The Virtual Zone strategy

To create Lisa we used virtual agent technology (VA), this new online customer service solution enables a company to provide a high quality and consistent service 24-hours a day, seven days a week.

Lisa has been programmed to understand the context of users' questions using 'natural language' to 'converse', engage and interact with customers. The VA technology uses a sophisticated word and phrase pattern recognition system that matches pre-programmed responses in the knowledge base with questions typed in by users. This creates the sensation of communicating with a 'real' person.

We needed to ensure that 'Lisa' was able to field questions about any aspect of rail travel irrespective of the user's knowledge and our VA technology enables us to analyse transcripts of user conversations with Lisa. This has enabled us to improve the quality of Lisa's responses. In addition considerable care was taken to ensure that all the answers used the right tone of voice and fitted with the NRE brand.

As well as making the conversations as personable as possible we also wanted to have an attractive interface that would mean customers enjoyed returning to the site whenever they had a question. To help us with this we engaged specialist partners Fortune Cookie to engineer a flash movie solution and a minimal weight interface to make Lisa 'human'. We think this was the first time Flash movie technology has been used in this way.

Accessibility and usability were always key aspects of the design and we involved NRE staff with the development of LISA from the beginning and they in turn tested out the thinking with their service user groups.

By the time we were able to go live, Lisa could help with every type of user enquiry from helping them choose the best ticket for their journey, to telling them what facilities are available at their local railway station.

Lisa went live on 10 July 2007 on the site help page at http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/site_help/ as an alternative source of information for travellers who were already seeking help with their enquiry. A few months later Lisa was added to the home page http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/

We regularly review the conversations that Lisa has with people, to identify and fill gaps in her knowledge.