Our colleagues Elena Martínez and Rocío de Torres attended last Friday's Voice Summit 2019 event in Madrid and they have undoubtedly taken a lot of a very intense day. Voice Summit Madrid 2019 - Voice Assistant and Call Center, the perfect couple. They presented a real case of a relevant client hotel chain in which both, technology and design, were combined to generate a product that met the clients' requirements.

The challenge

Implement a virtual assistant to improve its customer service and optimizing the costs of its call center. For this reason, when we first started with the development of the Voice Assistant, we worked with those cases of use that did not generate a direct income to the hotel chain. For instance: calls asking for a hotel telephone, addresses or availability information or even price.

We faced to major challenges

The technological challenge of creating and developing what we call the "orchestrator", a black box that is responsible for, among other things:

• Natural language processing must be bidirectional: Speech to text, text to speech.
• The assistant is the first point of contact with the customer and we leave behind the IVR system that call centers usually have.
• The integration with a CRM such as Salesforce or similar, to maintain traceability and, if we jump to an agent in the conversation, to have all the historical information.
• The integration with the call center's telephone management system.
• Training of intentions.

The challenge of the conversational flow design: it is not only a challenge due to the design and technological development, but also due to the leap that all the design teams of our companies must take today, which goes from graphic design to voice experience.

On the design side, we had the presence of our UX, UI & CX Designer, Rocío de Torres. Her personal experience as a designer and the constant evolution that the sector has undergone, has made her adapt to the new needs that have arisen. In addition, she has relied on agile methodologies that Emergya promotes, such as Design Thinking.

The keys to Conversational Design

By eliminating the visual part and focusing on the part of the "conversation" with the user, the approach seems to be totally different. However, the foundations of the design are similar or follow common patterns that allow for this agility. Therefore, the pillars remain the same because it is about communicating, what changes is the channel as it goes from being visual to being verbal and we go from designing with boxes to designing with words.

To build a good product we need 3 fundamental points:

1. Personality guide: this is the document that describes the general rules that the assistant has to comply with. It describes, for example, the personality of the assistant, the type of tone and voice, the structure of the messages, the good or bad uses, etc.
2. Diagram: this is the diagram that describes each flow and considers all the possibilities of the conversation. It is divided by user stories and by sprints and is the main tool for communication with the development team, together with the script.
3. Script: is the document where the specific phrases that the wizard will use in each case are specified. These phrases are linked to the diagram with labels that list the user stories. In this document, we also consider all the possible training sentences for the assistant to learn.

Based on them, we start designing the product with a workshop in which we seek the definition of the assistant's needs, empathy with the customer and the business and understanding and knowledge of the behavior of our target audience: the end user of the product.

Before this workshop, we work on our own on the flowchart of the most relevant case and present it during the session, which: facilitates the stakeholders' conversation, allows us to devise different paths that the conversation can take and allows us to put the user at the center of the conversation with the stakeholders.

We use archetypes, we ask ourselves how those people would communicate with our assistant, and we define the different use cases, flows, epics and a backlog that we keep alive sprint by sprint, building little by little as we get deeper into each specific use case. For this process of defining and polishing each specific flow, we are constantly getting to know the user through two tools in collaboration with the call center:

1. Recorded conversations
2. The interviews we conduct with the agents that are currently handling these calls.

If you have any doubts or would like to tell us about a project, do not hesitate to contact us and we will be delighted to help you.