The People Behind The Bots — Meredith Schulz
Meredith Schulz is a Senior Conversation Design Manager at LivePerson. Meredith has 15 years experience working with product and engineering teams, to increase user engagement through conversational interfaces, marketing and in-product experiences. We’re super excited to hear Meredith’s personal journey into all things Conversation Design! Let’s get straight into it!
Q1 — What drew you to the Conversational AI industry?
Meredith: One evening in late 2015 I was driving home from work listening to NPR. I heard a story about a startup that launched in a weekend by simply putting a phone number on a landing page that said “text this number to get anything done.” They exploded overnight. After being in the mobile marketing world for 6 years, this was refreshing to me. Why have to download an app when you could just text a business? I immediately went home and researched everything I could about a this new technology called conversational commerce. I was hooked and knew I needed to pivot my career.
Q2 — What skills or transferable skills helped you when entering this space?
Meredith: In my mobile marketing career, I was responsible for retaining app users. I realized I could apply my knowledge of writing push notifications, microcopy, call to actions, and user engagement to conversation design
Q3 — Were there any specific resources, tools, industry experts, that helped you along the way?
Meredith: In 2016 & 2017 there were not many resources on conversation design yet. I found a small growing community in Austin and eventually we started a meet-up group, now called Conversational Collective
I also signed up for free accounts and experimented with tools like Alexa Skills Kit, Apple Business Chat’s sandbox, and Api.ai (now DialogFlow).
After a while, I was able to get freelance jobs working with a few startups and agreed to help with both their marketing and conversational experience. I learned a lot during user testing of my first designs!
I also recognized how UX patterns and UX writing can apply to conversation design, so I started reading several books on that topic. My favourite resource has been Microcopy by Kinneret Yifrah.
Q4 — In a sentence or two tell us what your role entails
Meredith: I manage a conversation design team across a portfolio of consumer brands at LivePerson. We create conversational experiences for Web, SMS, Apple Business Chat, Google’s Business Messages, WhatsApp, Messenger, and several other messaging channels.
Q5 — What do you enjoy most about your role?
Meredith: There’s always something exciting to work on that can make a big impact on any of our accounts.
Q6 — What is the most challenging part of your role?
Meredith: It can be a challenge to balance what’s technically possible against your ideal design solution. Luckily we have several features and tools at LivePerson that help make this easier.
Q7 — What excites you about the future of this industry?
Meredith: As technology improves, the conversational patterns we can create will become layered with even more personalization and contextual understanding. This will build better relationships and trust between brands and consumers. Conversational commerce will become an integral part of personalizing the customer journey over the next few years.
Q8 — What is one piece of advice you would give to other people looking to enter this industry?
Meredith: Get hands-on experience. Work on a side project or volunteer to help design a bot. Test it with your friends/family. You’ll inevitably have learnings to talk about which will help you land your next project, gig or job.
Techires’ takeaways:
- Understanding user engagement can be a very useful skill to apply into conversation design
- You don’t have to have existing experience in this space. Work on your own project to gain experience!
- Don’t be afraid to experiment with free tools, there’s many out there!
Thank you for reading! A special thanks to our guest, Meredith. We really enjoyed hearing Meredith’s insights, and hope you did too! Click here to follow Meredith on LinkedIn!
If you’re keen to hear more insights and advice from industry experts in the Conversational AI space, don’t forget to click the follow button to be notified of future posts!
You can also head over to our socials for more tips and advice from the team at techire ai and if you’re looking for roles within Conversational AI check out our jobs page and website.
And if you’d be interested in taking part in our blog series get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!
Allys Parsons — Conversational AI Recruiter @ Co-Founder @ techire ai
Leigh Smith — Conversational AI Recruiter @ techire ai
