Voice control and CUI are not that new. There were a few attempts in the past to make them possible and even the good old Nokia feature phones had voice control capabilities. However, since the technology was still immature, most of those trials didn't succeed. With zero patience for failure, after one or two unsuccessful tries, users just moved on or fell back to the web or mobile apps.

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are also a good example of a voice-controlled solution and a promising idea with a really bad implementation. In fact, more than 80% of IVR users say they hate the experience (https://www.nice.com/engage/blog/Everybody-Hates-IVR-2183). So how do we find the direct path to success?

Although this sounds obvious, it is actually crucial to the success of your chatbot or voicebot. I learned that when I initially set up my Amazon Echo device at home. Using a complementary mobile app, I was directed to ask Alexa specific questions, to which she had good answers to, such as Alexa, what is the time? or Alexa, what is the weather today? I immediately received correct answers and therefore wasn't discouraged by a default response saying, Sorry, I don't have an answer to that question.

By providing the user with a successful experience, we encourage them to trust the system and to understand that, although it has its limitations, it is really good in some specific areas. As time passes, different devices continue to evolve and continue to expand their support and capabilities, both internally and by leveraging third parties. To help users to discover new functions, some solutions, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, send a weekly newsletter with the highlights of their latest capabilities. In the following email, Amazon Alexa is literally providing a list of questions that I should ask Alexa in my next interaction with it, and it also exposes me to new functionalities such as making a donation.

On Google Home/Assistant, Google has chosen topics that it recommends its users to interact with. Here as well, the end user is exposed to new offerings/capabilities/knowledge bases, which may give them the trust needed to ask similar questions on other topics.

Other chat and voice providers can take advantage of this email communication idea to encourage their users to further interact with their chatbots or voicebots and expose them to new capabilities. The simplest way of encouraging usage is adding a dynamic "welcoming" message to chat and voice applications, which includes new features that have been enabled. Capital One, for example, updates this information every now and then, exposing its users to new functionalities. On Alexa, it sounds like this: Welcome to Capital One. You can ask me for things like account balance and recent transactions.

Another way to do this – especially if you are reaching out to a random group of people – is to initiate discovery during an interaction with the user (I call this contextual discovery). For example, a banking chatbot offers information on account balances. Imagine that the user asks, What's my account balance?

The system gives its response: Your checking account balance is $5,000 USD. The bank has recently activated the option to transfer money between accounts. To expose this information to its users, it leverages the bot to prompt a rational suggestion to the user and say, Did you know you can now transfer money between accounts? Would you like me to transfer $1,000 to your savings account?

As you can see, the discovery process was done in context with the user's actions. Not only does the user know that he/she can now transfer money between two accounts, but they can also experience it immediately, within the relevant context.

To sum up tip #1, by finding the direct path to initial success, your users will be encouraged to further explore and discover your automated solutions and will not fall back to other channels. The challenge is, of course, to continuously expose users to new functionalities, made available on your chatbots and voicebots, preferably in a contextual manner.