Healthcare AI Sales Companion

Project Definition

Providing a streamlined Salesforce experience with a unique design that utilizes an AI chatbot assistant in performing everyday tasks.

Business Problem

Salesforce is an amazing tool to help marketing and sales teams to better interact with their customers and manage those engagements. However, there is sometimes a disconnect between the big data that many organizations sit on and their Salesforce integration. A healthcare data company engaged with us to envision a way to leverage artificial intelligence and a Salesforce interface overhaul to entice customers to use their unique platform with a tighter integration between their sales team operations and the data that drives their industry. This was a proof of concept (PoC) that needed to be completed within 4 weeks.

Team Challenges

Very little prior knowledge of Healthcare industry.
Research details that were provided for the PoC lacked clarity as to user motivations and behaviors. They were very much focused on specific tasks and jobs to be done by each.
Finding a way to incorporate AI that seemed to be a part of Salesforce without having the time to do heavy engineering and restructuring of existing platform.
Incorporate innovative approaches to the proof of concept that seamlessly blended machine learning, predictive intelligence and an optimal user experience.

Project Focus

Process Flows
User Interface Design
Product Strategy
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Conversational UI

Initial Approach

Understanding the provided storyline in terms of the distinct personas and their individual journeys.

Outlining the proto-personas in terms of needs, goals and behaviors and then aligning features as value propositions.

Mapping out how data intelligence can be leveraged at different stages with the marketing and sales teams.

Mapping out the individual personas to a storyline and how the interface corresponds to specific points in the user journey.

Mapping the Journey

To understand the personas and storyline that had been provided for the PoC, I mapped out the individuals and structured my initial designs around the points of intersection between personas. This allowed the entire team to fully understand the scope of work being asked for and how individual personas would correlate with each other and interact with the AI assistant.

Challenges

With such a short timeline, our design team benefited from being distributed across our US and UK centers. I took the task of the primary strategy and design but then led others to help execute these designs with our offshore development centers. This required very clear and decisive communication with all of our team members around the world. We worked together literally around the clock to ensure the best possible outcome given our time constraints.

Defining a Solution

Conversationl UI design to schedule meetings, send marketing materials and suggest medical experts

A dashboard that mixes mission critical information curated by the AI assistant and a priortized content for the sales team member persona

Incorporating AI in a meaningful way

It was not an easy task to figure out how to best leverage the machine intelligence piece into the design. The simplest incorporation that could be achieved in the time allotted for the PoC was on the dashboard for each persona, where there could be a daily delivery of content curated for the individual and suggestions of actions to be taken next.

However, the design team used this opportunity to envision a conversational UI that could be used in addition to the dashboard and from anywhere within the application. This extension of the AI would allow individuals to communicate more effectively with their teammates by sharing relevant pieces of marketing material. It would also be able to auto-suggest times for meetings and act as a virtual private assistant for the sales team staff.

Do chatbots dream of electric sheep?

In order to make the chatbot feel a bit more real, I spent time creating a small narrative on the AI piece to determine its usage, voice and relevance with the platform. This process was the highlight of the project for me as it was very much akin to creating a character in a fictional story and then watching how they interact with the various personas.

For each persona I tried to envision a way that they could use the chatbot and AI to help them in their day to day activities. Not everyone would be comfortable leveraging this capability, so I tried to make "Ada" as personable as possible.

Retrospective Into Our Process

Not all is well that ends well

Unfortunately our company did not end up winning the contract for the Salesforce integration project. However, our knowledge and exploration of the AI piece has led us into other discussions with the company about how we can best leverage their data intelligence in a menaingful way for their customers. We were able to impress them with our forward thinking approach into how to incorporate AI into the Salesforce platform and act as a virtual assistant to their clients.

What we could have done differently

We definitely rushed into the UI design given our short timeline to completion of the project. Due to a mismatch in the approved designs we presented and an understanding of the limitations of the platform, our development team struggled to implement all the various designs in time. As a design team we must always be made aware of the limitations and challenges that engineering teams face when implementing our vision. Further exploration of incorporating the AI piece was an added bonus but did add another layer of complexity that our development team unfortunately did not have time to address.