Earlier this year, Paul Cutsinger, Evangelist at Amazon Alexa, joined a team of developers and designers from Capital One at SXSW in Austin to launch the new Capital One skill for Alexa. The launch of the new skill garnered national attention, as Capital One was the first company to give customers the ability to interact with their credit card and bank accounts through Alexa-enabled devices. This week at the Amazon Developer Education Conference in NYC, Capital One announced another industry first by expanding the skill to enable its customers to access their auto and home loan accounts through Alexa.

"The Capital One skill for Alexa is all part of our efforts to help our customers manage their money on their terms – anytime and anywhere," said Ken Dodelin, Vice President, Digital Product Management, Capital One. “Now, you can access in real time all of your Capital One accounts—from credit cards to bank accounts to home and auto loans—using nothing but your voice with the Capital One skill.”

The skill is one of the top-rated Alexa skills, 4.5/5 stars, with 47 reviews. It enables Capital One customers to stay on top of their credit card, auto loan, mortgage and home equity accounts by checking their balance, reviewing recent transactions, or making payments, as well as get real-time access to checking and savings account information to understand their available funds.

 “Capital One has a state of the art technology platform that allows us to quickly leverage emerging technologies, like Alexa." Scott Totman, Vice President of Digital Products Engineering, Capital One said. “We were excited about the opportunity to provide a secure, convenient, and hands-free experience for our customers.”

Building the Skill

To bring the new skill to life, the Capital One team – comprised of engineers, designers, and product managers – kicked off a two-phase development process.

“Last summer a few developers started experimenting with Echo devices, and, ultimately, combined efforts to scope out a single feature: fetching a customer’s credit card balance. That exercise quickly familiarized the team with the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and helped them determine the level of effort required to produce a full public offering,” said Totman. “The second phase kicked off in October and involved defining and building the initial set of skill capabilities, based on customer interviews and empathy based user research. Less than six months later we launched the first version of the Capital One skill for Alexa.”

The team also spent a lot of time finding the right balance between customers’ need for both convenience and security. In the end, Capital One worked with Amazon to strike the right balance and gave customers the option of adding a four-digit pin in order to access the skill and provide an additional layer of security. The pin can be changed or removed at the customer’s discretion.

“The Alexa Skills Kit is very straightforward. However, it is evolving quickly, so developers need to pay close attention to online documentation, webinars, and other learning opportunities in order to stay on top of new features and capabilities as they are released,” Totman said.

Finding the Right Voice

“We dedicated a lot of time to getting the conversation right from the start,” said Totman. “This meant we not only had to anticipate the questions customers were going to ask, but also how they were going to ask them.”

This was a really interesting challenge for Capital One’s design team.  In order to make the skill feel like a personalized conversation, the team had to identify exactly where and how to inject personality and humor, while carefully considering customers’ priorities and the language they use to discuss finances.

“A lot goes into making sure our customers get what they expect from our personality, as well as what they expect from Alexa’s personality. That becomes especially visible when injecting humor, because what looks great on paper doesn’t always transition to the nuance of voice inflection, cadence, or the context of banking,” said Stephanie Hay, head of Capital One’s content strategy team. “But that’s the joy of design > build > iterate in a co-creation method; product, design, and engineering design the conversation together, hear Alexa say it, react, iterate, test it with actual customers, iterate further, and then get it to a point we all feel excited about.”

Looking Ahead

Capital One’s Alexa skill represents just the starting lineup of features. Capital One’s team continues to test, learn, and explore new features by focusing on customer needs and continually refining the experience.

“As customers become more familiar using voice technologies, we anticipate growing demand for feature capabilities, as well as increased expectations regarding the sophistication of the conversation.” Totman said. “With voice technologies, we get to learn firsthand how customers are attempting to talk to us, which allows us to continually refine the conversation.”

“The possibilities with the Alexa Skills Kit are nearly endless, but I advise developers to be very thoughtful about the value of their skill,” said Totman. “Leveraging voice-activated technology is only worthwhile if you can clearly define how your solution will go above and beyond your existing digital offerings.”  

Stay tuned to part two to learn how Capital One built their Alexa skill and added new capabilities.

Share other innovative ways you’re using Alexa in your life. Tweet us @alexadevs with hashtag #AlexaDevStory.

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