Kohl's Retail Chatbot
My role
As design manager, I led the design of the chatbot and coordinated with the brand team on the personality of the Bot. I assigned a designer to the team and helped get him up-to-speed on Bots. I worked with Product to come up with user-cases and kept leadership informed on the progress.
background
AI has been around for many years, I had been researching and following the news on Bots for some time. I had explored designs for our digital wallet and when we did In-store mode, one of our explorations was to use a Bot as the self-service concierge.
Sharing with leaders got the attention and was the reason for the workshop.
In 2016 BOTs were becoming popular, or at least people were trying to discover how to use them. There were great opportunities for businesses to utilize them. Kohl’s had partnerships with Facebook, and they were really pushing Bot technology; leaders felt this would be a great place to start.
I was part of a small team to sit with our partners at Facebook to talk about messenger and Bots to see how it could be utilized for our customers. In the end, we didn’t go with FB, but a small startup to help us to develop our own Bot. We would consider this as a POC to share with leaders around Kohl’s.
Process
Jake Knapp’s book on the five-day sprint got the attention of leaders, so a trainer was brought in to facilitate the team to come up with a few use cases for the Bot. At weeks end, the two use cases would be Store Finder and Today’s Deals; two easy use cases to develop; though we had many others to explore, especially for customer service.
designs
After the workshop, we started digging deeper into various use cases. I worked with the designer on creating conversation flows, so we could understand the customer interaction with the Bot and know where they would be exiting; it was like writing a script.
I partnered with the brand team to come up with the visual assets. Then partnered with Copy to work on the script; making sure the language felt natural and conversational; something very new to the copywriters.
I created flows in the form of mock-ups as a precursor to the prototype. Once the designs felt right, I created a working prototype in Axure to get it as close to real as possible for testing.
usecases
Use-case #1 - Scan Loyalty Card
Use-case #2 - Shop Offers
conclusion
We did a round of testing to get feedback on what customers thought about Bots, to see if there was interest in using them. Bots were pretty new, some of the participants didn’t even know what they were, but thought it could be useful in certain circumstances.
We discovered that the copy needed to be short. To help with writing, we ran an exercise where one person pretended they were the Bot and the other was the user; it brought a new perspective on how to write for conversation.
I worked with the startup to create the POC. Since then Kohl’s has been finding opportunities to implement a Bot such as in customer service.