Amber Chat Bot

Client Mobile Web

Amber Chat Bot

Let’s be honest—calling customer service can be a frustrating and exhausting experience for anyone…

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Meet Amber!

Amber is Ambetter’s (CENTENE Corporation) chatbot virtual assistant.  Amber has become a Jr. Member Services Associate with the task of guiding members through the complicated world of health insurance. She can help with things like;

1. Help members understand the basics of their plan (e.g., deductible, premium costs, etc.
2. Help members make a premium payment
3. Explain certain medical terminology, such as “pre-authorization
4. Troubleshoot issues such as finding appropriate tax documents
5. Provide plan-related addresses and contact information
6. Help members find a medical provider
7. Search coverage information

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Opportunity

Conversational AI is a powerful tool for automating customer interactions. To deliver a worthwhile customer experience, it’s important to look beyond the technical aspects of the technology and also pay attention to how customers will interact with your virtual agent.

• You need to study, test, design, and account for;
• How a virtual agent can influence customer behavior
• Recommendations for how to navigate natural conversation barriers
• What is necessary to improve longer conversation flows
• The importance of a virtual agent’s pronouns
• The secret weapon of interaction design – empathy in tone and voice

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That last bullet is what drives my passion for design. Design is not just what looks good or even the ease of use, design powerfully influences emotion and connection. When you walk away from an experience, how did it make you feel? Do you feel like you would come back to that experience? Do you trust that experience?

So when creating a customer service chatbot for health care, it is not creating just any chatbot. Healthcare is a careful subject. We need to be clear and informative while also being kind and empathetic.

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The Impact

I was able to work with the Conversational Design Team to create interactions like “Coverage Search”.  In Coverage Search, a user can ask Amber what a specific medical service would cost. Amber can recognize the user’s search term, whether broad or specific and bring the results to the user inside of the chat interface.

There were a lot of obstacles when training a bot to not only receive and translate the intent but also to surface the right results. For example, how to do we explain and show multiple search results? How do you display that in a chat interface?

Take the example of a user asking “How much does the ER cost?”.

Well, there are usually several costs associated with an ER visit i.e. a possible ambulance ride, a doctor’s services fee, facility fees, and so on. How can we show the results of their search without just inundating them with thrown spaghetti?

Or the scenario that they have searched for a procedure that can be covered in two different ways? Ex. A colonoscopy is covered differently depending on if it is preventative or diagnostic.

So we designed several scenarios and performed moderated and unmoderated testing to see users’ reactions and gather feedback. We have had tremendous success with being able to direct our members to the right information quickly and easily.

Task

Improve on Amber's user experience