What Happened
Amazon announced in a blog post on Tuesday that notification feature will soon come to Alexa, allowing the voice assistant to alert customers with information that’s important to them. Soon, Alexa users will be able to enable notifications for select skills and shopping updates from Amazon on most Alexa-powered devices. Once activated, users will be alerted when there’s new information to retrieve by a chime and a pulsing green light on their Echo devices.
The notifications will be manageable individually via the Amazon Alexa App. Skills made by AccuWeather, The Washington Post, Just Eat, and Life360 are among the first to be using notifications. AVS is set to launch a developer preview in the coming weeks to ensure Alexa-enabled device makers can update their products to support notifications.
What Brands Need To Do
The addition of notifications opens up exciting new opportunities for Alexa developers to make their skills more proactive and capable of delivering updates and brand messages in a timely manner. For example, a travel booking company can create an Alexa skill that alerts users when the price of a tracked flight drops, and a healthcare brand can use notifications to remind customers of taking their meds. The arrival of notifications will significantly expand Alexa’s use cases, which brands looking to explore the conversational space should leverage to create more useful Alexa skills to provide added value to their customers.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: Amazon Alexa Blog
