What Does Holiday Shopping Have to Do with Enterprise Success? Everything.

We’re in the midst of the holiday shopping frenzy that began with Black Friday, followed by Small Business Saturday, and then Cyber Monday. This year, online holiday shopping in the U.S. is expected to top $124 billion (according to Adobe Forecasts). With that much being spent, it’s interesting to look at what consumers are spending it on. The answer? Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, the Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon.

Why the Echo Dot? It’s Alexa enabled and sells for under $50 (under $25 with Cyber deals). But it’s more than just price, it’s because Alexa just makes life easier.

In an article published on Medium, Darren Austin explained that his wife first fell in love with her Echo device because of how easy it was to make a grocery list. Once she realized that Alexa was easy and intuitive, she needed access in every room so that she could add new items to her list at any time. When Darren suggested another method for updating the list, she rejected it as too much trouble! Because of countless scenarios just like that, Alexa enabled devices have become the centerpiece of many homes. Whether it is getting answers to questions or completing tasks, consumers want their apps to be intuitive and accessible, and that is exactly what Alexa-enabled apps are.

So why is it that when Darren’s wife enters the workplace, everything changes? Getting answers to even the easiest questions at work is hard. Employees are expected to find portals, search knowledge base articles, and figure out answers to questions on their own. They have to sift through a list of articles that are technical, might be out of date, and might not even contain the answers they are looking for. As a result, frustrated employees have basically given up on knowledge base articles and just call or email the service desk instead.

Espressive was founded on the belief that getting help at work shouldn’t be so hard. While other vendors have focused on solving the problems faced by service desk analysts, we shifted the focus to the employee – because you can’t have self-service if your employees are not engaged.

With that in mind, we studied consumer technologies, like Alexa, to understand why they gain such high adoption. What we found is that these apps are just intuitive and accessible. AI is being used to deliver a better consumer experience, but consumers don’t even know AI is involved. So, we recognized that if we wanted to drive similar adoption inside the enterprise, we had to deliver a similar consumer-like model.

It’s time for your enterprise to go from the Google experience of search and hunt to the Alexa experience of just getting the answers and action that employees want. If giving employees exceptional self-help experiences with an intuitive and accessible app is on your holiday shopping list, be sure to give us a call. We would love to show you what Barista, our AI-based virtual support agent, can do.