Conversation design at Drift involved working with partner companies to build and maintain a series of AI chatbots on various customer webpages. Some key aspects of this process are highlighted below.

Flow Design

Using Drift’s playbook tool, I was able to design flows for several customer accounts. For many playbooks, the goal is to take qualified customers down the sales funnel and answer any relevant questions along the way. Oftentimes, each page on the customers website had a unique flow intended to meet the users where they are in their journey.

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Training

One major aspect of conversation design at Drift is training (a.k.a. log scoring). In this process, I would review a subset of conversations my bots had and used this data to train the AI. This training might include adding additional utterances or editing the flow to improve the user experience.

During my time at Drift, I introduced a prototype powered by GPT-3 to help designers reinforce how we trained our AI. Designers would input existing training phrases into the prototype and the output would provide additional text designers could use to improve intent recognition.

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Customer Interaction

I was responsible for several customer accounts such as Twilio, NetApp, and PTC. I also worked alongside other designers to service accounts for customers like Adobe and Cisco.

This interaction involved meeting with customers on a frequent basis and aligning on their goals for our AI powered chatbot. Persona creation was a major responsibility that involved collaborating with our customers to mold the character users would chat with. The persona creation process entails the curation of a specific voice and tone as well as a consideration for what the persona will and will not say.

This role also positioned me as a user advocate to our customers. When the customer had a goal that conflicted with the end users experience, such as restricting disqualified customers, it was my job to communicate this clearly and propose solutions to resolve the issue.

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Acme Corp Bot

I worked with small team of designers to create the Acme Corp bot. This bot was designed for the sales team at Drift to present AI to potential customers. This project, used by the team today, was a collaborative and creative design sprint.

The bot was also demonstrated at the 2021 WSJ AI Executive Forum by Elias Torres the co-founder and CTO of Drift.

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For more information about conversational AI at Drift, you can view the official website