Nithya Asokan

Business Assistant

Overview

Building an AI-powered assistant for Amazon Business customers to solve top customer issues and unlock business potential for small businesses and enterprises.

Note: I am not able to share this project in it’s entirety due to confidentiality.

Role
UX Design Lead

Team
Amazon Business Service Experience Technology

Status
Incubation & testing

Background

Business customers face unique challenges in account management, ordering, delivery & payments that are specific to their businesses as compared to Amazon’s retail customers. This meant that the customer support experience also had to be tailored to suit the needs of various types of business users across organization sizes and industries.

Amazon’s customers are looking for quick access to support and fast resolution to issues. When faced with an issue, customers usually turn to one of the existing support channels for help.

My role

I am leading the UX for the Business Assistant experience from strategy to ideation and incubation. As a first step, I am partnering with the customer insights team and UX research team to dive deep into Amazon Business customer support framework to identify top areas of friction within the current support expereince across channels. With this, I am collaborating closely with the Product team to define the strategy and key tenets for the experience.

Identifying opportunity areas

Our research indicated that Amazon’s customers are looking for quick access to support and fast resolution to issues. When faced with an issue, customers usually turn to one of the existing support channels for help. In Help & Chat experiences, the customer had to go through multiple pages and resources to find the relevant solutions and resources to their issue creating a frustrating experience.

In the Business environment, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the common solutions given on the Help & Chat experiences do not work for all users and business types. This results in higher frustration and higher contact volume post help resources.

Defining the North Star

In the Business environment, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the common solutions given on the Help & Chat experiences do not work for all users and business types. This results in higher frustration and higher contact volume post help resources.

Business Assistant is founded on the key principle of self-service that enables customers to solve common issues on their own through the Amazon Business platform with minimum friction or disruption to their business. Business Assistant understands the customer’s organizational needs, user role and value drivers through analysis of the account info, order history, purchase preferences, buying patterns and platform interactions. Through this learning, Business Assistant is able to surface relevant support solutions in context of the AB experience in a way that is frictionless and frustration-free.

Outcome & Next steps

I am working in a team of 3 to define the core interaction design principles for the Business Assistant. We are focusing on key support areas and high value actions for the initial phase.

Customers will be able to follow simple instructions from Business Assistant that allows them to troubleshoot common issues such as requesting updates on missing item, tracking delayed delivery, and requesting refunds, as well as perform actions such as setting up delivery instructions, request invoices, and request tax refunds. Business Assistant would be available to customers both in the context of the Order experience for above the line solutions and as a centralized Assistant Hub that enables below the line solutions.

Below is a snapshot of some of my work in this regard.