How to improve the conversational experience of a chatbot?

THE CHALLENGE

This article waited more than 3 months to be written, but it had to be written. I wanted to share with you the outcomes of my experience during the that was proposed by Conversation Design Institute & Voiceflow during the in June 2022.

During the challenge all participants were offered a free access for a few days to the tool. They were asked to find a chatbot that they would like to improve and create a prototype of a ?better version”

I love challenges, I love learning and I love new tools. I could not resist such opportunity. The time was short, and I have a lot of duties, so all I could do is to point out few flaws and ?improve” only very few functionalities to show my vision of possible direction of changes.

The first step was to find a chatbot where I could make a real difference. I visited a lot of different websites until I found ?the winner” to work on.

THE CHOSEN CHATBOT

The MOBA virtual assistance of 汇丰 UK that you can find at HSBC UK - Personal & Online Banking raised my attention.?

First, the offered menu had a lot of options that usually took much more space than the chatbot itself. This forced a user to scroll up or down to read the choices and pick the right one. See below.

After I played around with chatbot I realized that the structure of menu was unclear. It was hard to understand?what was the logic of functionalities categorization. Instead of having 3-4 options in every step, the bot has had a lot of steps that were duplicated in different paths.

For example the button ?Where can I find my IBAN/BIC” could be reached as the 3 step of many different paths. Account/product opening was under Accounts and Product categories. The same case was for many other questions, for example:” credit card timeliness”.

See that in below recording.

These are few exemplary paths leading to IBAN BIC QUESTIONS

Menu 1 Button -> Menu 2 Button -> Menu 3 button

1. Products -> Account/product opening -> Where can I find my IBAN/BIC
2. Products -> Managing my account -> Where can I find my IBAN/BIC
3. Payments -> Payments and transfer -> Where can I find my IBAN/BIC
4. Accounts -> Account/product opening -> Where can I find my IBAN/BIC

5. Accounts -> Managing my account -> Where can I find my IBAN/BIC

As we could expect the “Credit card timeliness” topic was also available in the Card path.

WHAT WOULD BE WORTH TO CHANGE?

In the deal world it would be worth to make a proper UX Research. It is important to find out how to categorize the topics in a way that it is obvious for users. They should know what option to choose to solve their problems in a few steps. Then each step should consist of up to 3-4 options that are ordered in a logical way. There may be few ?logical ways”: by persona, by problem or by topic.

?While not having knowledge of HSBC customers, I would split the audience for bank customers with a problem, bank customers exploring available products and promotions, and potential customers that can be attracted.

?Personalization of answers depending on the personas would also make the chatbot more conversational.

?From UX writing perspective I was missing a consistency. The chatbot should speak all the time ?we” representing a company or ?I” when chatting on its behalf. MOBA virtual assistend used different pronouns.

?The button texts were presented as options (nouns or gerunds), questions, or requests. I would also try to make this consistent at least on the menu level.

?Instead of apologizing in the situation when bot did not solved the customer problem there should be a way to start over for another approach or quick connection with the human agent.?

MY VOICEFLOW PROTOTYPE

Having no knowledge about HSBC, nor much time to learn the tool and focus on the challenge I managed to add 2 functionalities. Possibility to learn about credit card timeliness and about IBAN/BIC.

I decided to split audience for current customers, and for non-customers. Thanks to that, instead of long messages, I could provide shorter answers dedicated to given type of user.

?On the below videos you can watch the behaviour of my chat prototype. The first example is for bank customer asking for IBAN and credit card timeliness.

The second recorded chat shows the conversation fo the user who is not a bank customer.

VOICEFLOW USAGE

?I really liked to play around with the voiceflow tool. I did not have much time to read the instruction, but my experiene and intuition were good enough to progress quickly. Thanks to implemented AI my prototype was not a simple click-bot but enabled users to type.

?The editor allowed to create modules and submodules that may simplify the design. I think it may be very useful tool when conversation designer tries to explain how (s)he sees the flow that should be created by programists.

See how my prototype structure looked like.?

I am really curious what would be your proposed changes, and what do you think about my prototype. Please feel free to share your feedback, comments and proposals.?