Digital Assistants: Be Where Your Customers Are Today

By Wayne Jasek, Director of APAC, Kentico

Wayne Jasek, Director of APAC, Kentico

As technology advances, people don't just consume digital content; they want to experience it, touch it, and integrate it with their lives. So, if your start-up can’t offer them an almost tangible experience, where your content is present and easily accessible on the devices consumers frequently use; you might as well close the shop and go home.

Digital assistants allow people to offload mundane and routine tasks to technology. From small, household appliances to mobile-based voices, digital assistants are available to nearly every consumer. How and when they use them can reveal to young businesses a tremendous amount of personal data about their spending habits, favorite travel destinations, and what music they like to hear while cooking dinner.

We all know that the major suppliers of digital assistants in the home today are Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Combined with a vast network of connected systems and services, the Alexa Echo can play read an audio book, tell you a joke, and even order a pizza. Similar in function, Google Home brings the now customary phrases and offerings to the home, but with a lot more search know-how behind the scenes due to the devices ability to access Google’s data. From a mobile perspective, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now services allow users to integrate their email, shopping lists, calendars, and nearly any other kind of data, all which can be easily accessed with a simple voice command.

Should you expose your content to digital assistants?

With the sheer volume of customers using a digital assistant in some way, why would Asian based businesses not want your content available to them? Whether it’s a voice search or integration, people find what they’re looking for in the manner that suits their needs the best. As more people become accustomed to having a voice-activated assistant at their beck and call, how they get their search results will also evolve. Every start-up should begin thinking about how to make their content available in as many of these as possible.

To expose your content to digital assistants, flexibility and scalability are the key

Ten years ago, a company without a website was considered a dinosaur. A few years ago, a mobile app was essential for survival. Today, on-demand dynamic content and automated experiences are becoming the norm for what it takes to stay relevant in the market. The more relevant content you expose to your users, the more likely they are to consume it. Incorporating digital assistants into your business promotion and growth strategies is not just a good plan, it’s a critical plan.

How can you expose your data?

Digital Assistants are simply responses to input, with pre-determined results. All the major devices on the market have made it very easy to integrate with their systems to make this process as simple as possible. From simple information to the guided ordering process, it all starts with your content.

How you manage and expose your content will dictate how easily you can work with these new systems. If your information is in a structured, easily-accessible system, you’ll find providing it to Alexa or Google is a simple process. This means how you are currently managing your content becomes very important, as your data is key to the whole process.

Most businesses in Asia geared for growth have a centralized platform where they are currently building and distributing their content. These legacy systems may prove quite challenging to work with, limiting integrations and access. They may lock you down to technology or platform or require a lot of restructuring of the content. To expose your content to digital assistants, flexibility and scalability are the key.

Why going headless is a good idea.

In digital environments, most start-ups present their content to consumers via a CMS with a templating engine to deliver their web pages. This is the “head” of the CMS and determines the presentation layout of the content. However, with the rise in IoT devices and digital assistants where content is delivered in completely different ways, it’s necessary to separate the head from the body.

Headless CMS systems act as content management tools breaking content down into different components. These components are accessible through technology-agnostic interfaces, allowing start-ups to expose their content and inventory to Amazon and Google.

The question has changed.

Digital assistants continue to grow in popularity around the world, with devices becoming increasingly common in homes and businesses around the world. With all these devices becoming more commonplace, Asian start-ups are no longer asking themselves, “Should we make our content available to these assistants?”, but rather “Can we afford not to market ourselves through such popular devices?”

Founded in 2004, Kentico Software is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner headquartered in the Czech Republic with offices around the world. Kentico has 1,000 digital solution partners and powers 25,000 websites across 100 countries.