As businesses develop voice strategies, a common question is, “Who should be involved in creating our voice experiences?” A Voice User Interface (VUI) Designer is someone who specializes in content ideation and design for voice platforms. You may not have a VUI Designer in-house, but there are many other people within your institution who can contribute to the Conversation Team in meaningful and exciting ways.
Voice apps can require a combination of creative and technical skills—PullString Converse empowers knowledge workers to build full-fledged voice experiences and also enables developers to extend the voice app’s functionality through account linking or web services. Below is a non-exhaustive list of people you may want to consider when assembling your Conversation Team:
Creative
- Innovation Team - It’s likely this team is already involved in the voice strategy effort as they’re constantly looking for new channel and technology opportunities. Innovative thinking and experience with pilot programs are great assets when it comes to voice app development.
- Brand Team - Folks from the brand team will bring the much needed expertise around both the product and the end user. They’ll understand the unique customer pain points and can be instrumental in finding the right VUI solution.
- Digital Marketing - Digital marketers will have great content impulses—they may even have existing content that can be leveraged for voice. Collaboration with them can lead to a voice strategy that ties into a larger marketing campaign. Once the voice app is built, you’ll want their help in activating existing social channels to acquire users.
- Writers - Writers are the key to establishing what your voice app actually says—this has a profound effect on user experience in terms of navigation, efficiency, likeability, and brand recognition. It could be copywriters, technical writers, or just someone with a way with words. If you have writers in your institution with backgrounds in scriptwriting, improv, character development, etc. all the better!
- Product Managers - Product managers can have a profound impact on the overall voice strategy—defining user needs, priorities, goals, and how the voice app fits in with larger product/brand efforts. They can also be a great resource for facilitating collaboration amongst diverse team members.
- Customer Support/Success - Folks from these teams have a deep understanding of the challenges customers face—this expertise should be leveraged to identify how a VUI can help solve some of these pain points.
- UI/UX Designers - Even if they’ve worked primarily in graphical environments, UI/UX Designers have deep user experience expertise and may be good resources when it comes to developing and reviewing VUI flows, as well as with end-user testing..
- IVR Designers - IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response and is synonymous with commonly utilized phone trees. Does your business have a phone tree system? If so, whoever built it will have lots of insight to provide on conversational design.
- Smart Speaker Enthusiasts - Joan down in finance may not have a role that directly corresponds with this effort, but if she’s a smart speaker geek who owns multiple devices and has lots of experience interacting with them, she may bring a valuable point of view to the table, especially in ideation mode.
Technical
- Developers - Developers are essential if you want to build out more advanced voice apps that leverage existing CMSs, utilize account linking, or tie into external APIs. Having a code expert to handle those extensions will enable your knowledge workers to design top-notch voice apps.
- Creative Technologists - If you have someone who is comfortable in both creative and technical fields, get them involved! They can be the conduit for the project, helping bring folks with different backgrounds together for a focused effort. They probably have experience building prototypes and are comfortable with new platforms and technologies.
While you certainly don’t need all of these resources at the table, some combination of them will lead to a rich development process. PullString Converse empowers teams with diverse backgrounds to successfully collaborate and build top-notch voice experiences.
