Helping to Launch an AI-Powered Conversational Experience

CapTech partnered with a top 5 U.S. bank to help launch an AI-powered Virtual Assistant (VA). CapTech’s consultants provided a wide range of support for this program, including technical program management, conversational design, content strategy, user acceptance testing, and product management.

The bank wanted to transition its VA from an in-house NLP solution to Google Dialogflow, addressing a comprehensive range of user intents. Over an 18-month span, a cross-functional team of 26 CapTechers with varying skill sets worked within a sprawling team structure that included eight different design pods.

CapTech's product  SMEs collaborated with multiple teams at the bank, providing expertise in feature design and size estimation, user story writing and refinement, sprint planning, defect remediation, product acceptance, and risk escalation and mitigation. CapTechers also led the creation and execution of the testing strategy for the VA, ensuring a seamless and accurate experience for customers prior to launch. Efforts included the implementation of Spanish support for the VA, which, at the time, was the first to market for any financial institution. 

CapTech also had a strong CX team embedded within the eight pods. A CapTech content strategist conducted an audit and revised the VA’s Style Guide and Character Playbook (which included a backstory, VA traits, and voice attributes) to maintain linguistic and flow design consistency across all product pods and provided quality assurance for VA flows and content matrices. CapTech’s conversational designers helped deliver those flows to outline the experience, ensuring consistency across workstreams.

Leveraging the enhanced capabilities of Google Dialogflow CX, CapTech also modeled advanced entity slotting and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities to make the conversational flows more intuitive and helpful. In addition, CapTech’s CX team designed the visual look and feel of the VA’s branding and chat experience and delivered multiple videos to showcase the VA’s capabilities.

CapTech’s support of the bank resulted in a successful relaunch of the VA — one that had 20 million interactions in its first year. With multiple teammates working over an 18-month span, the combined CapTech team delivered the following outcomes:

• Worked closely with product managers and program leadership to plan feature development and releases, aligning to the overall product roadmap.
• Led successful transition to Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) user stories to promote consistent story sizing, product acceptance, program reporting, and accurate automated test scripts, which increased the turnaround time for implementation.
• Created an effective test strategy while partnering with product and technical teams to perform test planning, test execution, defect management, and testing status/reporting.
• Leveraged foreign language proficiency to translate thousands of phrases used for model training within Google Dialogflow, then diagnosed gaps in Spanish training data to improve response accuracy of the VA by 25%.
• Helped deliver approximately 60 unique integrations with the mobile app, the digital platform, and enterprise middleware systems.
• Prepared and coordinated over 200 stories with external partners to meet the unique requirements of a conversational experience and natural language processing (NLP).
• Designed 200+ flows to outline the conversational experience, ensure compatibility between workstreams, and leverage the enhanced capabilities of Google Dialogflow CX.
• Developed sizzle videos for the Board of Directors and other key stakeholders and high-fidelity prototypes to user-test key experiences.