Frictionless  customer service  at scale

Splendour in the Grass is one of Australia’s biggest music festivals. For the last 20 years, Splendour has brought the worlds biggest acts to the North Byron Bay Parklands in NSW. The festival has become infamous for fast sell out times, with the 42,500 tickets sold in 2019 selling out in just 6 hours.

Due to the popularity of the festival, the Splendour Facebook page receives heavy message volume. With inbound messages spiking around lineup announcements, ticket release days and other significant milestones.

Given the cyclical nature of music festivals, it is reasonably straightforward to predict what messages users are going to send and when the volume is going to spike. For example, when the lineup is released, user will ask questions about the lineup and after the festival, users will ask questions about lost items. While being aware of what to expect is straightforward, handling these messages at scale is not.

In the 24-hours following the announcement of the 2020 lineup, the Splendour Facebook page received messages from over 400 unique users. Handling these users over such a short period of time would have been an impossible task for the customer service team, and hiring additional staff to assist with these messages would be costly and ineffective. For previous years, this has resulted in messages from users going unanswered, resulting in lost sales and unhappy customers.

As a brand that largely sells to Millenials and Gen-Z, ensuring that the chatbot accurately reflected the brand’s personality was imperative. Working closely with the Splendour team, we were able to create a chatbot that was informative, fun and on brand.

During our research, we discovered that the messages that the page recieves varies dramatically before, during and after the festival. As such, the bot had to be able to dynamically update as the festival plays out.

Prior to the festival the bot focused on ticket sales and promotions, during the festival the bot assisted people at the festival and with urgent announcements and after the festival the bot assited with lost items general enquiries and promotions for the following year