Alexa Skills for Business

It's a good question! Why would a smart home device be invaluable within the workplace? The reality is smart voice recognition devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home present a whole new world of opportunities limited only by your imagination. Whether you want your own virtual personal assistant to read you your emails, tell you the latest sales figures, call statistics or stock levels, Alexa, with the correct systems integrations, can save you an extortionate amount of time and money.

Advansys develop bespoke skills for Amazon Echo devices. Skills are simply apps that perform specific functions when activated. They can be created for private use or, if you wish to make them available for general consumption, they can be published on the Alexa Skills Store. A skill can be operated with an invocation name and an intent, like a phrase or question, which can either fetch some useful information and read it back to you. If required you can have interactive skills that are able to take the user down a specific journey by asking them questions guiding them through step by step.

The following diagram illustrates the Alexa skill interaction workflow:

Deployment Phase

• Sign-off from client
• Publish end user skill information and help
• Branding considerations
• Submission to Alexa Skills Store

Optimisation Phase

• Review skill performance
• Minor tweaks and improvements

Voice enabling a business sounds fascinating of course but on a practical level here are a few ideas of business skills for Alexa and how you might call them via a fictitious skill we've named "MyBusiness":

• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness how many new sales leads we have received today"
• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness how many open support tickets we have"
• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness how much have we spent on advertising this month"
• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness what are the best selling products this week"
• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness to tell me the ROI on the Black Friday PPC campaign"
• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness to tell me the total spend to date on Project X"
• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness who are out top 10 customers and what revenues have we earnt from them"
• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness to send and SMS message to Bob saying 'I'm running about 15 minutes late for the meeting' "
• "Alexa, ask MyBusiness to create a new meeting request for Bob, Jenny and Dave at 10:00am tomorrow"

Any system can be Alexa enabled with a little creativity. Of course systems with real-time APIs (application programming interfaces) lend themselves much easier than legacy databases and applications. However as long as there is some method of data extraction and a schedule in place for refreshing it periodically this can be made available to Alexa via a web service. Advansys are able to hook into your internal systems and pull together/consolidate KPI (Key Performance Indicators) data that can be subsequently be requested when needed via voice commands.

We have integrated into may platforms over the last 17 years including but not limited to SAP R/3, SAP Business One, Sage Line 50/100/200/MMS, Oracle, Software AG, AS/400, MS SQL Server, mySQL,Warehouse Management Systems, Payment Gateways and Voipfone/Telelcoms providers. We are also experienced at building data warehouses, reporting applications and data feeds.

If you'd like to find out more information on how Advansys can help
voice enable your business and turn it into a "smart business" please
get in touch today using the contact us page or submit a callback request using the tab on the right of this page.