BILLY DUVALLE

®2024

AI Chatbot : Context, Personality and Tone

The vision is to design a GenAI-powered chatbot for Salesforce that delivers smooth, conversational interactions while ensuring quick, accurate results. By enabling natural, context-aware dialogue, the chatbot reduces friction. It makes users feel supported and understood, while its focus on speed ensures instant access to the right information, solutions, or workflows.

Client

Salesforce

DELIVERABLES

RESEARCH

PROTOTYPES

Experience

Year

2024

Role

RESEARCH DESIGN

Chatbots have become redundant

Including the Einstein Chatbot on the Salesforce website. All it can do is connect you to an Agent, which you probably could've done yourself.

But how did it reach this point?
  • No Contextual Awareness

    Most chatbots can't remember context , so they give generic answers or repeat things. It almost feels like you’re talking to a wall.

  • They lack personality.

    Most bots feel robotic or overly scripted, which makes the experience dull and transactional rather than engaging.

  • They fail at multi-step tasks.

    Great at answering a single question, but terrible at carrying a conversation across goals (e.g., browsing, comparing, deciding).

With AI taking over the Chatbot game,

it just didn't make sense to stick to script based Chatbots anymore.

What Salesforce asked of us

"How does a little window like a chatbot, get people to be excited about this experience?"

Salesforce sponsor

  • Research
  • Design
  • Prototype
  • Contextual inquiries
Focus of this
Project

Exploring and designing chatbot experiences that leverage GenAI, specifically looking at how these bots can adapt to user needs, provide meaningful interactions

Issues with the Salesforce Chatbot
Losing
Track of
conversations

Scrolling through lengthy chats to find something relevant you chatted about previously

  • Expert
    Assistance

    Frequently escalates to an agent instead of resolving the query directly.

  • Insufficient
    Information

    Struggles with one-word queries due to limited context.

  • No Visual
    Hierarchy

    Hard to scan and find information when responses are long blocks of plain text.

Proposed features for the new Chatbot.
  • Chat
    Timeline

    A timline that lets you revisit old conversations.

    Users can keep track of chatbot conversation based on topics of entry.

    Through this they are able to jump over to specific sections to find the relevant responses they need.

  • Clarifying
    Questions

    The new mechanism focuses on having a natural conversation.

    Asking clarifying questions to guide them to provide elaborate entries.

    No forced redirection to support anymore.

  • Suggestive
    Prompts

    Users often struggle to structure potential quests in chat.

    It helps the user form their queries quicker without breaking their flow.

    Makes the user feel heard and gives them a sense of continuity.

  • Visual
    Clarity

    Improved visual hierarchy for a smoother experience.

    Simplifying product discovery through the use of CTA's like 'compare' .

    Summarizing key product features into scanable points.

The Process

  • Protocols and Insights from probes/interviews etc.

  • Insights, sketches and notes!

  • Meet the team

  • Solving issues related to inactivity

Reflections
What could've
been done better

Deeper research on both personality of the chatbot as well as testing concepts with a larger sample.

Future Scope

Develop the timeline concept further to enhance the experience for customers and integrate media elements for richer engagement.

What we
learned

Communicating design ideas to stakeholders. Being able to maintain a healthy group dynamic in a large group

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