Tom Whitfield
Senior Conversation Designer
Bristol, United Kingdom
Summary
Conversation designer with 6 years shaping support and banking assistants, most recently owning the voice and flow of an assistant handling 40,000 conversations a week. Cut containment failures by a third by redesigning how the assistant admits it does not know.
Experience
Senior Conversation Designer · Merricks Bank
Apr 2023 – Present
- Own the conversational design of a customer assistant handling 40,000 conversations weekly across app and web.
- Reduced failed containments by 34% by redesigning fallback and escalation — most failures were the assistant guessing rather than admitting uncertainty.
- Wrote the tone and persona guidelines now used by four product teams, including how the assistant behaves when wrong.
- Run fortnightly conversation reviews with support agents, turning transcripts into concrete design changes.
Conversation Designer · Fern & Co Digital
Sep 2020 – Mar 2023
- Designed dialogue flows for retail and utility clients across voice and chat, from first sketch to production copy.
- Introduced conversational prototyping, cutting review cycles from weeks to days.
Education
BA Linguistics, First Class
University of Bristol · 2015 – 2018
Certifications
Skills
Conversation Design: Dialogue Flows · Persona & Tone · Fallback Design · Escalation Design · Sample Dialogues
Research: Transcript Analysis · Usability Testing · Containment Metrics · Intent Analysis
AI Fluency: Prompt Design · LLM Assistants · RAG · Guardrails