Chat Experience Design
Empowering the Future of State Farm's Chat: Pioneering innovative conversational experiences, envisioning the next frontier in AI-driven customer service, and ensuring seamless self-service enhancements for unparalleled satisfaction.
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Oct 2023 - Current
TLDR
With over a million conversations across the State Farm chat experience, I wear many hats within the Experience Design role. I partner closely with product, dev, and content to design conversational experiences that decrease traffic to live reps while offering new intents, training phrases, and responses that empower self-service among our customers. Since joining State Farm I have worked with partners to document the strategy and architecture of our chat experience while also implementing new conversational flows (via voiceflow) and UI components. Before joining the team chat didn't have a design system that leveraged the current State Farm component Library. I developed the start of our brand new Chat component library and look forward to adding additional updates and iterations for future use.
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My Role
Drawing from my experience at Expedia Group in various conversational domains, I spearheaded the design of conversational experiences, led AI strategy and vision initiatives, and curated a design library tailored to Chat. This involved auditing and integrating Chat-specific elements while leveraging the broader component library for all State Farm customer-facing products. Additionally, my role involves a great deal of strategy, planning, and alignment with Chat stakeholders as we have adopted new technologies and continue to expand on platforms such as Apple messaging for business and explore AI integration.
What
The State Farm Chatbot is a sophisticated system, comprising eight individual bots alongside a routing bot, each tailored for deployment on pages where live agents manage call volume. Despite its maturity, the rollout of this chatbot across the company has been gradual. To broaden its scope within State Farm, we embarked on a journey to explore new tools for enhanced conversation design. Simultaneously, we addressed the issue of conversation consistency, acknowledging variations across the eight chatbots.
Moreover, we scrutinized our deployment strategy across all chat platforms, ensuring they are modernized and poised for upcoming AI deployments and changes. This comprehensive review aims to streamline operations and optimize the Chatbot's performance across diverse areas within State Farm.
Current State of Design Process
Future State with new tooling
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Why
While State Farm has improved its chat functionality, there's room for growth, particularly in key entry points and the SF mobile app. Collaborating with stakeholders, I aim to scale chat effectively and ensure consistency across platforms, prioritizing efficient inquiry resolution and enhanced self-service options.
Since joining, we've expanded chat to the authenticated “my accounts” page, resulting in a 40% increase in total conversations and reducing transfers to live reps from 45% to 36.9%. This successful expansion enhances customer satisfaction and operational efficiency by offering more self-service options and reducing escalations.
How
Delving deep into our analytics, we meticulously examined our conversational paths to uncover insights. By pinpointing pain points and analyzing a wealth of quantitative data, we gained valuable insights into user needs. For instance, we discovered that our top intent hit was “Why did my rates increase.” Collaborating with developers, we identified reason codes for rate increases and seamlessly integrated them into our systems.
Utilizing APIs, we retrieved reason codes per policy, and after a thorough legal review, we implemented them on our largest chat platform. Previously, such inquiries were escalated to live representatives, who were unable to provide detailed explanations. However, with our solution in place, we now proactively address the reason for rate increases within the chat interface. Should customers require further clarification, they are seamlessly guided to their agent, facilitating detailed discussions on rate changes.
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