The Elements of Voice First Style

Chapter 24. Post-Launch Monitoring

No matter how deep your UX research has been, or how carefully your VUI was designed, how diligently the design was implemented, or how thoroughly the implementation was tested and beta certified, if your aim is to maintain a world-class, highly usable voice user experience, your voicebot will need regular and careful tuning once deployed to the real world. Robust and enduring excellence happens when a launched product is continuously evolving as information is collected about its use by real users.

Unfortunately, in the world of voicebots, such post-launch tuning is almost never done in any serious way.

Voicebots are launched and then life moves on. At best—but very rarely—quarterly analyses are conducted, and in those instances where they are conducted, concrete actions are almost never taken to improve the voicebot’s usability, or add features to the voicebot, or even tweak it here and there to make it more effective. We, the authors, have witnessed project after project where the voicebot is not touched, not even once, for years and years, if ever.

Why is that the case? We believe the answer is simple: unlike a mobile app that crashes or an ugly website that has missing images and broken links that, say, an executive will bump into (and get infuriated about and then will order their marketing team to fix the problems posthaste), almost no one in the company—let alone executives—will ever bother to engage with the voicebot, and they certainly ...