Editor’s Note: We always like to share new tips and perspectives on what you can do to take your skill to the next level, deepen customer engagement, and deliver valuable experiences to customers. Today we welcome a community expert—Gal Shenar, founder of Stoked Skills and creator of popular skills like Escape the Room and Wordplay—to share his own best practices for making your skills the best they can be.

With more than 45,000 published skills in the Alexa Skills Store, it has never been more important for your skill to stand out. But with voice being a fairly new medium, the best practices are still evolving. Skill builders are continuing to improve on what “works” and what they can do to build engaging skills that keep customers coming back.

In my experience publishing over 30 skills for Stoked Skills, I’ve come to realize that building engaging skills is both an art and a science. Today I’m excited to share with you four things I’ve learned and do with every Alexa skill so you can build the most engaging experience possible for your Alexa customers. 

1. Use Data to Inform Your Voice Design

As the developer of a new skill, it’s your job to find out what works best. In-person testing with real customers is great, but it can only get you so far. To really dial down the voice experience to perfection, you should do A/B testing. There are plenty of paid services that you could integrate with, such as Optimizely, or you could build a simpler one yourself by throwing some data into an Amazon RDS Database if you are just looking for some quick wins.

One way you can start using data immediately to enhance your skill is to optimize your onboarding experience. For example, pick a simple goal like to reach 20 interactions with your skill. Tweak your welcome messaging to see what keeps people using your skill the longest. You can randomize customers into two groups that receive different messaging and compare the difference in customers that reach your goal of 20 interactions. I’ve found that for more complex skills it can definitely help to give the customer some more instruction right off the bat, as opposed to a simpler skill where you might be able to get away with a short welcome message. This allows you to expose more functionality as the interactions continue and keep customers engaged longer.

2. Try Different Techniques to Retain Customers

Keeping customers coming back is a major pain point for many voice developers. Without having easy access to a screen or notifications, it can be quite difficult to remind your customers that your skill exists. In order to break through that barrier, there are a number of techniques to help get people more excited about coming back to use your skill again and again.     

Content updates are a great way to improve retention. If your skill can keep giving customers the content they want, they will be sure to come back for more. A stale skill that never gets updated will make it hard to keep those loyal customers coming back. Experiment with rewards or acknowledgement for customers who come back multiple days in a row.

For games skills, enabling a multiplayer experience can multiply the replay value of your skill. As skills are generally used in the home, many times multiple members of the family will be listening in and want to participate. Without a way to play together, you risk alienating a huge set of potential players.

Another tip for games skills is to add leaderboards. Leaderboards are an excellent way to bring your voice-enabled game to the web, so you can engage with your customers in a place they may be more familiar with. Leaderboards also get customers excited—they visit your website to check how they rank, leaving them with a perfect place to discover all the other skills you offer. I’ve received plenty of positive feedback and reviews from customers trying to make it to the top of the Wordplay leaderboard.

3. Optimize Your Voice Model

As you may have experienced, managing your voice model is extremely important as your skill grows in complexity. You need to strike a balance between what customers want to say, what Alexa can understand, and keeping things as simple as possible. As your voice model grows with more and more intents and utterances, it can become difficult to keep things in order as they can begin to overlap in ways you might not expect. For example, in Escape the Room, having safes/locks with too many different but similar intents to open (i.e. Four Letters, Five Letters, 4 Numbers, 5 Numbers) can lead to errors where Alexa maps the five letters the user said to a four-letter intent because they are so similar. In these cases it make more sense to simplify the model and only use four letter combinations.

Before building your skill, think very carefully about what you want to expose to the customer. You never want to give them too many options at a given time, or make any given interaction unnecessary. For example, when building Escape the Room, we had to build a simplified model of what we really wanted in order to be able to support a large number of rooms in a single skill and to keep things flexible for the future. Escape the Room is an open-ended exploration puzzle game, so it would have been extremely difficult to build the skill to handle everything that a customer could want to say in an open-ended experience. Therefore, we narrowed the interaction and exploration in the game to three simple events: “Inspecting something,” “Using an Item,” and “Looking in a direction.” By limiting the customer to three options in the main flow of the game, we took something that could have been extremely overwhelming to develop and really made it work for voice.

With a single intent called UseItemOnObject, I can support a number of different utterances the customer might expect to be able to say to complete an action. For example, “Open door with key,” “Connect wires with electrical tape,” and “Use wrench on pipes” can all be fulfilled by the intent with the format [Action] {ItemSlot} on {ObjectSlot}. This one intent, with a few sample utterances for different potential actions, allows the customer to interact with the room in a way that feels natural, while ensuring that Alexa can successfully understand their intent and pass it to your code correctly. With this intent, and the much simpler InspectObject and Look intents, a customer is able to navigate and interact with a completely open-ended room with a very small learning curve that can be reduced even further, as you’ll discover in the next tip.

It’s important to remember that keeping things simple when it comes to the voice model is not being lazy; it’s the smart way to build for voice. Your customers are not computers, and you can be sure they will forget things if you make your interactions too complex! On top of that, don’t forget to keep an eye out for all the new ways to improve your voice model, such as Amazon.FallbackIntent, entity resolution, and CanFulfillIntent—all of which can have a big impact in making your skills the best they can be.

4. Add Contextual Help

Offering contextual help is probably the most useful and impactful way to improve your skill experience. Alexa is becoming a staple in consumers’ homes, and you’ll find your customers may span across all ages and with completely different understandings of how to interact with voice technology. Your goal is to make sure that everyone can understand how to interact with your skill the way you intend, without boring your top customers that don’t need additional help.

The most effective way I’ve found to improve the experience and reviews of my skills is to track how each customer is doing, and customize responses and reprompts to cater to their needs. An Alexa power user is going to get annoyed and leave if there is too much waiting for Alexa to say something they already know, while a new user will leave immediately if they say a few things that Alexa doesn’t understand, and they don’t know how to proceed.

To combat this, give the “long” version of your instructions once, and try something a little shorter the next time the user is in that decision state. If they get stuck or require a reprompt, give them those instructions again until the user proves they understand the voice model well enough to not require the extra guidance. Adding this sort of logic into Escape the Room was extremely effective in increasing the time customers spent playing, as well as the review score.

More Resources

Follow these four best practices as you build your next Alexa skill or improve your current one. Keep on improving the experience in your skills using these methods, and you’ll be well on your way to building something that users will remember and come back for. For more tips, check out the following resources:

• Guide: 10 Things Every Alexa Skill Should Do
• Tips on Promoting Your Alexa Skill
• How to Add Contextual Help to Your Alexa Skill
• Use the New Fallback Intent to Respond Gracefully to Unexpected Customer Requests
• Amazon Alexa Voice Design Guide

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