PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 4 TIPS TO DESIGN A KILLER CX FOR CONVERSATIONAL AI APPLICATIONS

Providing an incredible customer experience is about more than just a one-o positive encounter. Ensuring the same level of service each time, across channels, is vital to business success. Think about dining at your favorite restaurant. Say you and your family eat there every week - it’s what you look forward to all week sometimes. The food, the wine selection, the availability of parking, and the welcoming ambience make the experience an unbeatable one. As a regular, you get used to a certain table and a certain service quality. Over the years you may not even remember these individual evenings very well. That is, unless, the chef served you exceptionally well made chicken…...or burnt it. CX is a bit like that - it can spark customer delight and become the deciding factor when it comes to brand evangelism. On the other hand, one bad experience is enough to ensure that a customer will never walk through your doors again. Conversation design is at the core of how humans interact with, and feel while interacting with technology. It’s an art and a science. Here are 4 tips that can help create a best in class conversational AI experience:

1 DESIGN WITH THE CHANNEL IN MIND With high-tech conversational AI platforms, a great experience is centered on words, both written and spoken. This represents a shi from traditional design, which focused on content, graphics, and buttons, to a highly customer centric approach. One of the main goals for a conversation via text is to get the information to the user in a consumable and natural manner. Humans have short attention spans and some of the most important aspects to ensuring that your end user is fully engaged is to present the content in an easily consumable format. Do not use more than 4 to 5 lines of text per exchange, and never send more than 4 sentences in a row. A key element when designing text interactions is to make the text bubbles appear with some lag. Adding idle time to text blocks makes them appear more natural, as if in conversation. It isn’t recommended that the conversational AI assistant impersonate a human agent! However, adhering to these simple rules can make the overall experience of ‘texting’ feel more natural to the end user.

PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE

Users also need guidance in asking the right questions and the IVA needs to steer the conversation to help the user reach their goals. O entimes users may not even be sure of what they’re looking for when they enter the chat. This is especially important in complex industries. With high-tech conversational AI platforms, a great experience is centered on words, both written and spoken. This represents a shi from traditional design, which focused on content, graphics, and buttons, to a highly customer centric approach. One of the main goals for a conversation via text is to get the information to the user in a consumable and natural manner. Humans have short attention spans and some of the most important aspects to ensuring that your end user is fully engaged is to present the content in an easily consumable format. Do not use more than 4 to 5 lines of text per exchange, and never send more than 4 sentences in a row. A key element when designing text interactions is to make the text bubbles appear with some lag. Adding idle time to text blocks makes them appear more natural, as if in conversation. It isn’t recommended that the conversational AI assistant impersonate a human agent! However, adhering to these simple rules can make the overall experience of ‘texting’ feel more natural to the end user.

Users also need guidance in asking the right questions and the IVA needs to steer the conversation to help the user reach their goals. O entimes users may not even be sure of what they’re looking for when they enter the chat. This is especially important in complex industries.

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Avaamo customers only need to build the IVA once, and can then run it on several channels including consumer messaging apps as well as enterprise channels

2 CHOOSE AN EXISTING CHANNEL WITH HIGH USER ADOPTION FIRST A channel in the context of customer experience and conversational AI comprises all the media which could be used by the end user to communicate with the business. This includes email, phone, Skype, Microso Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Live Agent Chat, SMS, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Alexa, mobile apps, and more. Users have varying preferences for how they interact with each other and how they interact with Workers increasingly prefer dierent organizations. By giving end users the smartphones for business ability to interact with the intelligent virtual communication, according to assistant in a manner that they prefer is akin to 451 Research. Fierce Mobile IT ‘fishing where the fish are.’ None of these channels reports that nearly 71% of are better than the other and each has its own strengths. With good design, it is a question of employees spend over two hours ensuring a uniform experience across channels, a week accessing company should the user prefer to interact with the information on mobile. business on more than one channel.

PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE Websites are the most comprehensive channel and allow for the richest user experience. The reason why web channels are useful for the business is that they are able to convey more information to the end user, but in a more consumable manner. Certain POS touch points like messaging or SMS may not be able to support the experience you desire and therefore a careful assessment of the channel constraints versus the digital workflows demands have to be evaluated. Messaging applications such as SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Line, WeChat and so on have become so prolific that they are easily the best channel to use to reach out to customers. They allow the business to eectively communicate with a huge user base in a quick and eective manner, in a format that they know and love already! Designing the text and the script is of utmost importance here because the messages must be clear, concise and small enough to appear on a mobile phone screen, without overwhelming the user. Customers can access this IVA via WhatsApp to quickly and conveniently raise issues or request maintenance

3 ENSURE THE CONVERSATION DESIGN IS USER CENTRIC The most eective way to understand what the design should look like is to put yourself in the user’s shoes. It is important to understand why the conversational AI assistant or intelligent virtual assistant(IVA) is being built, what environment it is operating in, and who it’s talking to. It is equally important to fix what type of branding elements should be incorporated, the channels of communication and the persona of the assistant. For example, in 2019, Avaamo deployed ‘Livi’ for US healthcare giant, UCHealth, reducing the burden on their helpdesk and call center significantly. ‘She’ is an intelligent virtual assistant that helps patients navigate UCHealth locations, doctors, and events. She also answers questions about patients’ health records, providing information on benefits, and lifestyle. Livi was made available through the UCHealth mobile app, smart speakers, and on the uchealth.org website. The IVA has interacted with nearly 500,000 UCHealth patients so far, with a 97% success rate.

“Going through queries and seeing what people ask Livi has allowed us to better understand the needs of our patients and visitors.” Nicole Caputo, Director of Experience and Innovation, UCHealth

PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 4 PRIORITIZE IVA PLACEMENT - CAN USERS FIND IT EASILY? The placement of the conversational AI assistant is a deciding factor in whether it will be successful or not. Having users search for the assistant, or having it buried in an obscure corner will likely reflect in low adoption and low usage rates. It is best to get your users to where they want to be within 3 clicks or less. Finally, recognizing the customers’ ask, maintaining the context of the conversation, providing relevant responses, and performing actions for the customer within a simple layout can go a long way in creating a meaningful customer experience. It pays to constantly refine and pare down elements and words down to their bare, aesthetic minimum.

CX DIFFERENTIATION IS CRUCIAL TO BUSINESS SUCCESS

Forrester’s US 2020 Customer Experience Index rankings revealed that 27% of brands improved their CX Index scores over the past year, a significant increase compared to previous years. According to Forrester, CX dierentiation is the key to post-pandemic success - and businesses know it. Cultivating customer relationships and trust throughout the customer journey now relies heavily on automated, positive experiences. Business leaders are putting CX first, recognizing that if done right, it can go a long way in raising CSAT and defining business success.

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