4 Alexa Skills For Businesses

Kasia Ryniak

July 2, 2018

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Smartspeakers are quickly gaining on popularity and businesses start to notice that. Every single week there are more great applications entering Alexa Skills market. But what are the skills that deliver great experience to their users? Let's take a look at four great Amazon Alexa Skills from four different industries to see what makes them successful. Food delivery, hospitality, productivity and radio - let's dive in!

1. Domino's

Domino's quickly realized that ordering pizza is a straightaway process - customers usually have their favorite pizzas, order them to the same location and pay with the same credit card. That makes a perfect case for experiments with making it easy and quick to make an order.

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In 2013 Domino's introduced Easy Orders - a feature that enables saving favorite pizzas and ordering them with just one click. It turned out to be a huge success gaining lots of customers switching from traditional ways of ordering pizza to a simple app. Later on the company experimented with Zero Click application, ordering through emoji and of course - voice. Domino's ventured into the unknown then land of Alexa Skills making some customers really happy:

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And with time it also grew in popularity. As Nick Dutch, Head of Digital for Domino's UK said: "One in five customers who can order a pizza with one click through the pizza chain’s Easy Orders option has asked Amazon Alexa instead, two months after making the feature available".

What makes this skill successful?

It addresses very specific case: small purchases (take-away food) of repetitive selections (favorite pizza) with constant information (delivery address and credit card info). It's enough information that can be handled by a smartspeaker without confusing the customer.

2. Marriott Hotels

Marriott made an innovative move to introduce dedicated Echo devices into their hotels to provide guests with a hub for information and entertainment. It enables guest to customize their experience and seamlessly access hotel's services. But most of all, it proved to be a reliable first front of customer support with answers to most recurring questions and handling simple requests.

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Implementation in Marriott chain makes a perfect usecase and inspiration for new program by Amazon - Alexa for Hospitality that enables hotels to create their own dedicated platforms to integrate existing services into voice assistant blended in rooms. All that to make a guest-centric and highly personalized experience.

What makes this skill successful?

It is settled in environment where questions and unknowns are common (e.g. time of check-out, details of laundry service) and provides the answers within a matter of seconds. It also moves the effort of answering the recurring questions by reception desk while still maintaining a human touch.

3. Harvest

Almost every company requires their employees to track time. Maintaining time sheets can be a pain, but fortunately there are applications that make it easier. Harvest is a tool used by over 50,000 businesses worldwide that allows employees to track time as they work.

Harvest is also very popular among telecommuters. Integrating Alexa that is present in more than 10% of households in the US proved to be a success. Voice control enables employees to create their timesheets without launching application and by that - switching context. One more productivity hack to add on the lists!

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What makes this skill successful?

It addresses telecommuters who work from home - a natural habitat for smartspeakers. With Echo device present in household it's easy to migrate simple tasks (like time tracking) to voice commands to avoid context switching while at work.

Read behind-the-scenes on how the Skill was created!

4. Shopify

Shopify is one of the biggest e-commerce platforms with more than 500,000 active stores. Among them big names: Penguin Books, Budweiser or... Tesla Motors. Hundreds of business owners use Shopify daily to manage their stores and access statistics. It provides all a merchant needs!

Shopify makes all they can to satisfy their growing user-base. Not that long ago they introduced a seller-facing Alexa Skill that makes store management even easier.

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The skill is rich with great set of commands. Customers can ask Alexa about business summary ("Hey Alexa, ask Shopify to tell me about my store this month"), sales reports ("ask Shopify how many orders were placed this month") or even products that need to be fulfilled ("ask Shopify how many items require fulfillment"). All that without even turning the app on. And users love it:

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