Facebook Live Chat Support

Helping people retrieve their Facebook & Instagram accounts through Live Chat support

Background

Early stage discovery phase to envision how Meta could provide customer support to people seeking to regain access their Facebook or Instagram accounts through the medium of a live text chat with customer support agents. 

A design sprint methodology was adopted to create high-fidelity vision prototypes that were used to plan subsequent work for product teams. Exploration of design features like entry points, automated messages and conversational visual elements were produced.

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Since completing this first vision sprint, the Live Chat Support feature has continued to be tested in more countries. In October 2022, Meta noted that they offered this live chat support to one million+ people in nine countries, and are planning to continue testing in 30+ countries globally. 

A first for Meta, this discovery phase allowed these live-chat features to be visualised and threaded together for the first time.

Design manager role

Design Manager working with 4-6 designers from different teams, helping to setup and facilitate a 2 week design sprint. As a Design manager, I co-created the sprint brief, guided the day-to-day activities, and facilitated teams to work together.

First-time collaboration between two design teams

This early exploration phase of Live Chat presented the first opportunity for the newly established Customer Support team to partner with another Meta team. As a Design manager, establishing clear complimentary roles between designers was operationally critical. 

New company design system

Supporting designers to navigate a new company design system. With the customer support experience intending to be a consistent cross-Meta experience, designs were produced using the newly established company design system. This design system was intentionally separate from any individually distinctive Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp design system, challenging the designers to adapt components to this developing design language.

Outcomes

Discovery phase outcome

The outcome of this multi-week design led vision exercise was a prototype & presentation that demonstrated to stakeholders how Live Chat would tangibly look & feel - and how a successful rollout would benefit both users and the company.

This vision sprint enabled further investment to be secured into the next year. 

Post-launch metrics

In the longer term beyond the vision sprint, goals were established around how to measure the success of the Live Chat feature. These included: 

• % recovery rate for churned users

• Time to recover for users

• Average Handling Time for agents

• Other customer perception indicators