The NSW Department of Fair Trading is a sub-division of DFSI responsible for the administration of consumer protection laws in NSW. They aim to ensure consumers and business alike are treated fairly and equitably in transacting between themselves. As such, a large component of what they do involves informing consumers of their rights and facilitating dispute resolution between the parties.

The Department was interested to explore the use of artificial intelligence (A.I) e.g. chatbots, to ease the burden on its call-centre and facilitate deeper browsing of its website, more relevant content and resources. After running three years of call transcripts through IBM Watson’s AI Suite, we settled on ‘Rental Bond’ disagreements as a topic area to test the use of such technologies. We set ourselves a goal of rapidly iterating and having a prototype in market within 3-4 weeks.

We began with stakeholder workshops involving both internal and external users groups. We explored a number of key areas, including anticipated use cases, implications these would have on key features of the chatbot and particular areas to watch out for – for example, where the legislation is not clear and the content does not provide clear remediation for a particular situation.

This translated directly into a detailed conversation map, where we clearly curated conversations to lead specific users to useful information. This conversation map fed straight into the widely used Facebook chat framework and we ideated improvements over a three week period. We involved both consistent and new user testing cohorts each week to ensure we weren’t ignoring intuitive design requirements. The resulting chatbot was launched within the four-week deadline and is now in market for full testing and rollout across a number of key department content areas.