Ella Asks Questions
Jump-starting client engagement by using Ella to ask questions, improving our ability to deliver personalized insights.
BackWho is Ella?
Ella is a virtual agent — a digital financial coach — who interacts with clients on the Sun Life website. She helps users better understand their finances by surfacing messages based on a decision engine. When she asks the client a question and provides personalized insight on their next sign-in, we see a lift of over 300% in engagement. My task was to take those initial findings and experiment with how Ella interacts with clients. I needed to keep in mind the technical limitations of our current website but also look ahead to our future vision. My team sought a solution that would incorporate contextual messaging and positive reinforcement while pushing the boundaries of Ella in terms of her personality, content, and tone of voice.
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Discovery
To learn about how current Sun Life clients perceive Ella, we conducted a set of moderated interviews. We heard that clients were open to sharing data with Ella, equating it to how they would interact with an advisor. The biggest challenge was that — in essence — asking the user questions to serve a business goal was not user-centric and could be a major point of frustration along their journey. Regardless, that was the ask. Conscious of creating more friction, I pushed for a design that was scale-able and intuitive, pioneering a new interaction with Ella.
Iteration
The first iterations of the design used a modal pattern. This zone surfaces every time a user signs into Sun Life and was used to pilot the initial concept last year. With that said, it is an in-demand zone so we opted to explore new forms of interactions. We were excited by badge-based virtual agents, located in the lower right-hand corner of the screen (such as on Workplace or AsiaMiles). This would bridge our current state to a future state and enable us to create a modular zone that could ask questions.
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Defining an MVP
Our vision excited stakeholders and tested well with clients. Users responded best when there was a balance of being asked questions but also receiving help and value. As is often the case, our team had to remove some of our favourite features in order to create a bite-sized MVP to launch and learn with. I encourage you to play around with our prototype. I built this for a strategy presentation showcasing our MVP design — it was built using Protopie, which has been a fun tool to learn. The tool was successful in its MVP and is now live to large portions of Sun Life clients.