Creating a chatbot voice & tone
My product team at Edward Jones piloted an internal chatbot to help branch teams (financial advisors and branch office administrators) get support more quickly through self-service options.
Note: Some details and images are not included or have been redacted for privacy reasons
TIMELINE
December 2022 - February 2023
TEAM
UX content strategist (me), UX researcher, product owner, business analysts, web content strategists
TOOLS USED
Bot platform, Mural
The problem
Branch teams were frustrated when the chatbot gave them inaccurate, lengthy or confusing responses. They felt like they were wasting their time and would rather talk to a live agent.
How might we make the experience more efficient, relevant and easy for them?
Branch team quotes from SAT survey
Hypothesis
Creating a chatbot persona and style guide will help us deliver consistent, user-friendly bot responses. This allows us to build a more reliable chatbot for branch teams and implement them more quickly across the firm.
We’ll know this is true when we see an increase in our chat satisfaction survey score.
What I did
Worked with UX researcher to go through chat satisfaction survey data to identify user pain points and opportunities
Created user journey and empathy maps
Facilitated workshop with product team to define and vote on chatbot voice and tone
Facilitated workshop with web content strategists to determine how we can express the chatbot voice and tone in the copy
Drafted guidelines, which includes a list of do’s, don’ts and examples, and presented them to the product team
Results
Having a documented chatbot persona and standards helped create a more consistent feel and experience across the firm’s chatbot experiences. It also ensured accurate and up-to-date chatbot responses.
I was moved to another product team after completing this project, so the next UX content strategist they hire will continue testing the style guide and iterate based on feedback.