How we built a personal identity for Swedbank’s chatbot
Situation
Swedbank transitioned to a chatbot-first strategy for customer service. This meant that moving forward the chatbot would also have to perform a degree of branding, to ensure it represented the bank appropriately.
The bank had strong language guidelines, but only for marketing copy, and it had strong design guidelines, but only for visual or UX design.
The team of 12 Conversation Designers, who author every line of text the chatbot says, had previously been restricted by Brand and Legal. We needed to bring everyone together to set a direction for the future.
We needed to create guidelines for the chatbot to follow.
Task
Tasked with developing a system to allow any Conversation Designer to know they were representing the Swedbank brand with their copy, we first sought to understand properly what the Swedbank brand was supposed to sound like in the first place.
We worked with the Brand team to download the characteristics of the Swedbank brand and positioning, and we leveraged our Conversation Designers’ experience in Swedbank contact centres to blend the DNA of the brand with the DNA of customer service.
Action
We took the Service DNA and Brand DNA as inputs to a series of Persona Generation workshops, which yielded a variety of different personality types.
This gave the guardrails for content to be written by each of these characters, bringing their given guidelines to life.
We took these different variations of content to customer testing, to gauge customer sentiment in response to these differing personality types.
Results
Renamed chatbot
The chatbot had been labelled “chatta med oss” (chat with us)- through collaborating with Brand we identified and eliminated areas of customer confusion.
Branded chatbot
Thanks to a strengthened relationship with Brand, we were able to deliver a conversational experience that is far more aligned to Swedbank’s broader brand ambitions
Future-proofed
The guidelines in the way they are structured will enable these to be used as guardrails for an LLM to train on how to “speak like Swedbank” when the time comes for that.