Telecommunications Support Chatbot

Industry: Telecommunications

Role: Conversation Designer

Skills: Conversation mapping, dialogue writing, optimization, design thinking

As the fourth largest cable provider in the United States and a Fortune 500 company, the client relied heavily on its chatbot to lessen the load on human agents. This meant that the chatbot had to be robust, with both designed flows and FAQ accessible via NLU.

When I joined the project, the chatbot was already in production. My focus was to 1) optimize the bot overall and 2) merge the brand’s two bots into one.

Key challenges on the project

One of the challenges I faced was designing for optimizations without APIs. APIs are an important part of a good chatbot user experience but are complex and time-consuming to build. Without APIs, the optimizations had to be focused more on overall user experience and data on any pain points users were facing throughout the many chatbot flows.

The brand also had separate chatbots for their two brands. Eventually, these had to be merged into one large chatbot. Auditing and combining 30+ intents and flows was a complex and detailed task.

Flow Optimizations

Audited and improved simple NLU

• Worked with developers to add “patterns” to trigger flows.
• Ensured those patterns could be recognized at any point in the chatbot flows.

Simplified the path to chat with an agent

• Worked with a data analyst and prepared a workshop with the client to share our findings. This helped us understand how we could simplify user data collection in the bot.
• Implemented design changes based on findings to shorten the path to a human agent.

Redesigned troubleshooting flows

• Re-wrote and broke up dialogues in such a way that the user could take a step-by-step approach and connect with a human agent at multiple points.
• Applied UX heuristics and copywriting techniques to make content more approachable.

Brand Convergence

• Maintained a complex design that was a combination of 2 chatbots.
• Audited all flows to see which content was shared, which content was different, and designed any necessary new flows in just 1 month.
• Suggested and implemented UX improvement along the way.