Empty Cabinet | The Design Work of Andrew Seay | Vibes Conversational Programs

Evolving messages into conversations

Conversations were the new black. At Vibes, we carefully partnered with our customers to explore the various ways conversations across messaging channels could enhance their consumer expereince with their brand. This interaction opened opportunities for Vibes to evaluate the market and business impact of evolving our Platform to to grow and engage mobile audiences. Our Vibes Labs team set out to explore and demonstrate the ways our customers could take advantage of this new user behaivor for their mobile marketing programs.

ROLES:
Program Lead
Experience Director

Conversational Marketing for Retail

To get started in conversational programs, Vibes had to gather customer interest. This meant a lot of concept development to attract customer interested in becoming early adopters. The Vibes Labs team concepted different use-cases and channels where messaging programs could take place. This included everything from insurance claim status to selecting the right pet food. While SMS was the sweet spot of Vibes, we deliberately kept it open in our discussions with Gap retailers to help show we were willing to align an MVP to meet any of their channel needs.

Prototyping

While ensuring Vibes could extend the brand voice into this growing engagement space, it was also essential to test how a messaging platform can provide the automation to detect intent and provide analysis on the conversation. We tested out frameworks, and channels we could utilize to show how the conversation could tap into the products and services of our customers.

The Start of a product

After gathering insights we collected from customer working sessions, we selected FB Messenger as our first channel to build a chatbot application. The market was there to support use-cases around store and loyalty program info. Messenger supports enhanced conversation interactions, making it fast and easy for a customer to find information about the company, services, and store info. Our framework had built in features to recognize hand-off protocol to customer support. The programs have all been a success, and continue to grow in the interactions and conversational analysis.

Conversational Product

With so much interest in conversational programs, it was time to gathered a team together to brainstorm a new product offering for Vibes. This meant an intense design sprint building the essential needs of the product to serve our customers. Through copious note taking, sketching, wire-framing, and prototyping, we came together with a v.1 product blueprint.