Human-AI Interaction

Case Study: UNDERSTANDING ACCOUNTANT NEEDS FOR AI CHAT EXPERIENCE

• The Problem: In October 2024, BILL released a beta experience of BILL Assistant - a chat experience designed to support common questions for customers. The scope of future development needed prioritization and recommendations for providing value to customers.

• Why does it matter? Providing answers using self-service tools, such as AI chat experiences, may offer BILL the advantage of reducing customer support calls and, for customers, of speeding up the time it takes to find an answer and potentially reducing the outreach from clients to the accountants who serve their businesses. Reducing this outreach to accountants saves them time and effort, allowing them to focus more deeply on their job.

• Approach: 

  • Identify and recruit a panel of accountants from high-value firms to provide multi-session interview feedback on the development progress of BILL Assistant.

• Insights: 

  • Accountants emphasized that the efficiency gain of using a chat agent for their tasks was not a given - they are product experts who do not want to take the time to type a request when they know exactly how to execute it. They saw an opportunity for client access, however.

  • Clients likely require access to account-level questions (e.g., who are my top vendors?) and support materials (e.g., How do I reset my password?) in the same chat experience. 

• Impact:

  • Influenced prioritization of combining account-level questions with access to support documentation, which impacted the development of a new (2026) chat support agent. This agent has demonstrated a significant increase in self-service rate from about 16% to over 30%. This saves customers time and saves BILL money by requiring fewer customer support hours.