Xfinity Assistant Journey

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by Tiffany Kelly, Senior Conversational Designer Candidate for PPL by Tiffany Kelly, Senior Copywriter and Conversational Designer

This is the story about the 1900-line spreadsheet that came across my desk one day in Fall of 2018 while I was working at Xfinity. It was from an engineer who just wanted me to proofread some copy they were working on. When I looked a little closer, I realized it was the entire general troubleshooting flow for the Xfinity Assistant chat bot. We had not had an organization-wide chat bot before. We had heard rumblings this was in development, but my team and I were not expecting to encounter it like this.

Hi! I'm Xfinity Assistant.

I'm the spreadsheet that just needed a light proofread.

Comment: *Actually it was an enormous user experience shift and brand-new feature that had the potential to change the way all our customers would interact with their Xfinity products and services.

Comment: **Actually it needed a whole strategy and a few more teams to get involved.

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The copy in the spreadsheet was all over the place, and the chat bot didn't know what it wanted to be. Was it just an extension of Help & Support? Or was it supposed to provide in-the-moment guidance? Mostly the copy sent customers to existing FAQ pages. It didn't help customers self-serve or engage. And v1.0 was already live! So we had to act fast.

Would you like to learn about some features of Xfinity Assistant 1.0?

Written by engineers who were building the chat bot. It's already live! Go to Learn about some features of Xfinity Assistant 1.0 No, I'm all set. Talk to an agent.

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We needed a strategy. This tool was going to be used throughout the entire Xfinity universe of products and services. And we needed consistency. We had to develop a coherent voice for all of Xfinity in a way that we had never had before. The chat feature was going to be everywhere customers interact with Xfinity: in their web and mobile apps, in Facebook messenger, and in their X1 TV experience. Our biggest challenge was siloed teams. Every team was always doing their own thing. Separate, inconsistent voices were already baked in.

What did we need to do?

Fix it.

Create a new voice for all of Xfinity in a way that we never had before.

Integrate chat into existing solutions and create new ones for a seamless experience wherever customers interact with us.

What's the challenge?

Silos.

UX teams, product teams, customer service teams.

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The siloed teams in question (and their unique challenges to consistency): Agents (Customer Experience): This was the team that guided live agents (on the phone, and now in chat) how to talk to our customers. This team had always been separate from marketing. They already had a persona voice in place ("Cody") based on extensive research. Cody sounded quite different from the Xfinity Assistant bot script so far. Xfinity Mobile: This was a new service at the time. It was out on an island, totally separate, with its own unique style guide. The Swaps team and their Facebook Messenger project: Equipment Swaps is a huge initiative within Xfinity. It's customer engagement, upgrades, and troubleshooting all in one. The Swaps team had already started designing an assistant experience within Facebook Messenger, and it needed to be reined in.

Hang tight! We're working on it.

Did we fix it?

Customer service experience team

Challenge: Cody the Persona

Xfinity Mobile team

Challenge: They have their own message guidelines

Facebook Messenger & Swaps project by the UX team

Challenge: They're beating us to it

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