Case Study
Bank of America
Contents
The Client
Bank of America is one of the largest and most well-known banks in the US (and internationally), serving serves millions of individual, business, and institutional customers.
The bank actively invests in technology and innovation to enhance its services, improve customer experience, and stay competitive in the digital age, pioneering efforts around: mobile & online banking, digital security, AI, data analytics, and more.
Apollo 21 worked in partnership with the team at Lippincott to execute this project.
The Challenge
Explore ways to enhance the capabilities of the Erica support bot through a more robust chat interface backed by AI and on-brand UI.
As one of the foremost financial services institutions in the US, Bank of America has firmly established itself as an advocate for innovative, customer-first banking solutions. Bank of America challenged us to explore how a deep integration of AI into their customer experience and customer data might come to life.
Given this challenge, we focused our efforts on the necessary data interactions that would provide unique benefit to Bank of America customers as well as multiple UX/UI entry points through which a chat interface could provide value. Our explorations covered in-app, on-site, and in-ad touchpoints for the new Erica.
The Plan
Prepare prototypes of multiple touchpoints and UX/UI entry points for user testing with Bank of America customers.
Given the chat-based interface of the Erica personality, we endeavored to create and test multiple iterations of Erica in order to understand which customers would find the most valuable, easiest to use, and most aligned to the existing brand values of Bank of America. The test scenarios covered mobile app, social media, in-branch, and video-based iterations of the new Erica. We developed clickable prototypes of each of these experience prior to working alongside Bank of America’s internal testing team for customer feedback. Each concept was tested with real customers, iterated upon, and tested again prior to the completion of the exploration.
The Solution
Three variations of the Erica persona were created and tested amongst customers, each with varying levels of personality.
The Apollo 21 team worked alongside teams from Lippincott and Bank of America to create three variations of the Erica persona for testing:
- Spherica: An orb-like animated object with a cartoon-like personality.
- Vectornet: An ephemeral colored mesh that appears as needed to draw the user through interactions.
- Ambient: The Ambient version of Erica (not pictured here) is designed to disappear entirely into the background vs. establishing a character-like presence.
Each of these personas was built into a prototype covering various touch points where Erica might interact with a customer. The demonstration of each persona and touch point is designed to consider beneficial actions that Erica might take by utilizing data to inform the customer of unique situations related to their financial health or to answer questions as prompted by the user.
The Outcomes
Responses from Bank of America customers…
“I immediately imagine it could help me with anything related to my account.”
“I was able to readily relate it to the Bank of America brand.”
“I get the sense that Erica is straightforward and helpful.”
“It’s user-friendly and professional — both of which are very good things.”
In Their Own Words
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