Digital trends: 2018 will be the year of the voice

Trend 1: Voice-based and virtual assistants will also find their way into the corporate world.2018 will be the "year of voice", even outside the consumer environment. Gartner analysts predict that early adopters who design their websites to use visual and voice-based searches will be able to achieve a 30 percent increase in revenue as early as 2021, meaning that this technology, which is initially established in the consumer sector, will also have an impact on companies: It will make the way we work more productive and enable better time management. For example, it will be easier for assistant employees to carry out searches while booking a trip and perform the necessary steps at the same time; programmers will be able to request open source code for their projects by voice. "Virtual assistants have a wide range of applications for all companies and organizations. They can be easily integrated into everyday working life and offer noticeable improvements in efficiency and effectiveness," says Robert Gögele, General Manager of Avanade in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. "Voice-based assistants such as Cortana, Alexa, Siri and Google Home are currently the leading platforms, and voice recognition and translation work very well."Trend 2: Automation and innovative technologies will enable a new employee experience.Employee engagement and satisfaction are among the most important topics for HR departments. In 2018, tech leaders will be called upon as consultants to further expand employee engagement, productivity and contribution to business development. In turn, intelligent and cloud-based systems are needed to establish innovations in this area, as the Center of Information Systems Research (CISR) at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has shown: Large companies with a positioning in the top quartile for employee experience are twice as innovative and 25 percent more profitable than those from the lowest quartile. These results show that the digital transformation's primary focus on customer experience should apply equally to the world of work. Furthermore, there is an immediate need for companies to incorporate the digital workforce into their growth strategy. "Companies must now design a digitalization strategy for more productivity and communication solutions for their employees. The focus should always be on how employees work," explains Thomas Krofta, Global Lead Digital Workplace Center of Excellence at Avanade. "In addition to increased productivity, another potential benefit of such an approach is better, more collegial collaboration. This opens up added value for recruiting, a particularly important topic in Switzerland. Companies that rely on such innovative technologies are also more attractive as employers."Trend 3: AR and VR are becoming retail's best friends.It's no secret that the signs in retail are changing: while retail stores in Switzerland are only developing slowly, shoppers are increasingly turning to digital shopping experiences. The analysts from IDC predict that around 40 percent of leading brands will rely on digital experiences by 2020 - in brick-and-mortar retail and beyond. Retailers will therefore enrich their physical offering with AR options that can be used by users of mobile devices. In this country, 2018 will be the year of adoption and experimentation in retail when it comes to new digital technologies. This includes AR/VR experiences when trying on clothes as well as virtual assistants that enable customer service via chat bots, for example. The increased use of interactive sales areas in stores and supermarketsn is one of the ways in which retailers can boost their business success in 2018. "More and more retailers are now considering the use of AR/VR in their stores. Of course, these technologies not only have an impact on customers and their shopping behavior, but also on employees," explains Robert Gögele, "digital tools can, for example, help to bring a product closer to the customer or train the retailer's teams on site. This brings us full circle to digital employee experiences - they are just as important for retailers as end customer engagement."Avanade is a leading provider of digital services, business and cloud solutions and design-oriented applications.