Say hi to Jane, our virtual assistant.
Client
A Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company who is the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm that serves real estate investors and occupiers through approximately 450 offices worldwide. They deliver an integrated solution for clients seeking to outsource facilities management (FM) and maintenance services.
Business Needs
The client was looking for some intuitive methods to increase the productivity of their field agents so that they can serve their end customers in a much more effective way.
01Discover
Upon observing the day in the life of a field agent, we found that they were spending a considerable amount of time and energy on doing mundane, repetitive activities that impacted their work productivity.
However, doing mundane activities is a universal problem that many working people have to face daily. This gave us an opportunity to put ourselves in the shoes of a user and understand the motivations and frustrations they go through during the day.
Contextual Functions
We did some research to understand all the activities a typical employee would do from the time he/she wakes up to going back to bed. We realized that there were several non-productive tasks that if delegated to an assistant, the productivity of an employee would increase.
02Define
We needed to find a seamless and friction-less way to manage and automate (where possible) a field agent’s day to day mundane activities.
Through research, we figured out that non-intrusive digital technologies can help to get these unproductive tasks done. In our ideation sessions, we stumbled upon the idea of a virtual assistant where we could use smart speakers like Amazon Echo which can listen to the user commands and perform actions.
The shortcoming with a smart speaker is the difficulty to carry it around when users are moving to different environments. To solve this, we ideated on how to create a seamless and omni-channel experience. The users must be able to do some tasks at home on a smart speaker and seamlessly transition to using their smart phones while in the car and laptop while at the workplace.
Whiteboarding and role play
We started ideating on different platforms and did a lot of whiteboarding to find a solution.
We also did role play activities where one person would act like a bot who would listen to user’s commands and respond accordingly.
Cognitive load on users was also an important aspect we had to focus on because, people tend to forget information after a series of conversations, and it becomes difficult to recall their original intended task after a while. Keeping this in mind, we designed a solution where the number of conversation turns must be manageable, and the bot must reiterate some of user's commands to not veer out of context.
Day in the life of a user
We drafted a day in the life of a user to understand at what point of time and environment our bot could pitch in to help the user. And then documented the conversation between the user and the bot for selected contexts/use cases.
With all the contextual dialogues designed and tested, we deployed our virtual assistant on Amazon Alexa and fondly named it "Jane".