Xfinity Assistant Acceleration Team
In March 2020, my entire organization within Comcast shifted focus to our unassisted chat support channel in response to COVID-19 and the constraints it placed on existing customer service infrastructure. With call centers closing or going remote, we needed to rapidly scale the Xfinity Assistant — expanding the content and self-service integrations that would allow the tool to address customer needs without a live agent. As one of the few experienced UX designers in the group, I played a core role in helping a classically operations-focused team adopt a product design mentality.
Chat flow content creation
Content creation began with a thorough audit of existing chat content, a clear understanding of technical constraints, and stakeholder alignment to ensure requirements were captured before any new work began. From there, I used Miro for rapid flow diagramming and iteration — a process that also surfaced NLP requirements to ensure customers were served the right content at the right time. Once flows were validated with stakeholders, I uploaded content directly into our chat platform to hand off to engineering for implementation.
Development team collaboration
My background working closely with engineering has been invaluable in helping our design group operate efficiently. Understanding the platform’s existing constraints was essential to moving fast and meeting our expansion goals — so a close working relationship with our development partners was critical for validating capabilities and designing around them.
Process improvement
When this team formed, there was no established design-to-dev process and no traditional product role to guide priorities or scoping. I worked to establish agile processes and ceremonies to ensure consistent output and a smoother relationship with all parties involved in creating new chat content and capabilities. Getting the group to stick to this new model required real evangelism — and by learning from our successes and failures, we refined and documented a repeatable process that has continued to serve the team well.
Results
The work we did drove dramatic improvements to Comcast’s customer service metrics. Xfinity Assistant usage grew 445% during the peak of the crisis — from roughly 60,000 daily interactions to 400,000 per day. By April 2020, 82% of customers who contacted Comcast through a digital channel got what they needed without speaking to a phone agent. More on how the expanded capabilities contributed to Comcast’s broader customer service goals can be found in this article from Fierce Network.