CVS/Aetna — Conversational UI

"What kind of healthcare provider can I help you find?" Is a pretty innocuous question, right? My design team on the conversational UI "find a provider" project for CVS+Aetna discovered just how deep one little question can become. The goal was to drastically reduce the call volume of simple questions being asked to the customer service reps. Our first step was to determine a conversational tone that would guide our bot assistant's questions and responses. This included the voice we selected from available Watson options as well as the way the bot (we later named her Val after the 'V' in CVS – Value) would handle herself in a conversation. We then scripted, recorded, and prototyped several conversations using the actual voice from Watson and validated them with stakeholders and actual customer service reps. Then it was on to the creation, which was vastly more complex than I'd ever imagined! By the end, our little question involved four categories of questions & responses and over 600 potential conversation points, all written and structured in Miro before being handed off, bit by bit, to the development team.