Alexa’s responses should be contextually relevant to your customer. Your skill should demonstrate that it remembers important things about your customer and it should use what it knows to improve their experience. Don’t waste their time surfacing information or presenting options that aren’t relevant to them in their immediate context. Offer options and information the customer is most likely to need based on what they’ve already said and done.
Checklist for creating more contextually relevant conversations:
▢ Help new customers understand the skill’s functions; Adapt your messaging to the needs of customers along their journey
▢ Taper messaging down over time as the customer gains more experience
▢ Present options to the customer in order of most relevant
▢ Don’t present options that aren’t relevant to the customer
▢ Don’t bait and switch: Don’t offer options that will result in an error
For example, the first time your customer invokes your skill, it’s helpful to tell them a bit more about what your skill does. That same information will be irritating once your customer has used the skill and returned multiple times – of course they know how it works already! Recall our MyCapital skill example in the preceding sections. The first time our customer invokes it, they’ll need to know about what our skill does, and they’ll need to link their account so we can help them. We might surface what we call a “First Time Experience” like this:
Customer: Alexa, open MyCapital
Alexa: Welcome to MyCapital. I can help you check your balance, pay your bill, check your credit score, and more. To start, you’ll need to link your MyCapital account. I’ve sent some information to your Alexa App to help you.
Once our customer has linked their account and returned to the skill, we can surface a more contextually relevant message and options to greet them:
Customer: Alexa, open MyCapital
Alexa: Thanks for linking an account! Your MyCapital balance is $479.98. Your payment of $25.50 is due in 5 days, on December 8. Want to pay it?
Of course, the next time the customer returns to the skill, we aren’t going to thank them for linking an account. We already did that. Now, what if the customer doesn’t have a balance? It wouldn’t be very contextual (or natural) to say something like this:
Don't:
Customer: Alexa, open MyCapital
Alexa: Your MyCapital balance is $0. Your payment is due in 5 days, on December 8. Want to pay it?
Customer: Yes please
Alexa: Sorry, you don’t have any balance due. I can help you check your balance, pay a bill, or check your credit score. Which would you like?
That wasn’t a very contextually relevant experience, and since our hypothetical skill can only check and pay the balance, as well as check the customer’s credit score, the follow-up prompt listing all the functions of the skill is unnecessary – there’s only one thing left that the skill can do! A better experience for this customer’s context would be:
Do:
Customer: Alexa, open MyCapital
Alexa: Your MyCapital balance is $0. Congratulations! Want to check your credit score?