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At a glance

• Role: Conversation Designer
• Skills: Conversation design, voice and tone, prompt and guardrail design, flow mapping, prototyping in Voiceflow
• Product: Kate, ČSOB's (KBC Group) virtual banking assistant, living inside the SmartBanking mobile app
• Timeframe: 2+ years guiding Kate's design
• Impact: 15,000+ active users · 60% autonomy · 1,200+ knowledge-base entries
• The hard part: Designing a hybrid AI + rule-based system where a sensitive, compliance-heavy task feels warm and human while staying fully auditable </aside>

A banking assistant lives at the exact point where warmth and liability meet.

Overview

Kate is ČSOB's virtual assistant, a friendly companion in the world of digital banking who makes everyday banking feel more personal and natural across the KBC group. She speaks the local language, understands regional banking rules, and helps with everything from a quick balance check to more sensitive service requests. Over two years, I guided her design as she grew from a scripted helper into a companion clients turn to for their everyday banking.

This case study walks through how that experience was designed, and the four artifacts that hold the system together: a brand voice document, a flowchart, a full script, and a working prototype.

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Real work, adapted for a course. Every flow, script line, and design decision here is drawn from real Kate use cases I designed at ČSOB, then reworked and documented as my final deliverable for the UX Content Collective (UXCC) conversation design course.

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The challenge

Digital banking often keeps people at arm's length: functional, yet distant from how customers actually think and feel. Kate's job was to close that distance: to resolve everyday requests independently, with empathy at the core.

But "everyday" spans a wide range. A quick IPPID lookup and a reported-lost card sit on the same conversation surface, with very different stakes. Two pressures shaped every decision:

• Warmth and precision can't trade off against each other. Kate had to sound like a knowledgeable friend, never a form. Yet the moment a card gets blocked or a replacement gets ordered, that same voice has to become fully predictable, with no drift, no rephrasing of compliance text, and no guessing.
• Every message had a hard ceiling. Three lines maximum, one question at a time, options over open text. That constraint had to hold even in the most emotionally loaded moment in the whole script: a customer reporting a lost or stolen card.

The team behind Kate

Kate was a shared effort, carried by many hands. I led conversation and content design, working closely with:

• Two business owners who crafted the initial narratives
• Segment managers, legal, and compliance teams who provided context
• Our development partners in Varna, Bulgaria
• The QA teams who tested every interaction

Our rhythm was set by quarterly PI (Program Increment) Planning sessions, where teams aligned priorities and broke complex challenges into manageable pieces, so design flowed naturally with development cycles and business goals.