Capital One's Intelligent Guidance: Guiding customers from customer service agent to self-service opportunities
Lead Design Strategist
Capital One aimed to reduce costs and improve customer experience by guiding customers to optimal self-service channels. While many could self-serve, they often chose agents due to habit or frustration. Intelligent Guidance set out to design seamless, intuitive experiences to help agents confidently guide customers without sacrificing personalization.
We conducted research with agents and customers to identify pain points and needs. The resulting MVP in Empath featured automated eligibility checks, dynamic scripting, and reassuring language. The design focused on four principles: limit agent judgment, ensure seamless transitions, meet customers where they are, and highlight the value of self-service.
Agents lacked clear, embedded guidance and relied on memory or inconsistent workarounds. Customers were wary of being “passed off” and feared starting over when switching channels. The challenge was to design an experience that balanced efficiency with trust and personalized support as well as set a new standard for how self-service experiences should be handled in the future by our product and design teams.
The final solution was two fold: an internal guidebook for innovation and product teams to ensure all touch points benefitted both agents and customers in the services process and an MVP workflow for Empath that gave agents the necessary tools to help the customer self service as quickly as possible. Early launches showed 30% reduced handle times over the first month of rollout.
