BMO Chatbot
BMO is planning to launch a virtual assistant services on their mobile application to better help mobile users as well as reducing the call volume / workload of their physical call centre.
Design Challenge
Since the pandemic, the frontline agents (call centre) have been overwhelmed with calls. Many of the drivers came from online and mobile banking. The company wishes to incorporate a Virtual Assistant (VA) and a live chat function into the current BMO mobile application. These features are intended to assist customers in better navigating their issues and completing their tasks.
My role
I was the project's lead product designer, starting with research and moving on to product roadmap planning and MVP goal setting. Along with user journey mapping and iterative product design.
Research & Planning
Primary research
Worked with the research team to conduct preliminary interviews to understand the sort of activities people would prefer to do through a chatbot vs. traditional app-flow or filling in a form.
Secondary research
Various forms of secondary research were conducted such as competitive research, industry scan, parallel research to understand how VA is integrated into different industries or within our competitors.
Usage analysis
Working with CX team and data analysts to study contact centre call & email drivers and insights.
Define the scope
Create roadmap
Worked with POs, business, and dev teams to design and define the product's short-term (1 - 3 months) targets, mid-term(6 months) targets as well as long-term (1 year and beyond) strategies.
Define MVP features
Based on the roadmap, the POs, designers, CX and dev team worked together to narrow down the scope of the MVP product. White boarded the business needs, relevant technology, fulfillment systems and potential vendors.
Mapping MVP flow
Worked with POs and Care to create potential use cases, along with general user journey and product flow.
Keep it consistent
Based on the existing BMO Design System Components and colour palette to keep the Chatbot interface consistent with the rest of the mobile app and the BMO brand.
Make it scalable
Our goal was to make the design consistent and scalable for future functions and tasks. From interface design to content design, we tried to modularize each section into standard small pieces.
-
Worked with business to standardize general user flow into small mudules.
-
Worked with content strategist to format language into standardized small pieces.
-
Designed interface using consistent UI components following the BMO brand and BMO colour palette.
Design & Testing
Various concepts were created & tested with internal & external user groups.
The final direction were chosen based on:
- Interaction style -> conversational? free-form? Multiple choice?
- Visual style for conversations and select options
- Usability on the mobile devices -> interactive items visible? reachable? Gesture or click?
Learn from the users
The short-term MVP product, as planned in the product roadmap, serves two purposes:
-
Assist users to faster wayfinding within the BMO app, as well as call center traffic distribution;
-
Obtain keywords from freeform tying by users -> These keywords will assist us in deciding which features to add/adjust in the future release, as well as training AI engines to recognize and understand natural language more accurately.
