Eno, Your Capital One Assistant

Helping customers to protect their finances, shop safer online, and manage their accounts

Overview

The idea of Eno started with a simple SMS alert that Capital One sent to customers asking them to “confirm” or “deny” a purchase; the alert was not built to understand anything else. And yet, a surprisingly high number of responses from customers included something other than those two words. Customers sent questions, explanations, and even emojis. It became clear that there was a desire to engage with Capital One conversationally.

Eno by Capital One was the banking industry’s first, natural language, SMS chatbot. It uses a natural language processor to understand the different ways that customers text about their money. Since its launch in 2017, Eno has evolved into a multichannel solution with numerous capabilities.

The challenge

Joining the Eno team in 2018, I was not sure what to expect - what does it mean to be a UI/UX designer creating experiences for a conversational interface? That in itself was a challenge; however, I learned a lot along the way about content design, character development, and scaling products across a large company. With a focus on spending insights, my team and I were challenged to imagine: how might we anticipate customer needs and show up proactively to help? With that said, our business goals were to reduce customer call volume and build trust and loyalty in Eno, all while scaling to meet our customers where they were.

Design process

I worked closely every day with a content designer and a product manager. Together, we worked to kick off new initiatives where Eno could show up to help customers. These initiatives came from either discovery research or existing Capital One experiences that we redesigned to come from Eno. Our process involved first meeting to align on goals and intent. Then we would typically move into wireframes and content drafts, attending peer reviews and stakeholder reviews, and then finally working with engineering to launch and QA. Throughout this process, we were often running discovery research to understand where Eno could be the most helpful to its users.

I also focused a lot on scaling Eno across the enterprise. This involved thinking about where Eno could show up if the sky was the limit. During this time I led and participated in a handful of design sprints and workshops, partnering with designers from other areas of Capital One to sketch, quickly iterate and build off of each others ideas, and present to stakeholders.

Solution

Eno is Capital One’s virtual assistant, looking out for customers and their money through card security, spending insights, and 24/7 chat. Eno’s spending insights help customers track where their money is going by monitoring their credit card account and sending useful insights when it spots things that might be of interest. Some examples of the insights we have created are: free trials, generous tip, recurring charges, credit back, card decline, and charitable donations. Customers interact with these insights now on several platforms including Capital One’s mobile app and push notifications, Capital One’s desktop website, text messages, and email.

Want to learn more about Eno?