Reflection Visualisation

The challenge  In this project we develop and design a chatbot for a car leasing company. The goal of the  chatbot is to be a central point of contact where the customer of the car leasing company  can easily find answers on the FAQ’s. Indeed, the chatbot will be a customer service tool.     The main challenge in this project is to gather all the information that the chatbot must  contain. Today all information, all FAQ’s are decentralized over the company, over different  department. So, centralizing the answers of the FAQ’s will be the first step to develop the  chatbot.     Yet, this is not that easy. As there is no current central point of contact and every  department has its owsn FAQ and its own unique process to handle questions of customers.  We need to revisit all FAQ’s and reshape the current process of handling questions of  customers.

The tool  The used tool is Visualization, it empowered us to create a common understanding about  the FAQ’s over different department. It also enabled us to draw out the various processes  that each department uses to solve certain questions.     By drawing out these processes we can compare them and identify similarities and  differences between them. This is a first step in centralizing the FAQ’s and working towards  a unified customer service.

Application

1.  Interview with each department      In a first step we interviewed employees of all departments and asked them about their  experiences and their way of working. We asked them to identify 3 groups of question  they mostly deal with and instructed them to rank these groups.     Beforehand we collected the FAQ’s of that department and had cut them out so the  interviewee could easily rank the questions and sort them under the identified topics.

2. We identified links and patterns

Then, we compared the answers of every group, and  saw some links and patterns. We wrote down these  links and patterns and came to a certain flow, a  process.    We did this together with the key stakeholders, it was a  clear and useful way to extrapolate our thoughts and  create this crucial common understanding.

3. We saw what was unique for every department.

We also identified what was  unique for each department  and visualized this to create a  common understanding.

4. Finally we draw out the data architecture of the bot in order to communicate our

finding to the developer of the chatbot.

Insights  As discussed in the “application” chapter, every insight derived from drawing out the  findings and the process.     In the first step we discovered key topics for each department an understood why these  topics were so important. Thanks to ranking the FAQ’s under the topics we were enabled to  detect themes and common processes of solving question.    In the second step, where we compared each department we found patterns in the  processes, this showed us what was important and efficient in the process of solving  questions.     In the third step we used our insights from 1 & 2 to indicate unique questions for each  department.    Finally we visualized the complete flow and architecture to explain our data architect how  the chatbot must be developed.

Approach  Using visualization seems like the only way to handle such decentralized complex project. I  would do exactly the same.    Yet, I don’t consider each design thinking tool as a isolated tool. Visualization makes  storytelling possible and sometimes results in a mind map. This became very clear during  this project; a combination of each tool is the perfect mix to create a common  understanding and discover valuable insights.     Nevertheless, I choose ‘visualization’ as a topic for this assignment because, for me, it was  the first step to be able to apply the other tools.

