How can conversational ui improve customer experience of a brand?
Ring is a neighborhood security company that reimagines home protection. It exists in a highly competitive market space, where brands like Nest, August, Iris, Netgear, and ADT live as well. The home-automation and security space is one of the main places people seek when starting to think about home solutions. Every month, Ring sells 50,000 of it’s doorbell model. While Ring has a seemingly successful adoption rate, their drop rate is equally as high, resulting in risk of losing valuable market share.
Beyond their website, app, and TV spots, Ring has no voice and lacks communication with their prospective, new, or existing customers.
Create a persona for Ring by using a conversational UI, that can integrate itself into their existing digital platforms, as well as live beyond them.
We designed Alden. The Ring chatbot that informs and educates the user on Ring products.
Give curious prospective users information on Ring's product offerings in a straightforward, engaging way.
Helps users troubleshoot problems
Guides users to the right products
Helps onboard new customers
Empathetic
Protective
Responsible for the users care
We interviewed owners of Ring products, sent out a survey, and looked at a reddit channel for Ring users. Some responses and comments are shown below:
Synthesizing our research findings, we decided to tackle three key aspects of the customers journey with Ring as a brand:
product selection, on-boarding, and troubleshooting.
I focused on the product selection part of the chatbot. The next step, was to give our bot a name, persona, and voice of its own — this helps to remove the ‘robotic’ part of talking to a chatbot.
After finding the areas we needed to tackle, the next step was to conduct an intent-breakdown. A bot can have a variety of intents, but I had to focus on those specific to my use case: finding information on new and current products, and potentially buying a product. Breaking the intentions into categories helped assist in developing the bot’s persona as well as mapping out the conversations.
Knowing the core brand-principles of Ring (providing security and protection for a users home), we were able to conclude that the bot needed to be empathetic and feel more human - not sterile and robotic like the ones that typically answer the phones before you speak to a live service rep. With this in mind, we referenced pop culture to find characters that matched this mindset, settling on Alfred Pennyworth from Batman, and Baymax from Big Hero 6.
We named our bot Alden - Alden is empathetic, protective, and feels a sense of responsibility for the user’s care.
The challenge here is anticipating the user’s questions or intents when chatting with the bot, and steering conversation directions. The basis is sort of a conditional if/else loop, which needs to remain true to the more humanized approach we gave our bot.
I tested the bot with a total of 40 users. New unique insight appeared with each person, providing valuable information on how to improve the conversation and make Alden feel more personable. Some suggestions included addressing the user on a first-name-basis and using GIFS and Emojis like a real human would.
This is a continuous iterative process that ultimately serves to enhance the experience for the next user. We even got some hits from actual Ring customers whilst prototyping the chatbot.
Conversation Mapping, Research, Concepting, Persona Development, Information Architecture
Gloryah Allen, Rachel Zhou