Building trust and customer engagement with a Virtual Assistant

Defining the VA's Persona

Exo Digital was tasked to create a more charismatic Virtual Assistant. The virtual assistant needed to have a personality that is friendly, helpful and supportive in every interaction. The VA must be professional and act as a trusted friend, offering tailored advice and support. Most people we spoke with wanted less human representation for the visual persona and somewhere between a neutral image or a faceless character.

User Testing

In the initial user testing with customers, people were drawn to cute characters with faces; however, this did not reflect the AGL brand. We conducted stakeholder interviews to develop a persona with a personality that reflected the AGL branding.

Surveys were sent to capture thoughts on what builds trust and the critical attributes for the VA persona. We also facilitated design workshops to build trust in bot conversations and define a better engagement experience for the Virtual Assistant.

Virtual Assistant Character Design

The avatar we designed is dynamic, changing with the context of the conversation or interaction to show the user that they are being heard and understood. To make the avatar recognisable in its different compositions, it will always be made up of 3 shapes styled in the same way across every arrangement.

The dark blue and light blue shapes make up most of the composition; the white shape will be the “eyes” of the character. It won’t represent eyes literally; rather, it is the central focus that expresses emotion and character.

The concept leans on the abstract compositions of the previous examples to make it feel like a bot rather than a human.

Virtual Assistant Motion Design

Exo Digital created a natural flow of interactions with the chatbot that provided options rather than just typing text. We built a responsive virtual assistant by establishing emotional feedback that matches with the various use cases. The chatbot responds to the user promptly and in a straightforward manner, so it doesn’t overload or confuse the customer.

The avatar is dynamic, changing with the context of the conversation or interaction to show the user that they are being heard and understood.

Redesigning Chatbot Experience

Exo Digital worked with AGL’s team, outlining the critical design activities required to give the best outcome to improve the customer experience of the Virtual Assistant. We identified gaps and opportunities in the current experience and then defined use cases and customer segments through further research.

We undertook a landscape and competitor review to see how other businesses addressed customer support through Virtual Assistants and developed a bot strategy and vision based on customer expectations.

Together we created a natural flow of interacting with the chatbot with options rather than just typing text.

Defining Tone of Voice and Content Style Guide

Exo Digital conducted stakeholder interviews to understand the vision and roadmap for the Virtual Assistant. We explored ways to align the bot’s tone of voice with the AGL brand and defined the “do’s and don’ts of bot conversations, writing scripts for bot/conversation mapping.