Content Strategy & Design
Annie, American National Insurance’s Virtual Assistant
Annie’s Beginnings: A COVID-19 Assistant
During the summer of 2020, as COVID-19 numbers were on the rise across the country, American National had launched a few initiatives to help provide information to clients around their polices and COVID-19. One of those was launching a virtual assistant — or chatbot — on AmericanNational.com, named Annie.
Annie had been talked about well before COVID-19, but the pandemic was a way to launch Annie with a strong purpose that could be built upon in the future. Working with IBM, we launched Annie within just one week, including me reviewing pre-written chat responses and writing new ones specific to American National.
Annie 3.0 – Expanding Her Capabilities
After a few iterations, Annie is going through her third big release, which we’re calling Annie 3.0. In this update, The goal is to dramatically improve users’ self-service capabilities on AmericanNational.com, increase client loyalty and retention, while also lowering customer service business costs.
For my part of Annie 3.0, I was in charge of creating the content strategy around her new expanded library of responses and the communications strategy to let internal stakeholders know about our updates.
Content Strategy
Developing the Content Strategy
When it comes to developing content for Annie, we wanted to focus on the most important piece of UX/UI writing: To deliver the right content, to the right user at the right time.
To create our content strategy, I focused on how content would impact the user experience and Annie’s content architecture – or the way content is organized, structured, labeled and connected.
Annie’s Content Architecture
For Annie, the content architecture is firmly based in how we organized the content she sends out to users to make sure she’s answering questions with the right answer at the right time. This means developing content models that groups together similar topics, and then creating content trees to see how far the conversation can go before sending users to a live representative.
Content Model Examples
Annie’s Tone & Voice
Brand Voice
To keep Annie in line with the overall voice of American National, we focused on the three foundational words in our brand guidelines: Being personable, thoughtful and experienced.
Annie’s Personality & Tone
Personality
Annie is be a friendly, welcoming and understanding virtual assistant, willing to help users find information they need. Legally, we are clear that she isn’t an actual human being, but her content patterns are conversational in nature.
Tone
Annie’s tone fluctuates depending on where users are in their journey chatting with her:
Welcome messages: fun, engaging and welcoming
Initial responses: Helpful, more professional
Successful interactions (users get the info they’re looking for): Upbeat, fun
Successful goodbye messages (users leave feeling satisfied): Positive, fun
Unsuccessful interactions (users didn’t find info or have to be sent to a live representative): serious, helpful
Unsuccessful goodbye messages (users leave feeling unsatisfied): Professional, friendly