Published: December 15, 2022
Key takeaways
The Skill Quality Coach in the Analytics tab of the Alexa Developer Console provides a 0-5 measure of skill quality and Recommended Insights to help deliver a high-quality customer experience and drive repeat engagement.
In this article:
Skill Quality Coach (SQC) is a personalized guide to help skill creators build high-quality skills on Alexa. It’s a tool to help you deliver an engaging customer experience and drive repeat engagement. Watch the video walkthrough.
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 SQC includes a Skill Quality Score (SQS). The SQS is a number between 0-5, and is designed to provide a measure of skill quality. It is calculated based on multiple factors that enhance the customer experience, such as content richness, reduced friction, lower latency and customer feedback. Skill Quality Coach also provides Recommended Insights, which are personalized recommendations to help you improve your Skill Quality Score.
1. Dashboard Filters
SQS dashboard filters provide a way to customize the dashboard according to skill stage, time range, and aggregation period, or period for how often data is accumulated.
2. Skill Quality Score
SQS is a combined score between 0 and 5 made up of different components that include skill design features and customer experience.
Skill design features:
These are common patterns and design elements of analyzed skills that have been successful in driving customer engagement. These design elements fall into 4 themes:
- Rich Multimodal & Voice Responses: High-quality skills leverage rich multimodal and voice response to engage customers. With the increase in multimodal devices, responses that work across visual and voice modalities becomes an important element of engaging skill design.
- Voice Model Coverage: High-quality skills have accurate 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 long-term engagement. These skills are also able to form 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 which represents Alexa-connected devices with which an Alexa customer can interact. These skill endpoints provides beneficial responses with low latency to create an ambient experience.
Customer experience:
Customer experience in SQS takes into account customer habituation and customer feedback. 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. As for customer feedback, it is received through channels such as reviews. See Design Principles for other ways to use natural conversation best practices to improve your skill's stickiness.
3. Recommended Insights
The Skill Quality Coach provides personalized recommendations to improve SQS which are informed by the four key themes of Skill Design features listed above. The recommendations shared, are generated by:
- Automatic Insights Engine: The Automatic Insights Engine tracks and analyzes usage of skill design features to learn common actions associated with successful skills (high retention and large user bases).
- Skill Insights team: The Skills Insights team is a team of testers and builders that curate recommendations which focus on delivering a friction-free customer experience.
For the insights engine to be more personalized for your skill, share your feedback by voting with the thumbs up or down feature.