Using AI to Improve Product Teams’ Customer Empathy

During customer conversations, it is important to know both what questions to ask at any point during the development cycle, and how to ask them. Asking the right questions to capture rich, accurate, and relevant customer feedback is not easy, and professionally-trained researchers cannot be a part of every customer conversation. To scale out researchers’ knowledge, we built an artificial intelligence system, the VIVID whisper-bot, trained on three theories: the Hypothesis Progression Framework (contextual research questions for each product development phase), the VIVID grammar framework (asking who, what, why, how, where, how much, and when type questions to recreate rich stories), and the syntactical structure of biased and leading questions. The whisper-bot listens in on a customer conversation, highlights customers’ key verbalization (e.g., pain points using the product), and suggests follow-up interview questions (e.g., removing bias or enriching a story). It thereby encourages good interview practices for everyone, which we believe will increase empathy on product development teams, and lead to improvements in the products’ user experience.