Mobile Concur Assistant

UX | Mobile/Desktop Design

We were given the task of "make a bot". This was when bots were first becoming a thing and one of the VP's decided we needed one. No idea what for, just we need one. We were unenthusiatic to say the least to be given this task with no problem that's it's solving so we set out to find one. And actually, we did. And customers couldn't get it quick enough.

The Problem

One of the main reasons people purchase Concur is that we overlay everything with Policy. This is part of our secret sauce that the travel adminstrators love so they can keep an eye on travel costs without having to go through every report or travel request. The problem is that most people do want to stay within their company policy but they don't actually know what the policy is. So in comes the Concur Assistant. We decided to create a bot that you can just ask if something is within your policy. "Can I fly first class?" for instance. Or, "How much can I spend on dinner?".

The Solution

It turns out that SAP just purchased a bot platform so we leveraged that. This was more of a proof of concept since we didn't really have any resources to work on this from our side. We partenered with the labs team to actually create the entire admin portal to enter the questions and answers and refine things once the questions started coming in.

And as this started as just a way to help users answer policy questions, we eventually want to turn it into more of a genral contextual help system. This way if the user is in the middle of booking a flight and they pull up the Assistant, they'll get relevant question right off the bat pertaining to booking airfare. Also, we have hopes of someday personalizing the Assistant so it knows specifically what your personal policy is and not just a generic company policy. We found that for many companies the policy may change from person to person or role to role.

Admin Portal

We could add the question and answer pairs for the proof-of-concept ourselves, but in order to scale we needed to create a place that the admins themselves could maintain their list of questions and answers. We partnered with the Labs team to create the portal. The goal here was to start very simple and build it up once we had the initial concept running. So we had a place for them to add question/answer pairs, a place for them to test the bot to make sure they were getting the answers they expected, and also a place to see the output of all the questions asked.

Metrics

This isn't an exact science. We needed a way to see some metrics on how well the answers were pairing up with the questions asked. We settled on a "did this answer your quetion" prompt after each answer with a "yes" or "no" option. We then showed this on the admin portal as a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" next to every question/answer pair that came in. This way we could determine if we needed to change a mapping if we had a lot of "thumbs down" on a particular answer. It does take a bit of human interaction however, because we found that sometimes the answer didn't line up with the quesiton asked and sometimes people just didn't like the answer to the question. We also added a bit of an analytics section so the admins could see any trends as to which answers were successufl and which ones were not. From there, they could also associate new questions with existing answers and fix anything that wasn't working as expected.