Officeworks moving to the forefront of voice search in Australia.

CLIENT: Officeworks    |    PROJECT: Voice Assistant Action

Bringing retail into the home with voice

At the moment worldwide 55% of teenagers and 41% of adults use multiple voice searches daily with Comscore forecasting that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches.

First and Officeworks saw this as an opportunity that presented two options:

  • Begin a process of optimising the website for general voice search queries
  • Build an application that allowed users to talk to Officeworks in a true conversational style

It was decided that in order to best understand how users wanted to talk to Officeworks only option 2 would allow Officeworks to how users would interact with Officeworks as all conversations are fully logged not just initial search queries. Moreover, it was thought that a first to market Google Assistant application build would allow Officeworks to bypass general voice search queries and own the stationery and office supply space for voice at the outset.

Structured content with crafted conversations

FIRST built the big box retail first to market in Australia application using Dialogeflow (formerly api.ai) on the Google Assistant Platform using the medium of Google Home as the interface.

This provides two immediately scalable additional solutions:

  • Enhanced interaction during the conversation via images and text on Android devices
  • Expansion to other interfaces such as Alexa, Cortana, and Facebook Messenger

The application was built using a mix of existing data feeds (for store locations and stock availability) and bespoke communications writing.

A genuinely assistive exerience for customers

The Assistant delivers real-time in-store product availability as well as being able to create shopping lists that can be emailed to the user to be taken in-store. In addition nearest store and opening hours questions are answered seamlessly. 

“The infrastructure is in place to take the Officeworks assistant app to a revenue-driving platform on Google Home. We’re now utilising the Google Machine Learning technology to bring the customer interaction to life.”

STEPHEN D’OLIER – FIRST DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR