Don’t make me wait.
Conversational user experiences—Intelligent virtual agents are a hot topic. Although they can be relatively easy to create, they can be much harder to execute well. Ricoh is a complex business with many units all with their own sources of information and processes. As I regularly heard and analysed conversations of Ricoh users with the level 2 resolution live agents, it became quite apparent that the agents were having to answer a finite number of resolution needs from customers repeatedly. Ricoh decided to partner with SmartAction to explore a solution via a new channel.
I was charged with leading the research internally and design the communication around the transition.
Opportunity
Improve the of experience of customers to through Conversational AI
Research
Pulling on data from survey feedback and service desk logs, I began to build up a picture of the types of people calling the helpline (personas) and the types of information and tasks they were trying to complete (jobs to be done).
My research quickly identified a common set of main objectives & themes which I used as basis for iteration of conversational content.
It became apparent that, in most cases , the problem wasn’t that the information wasn’t available on ricoh.co.nz—it was that it was hard to get to or that customer’s had additional questions they needed an agent to answer.
Discovery & Goal Setting
Key stakeholders from around Ricoh were invited to a kick-off workshop—to engage the necessary people internally and to offer them an opportunity to solve real day to day customer problems.
With internal buy-in and a clear idea of the customer problems we wished to solve, the next step was to decide on an identity and personality for the agent.
Should it agent be male or female?
Would it have a sense of humour or be dry and direct?
How should the agent represent Ricoh so that users respond positively, even during negative experiences e.g. machine outages?
A second workshop was run where we worked through my research and identified, with the subject matter experts, the most valuable user content to focus on.
In this workshop, I also co-facilitated the team to shape the agent’s personality & tone.
As a team, came to the conclusion that we should treat the agent as a guard level 1 support to take the load off the live agents by offering valued and timely direction to live agents when needed.
The agent now had a name—Rich.
IVA v IVR
Perfect low hanging fruit for AI.
Generate a symbiotic relationship with live agents.
Create an iterative process to gather other exceptions for live agents.
The quickest way to get Rich, the new employee to do its job was to create a test within the platform and iterate based on customer feedback.
Once I had a set of draft up user flows and conversation content and approved with relevant SMEs, I wanted to test drive the experience with real customers.
With SmartAction, we were able to create a concise set of conversation flows - a testament to the ease of use of their platform.
