Xfinity Assistant Acceleration Team

Year: 2020-2021
Team: 4 conversational designers, countless stakeholders, NLP engineering team
My role: Lead Conversational Designer (in-house)

Beginning in March of 2020, my entire organization within Comcast shifted its attention to our unassisted chat support channel in response to the COVID-19 crisis and the constraints it placed on our existing customer service infrastructure. With callcenters closing or going remote, we needed to quickly ramp up the Xfinity Assistant to pick up the slack. A huge part of this ramp-up was expanding the content and self-service integrations that would allow the tool to address customer needs without a live care representative. As one of the few experienced UX designers within our organization, I played a core role in helping a classically operations-focused group adopt a product design mentality.

Content creation

My content creation responsibilities begin with a thorough audit of current-state chat content, an understanding of the technical constraints present, and a stakeholder alignment from the appropriate groups to ensure that requirements are captured and well understood. With this groundwork complete, the flow creation and eventual content work can proceed. Miro has been an invaluable tool for this, allowing for rapid iteration and flow diagramming. This process also helps to illustrate the natural language processing needs to ensure that customers will be served this content at the right time. Upon completion of the content creation process and stakeholder validation, I then upload the content into our chat platform to allow for our development team to begin implementing the designs.

Development team collaboration

My depth of experience in working with a development team has been extremely useful for helping our design group with effective development handoffs and collaboration. It is crucial to understand the existing constraints in order to move rapidly and meet our objectives in expanding chat capabilities, so a close working relationship with our development partners is key to validating platform capabilities and designing around them.

Process improvement

When this new group was formed, there was no established design-to-dev process, and no traditional product role to guide priorities and scoping. I worked to establish a variety of agile processes and ceremonies to ensure consistent output and a smoother working relationship with all parties involved in the creation of new chat content and capabilities. Enacting this new working model required me to be a process evangelist and help ensure that the group was sticking to our new way of working. By learning from our successes and failures, we have continued to refine and document this repeatable process to great success.

Celebrating Our successes

The work we have done has increased containment metrics while engagement has grown exponentially, resulting in massive operational savings. More information on how Xfinity Assistant’s expanded capabilities has helped Comcast reach its customer service goals can be found in this article.