Amazon launches new Skill Quality Coach to guide developers to build high quality skills

At Alexa Live 2022, Amazon Alexa announced Skill Quality Coach (SQC), a personalized guide to help skill developers build high-quality skills on Alexa. Skill quality is essential to delivering an engaging customer experience and driving repeat customer engagement. 

SQC learns from thousands of Alexa Skills to identify the common attributes of successful skills. It then evaluates your skill against those identified attributes to create a quality improvement plan for your skill. 

The Skill Quality Coach will also include a Skill Quality Score (SQS). The SQS is a number between 0-5, and is designed to provide a measure of of skill quality. The SQS is calculated based on several aspects of skill design, and measures of implicit and explicit customer feedback. 

The SQC provides Recommended Insights, which are personalized and curated recommendations to help you improve Skill Quality Score.

Skill Quality Score 

SQS is a composite score between 0 and 5, is made up of different components that include: 

• Skill Design features: We have analyzed thousands of skills and identified common patterns and design elements of skills that have been successful in driving customer engagement and retention. Our machine learning model analyzed more than 120+ different features and design elements to shortlist a handful of features that are hallmarks of successful skills. These design elements predominantly fall into 4 themes: 
  • Rich Multimodal & Voice Responses: High-quality skills leverage rich multi-modal and voice response to engage their customers. With the proliferation of multimodal devices, richness in responses that work across visual and voice modalities, becomes an even more critical element of engaging skill design. 
  • Voice Model Coverage: High-quality skills have accurate and rich voice models that can easily understand the intention behind a customer utterance. For example, high quality skills gracefully handle utterances not supported by the skill by leveraging the AMAZON.FallbackIntent, which enables Alexa to redirect customer requests to the right experience, preventing customer dissatisfaction.
  • Content Richness, Freshness & Personalization: High-quality skills have sufficient content that is kept up to date to drive sustained long-term engagement. These skills are also able to form deep, meaningful and personalized connections with their customers by understanding their needs and request patterns over time. 
  • Endpoint Health: High-quality skills have robust and reliable skill endpoints that provide high utility responses with low latency. An ambient experience is incomplete without a high performing skill endpoint.
• Customer Experience: The customer experience portion of SQS takes into account customer habituation and customer feedback received through channels such as customer reviews. The customer habituation score measures stickiness of a skill based on how recently and how often customers use the skill. A high score on customer habituation indicates that skill has a higher portion of engaged and repeat customers (fans of your skill) when compared to similar skills. For example: For the two skills in the Games category below, we see that Skill A has greater proportion of customers who are fans of the skill compared to Skill B, which has a lower Customer Habituation score. As Skill A gets more customers, it will be important to retain and engage users to maintain a high customer habituation score.