Meet Botzilla: the sassy but friendly virtual agent that stole the show at Slush 2019
Slush is an annual tech event held in Helsinki, Finland that attracts 25,000 attendees from around the world. Comprised of a whos-who of the hottest startups, venture capital firms and tech enthusiasts, the two-day conference (taking place 21-22 November 2019) is the world’s leading startup event and boasts an eclectic, festival-like energy that sets it apart from traditional tech shows.
Challenge
For the 2019 edition, Slush orgranizers were looking to deliver attendees an unparalleled customer service experience that matched the brand’s hip, unique vibe. They needed to satisfy thousands of repetitive attendee queries on everything from program scheduling and ticketing to information about the on-site sauna and the legendary Slush afterparties. All while ensuring that the volunteer support staff weren’t overworked.
Solution
Boost.ai approached Slush organizers with a plan to help: build a conversational AI-powered virtual agent for the event website in just 6 weeks.
Developed using boost.ai’s groundbreaking conversational AI technology, ‘Botzilla’ was designed to answer any and all questions about Slush and assist with over 300 event-specific intents. The highly-scaleable nature of the technology allowed for the virtual agent to be updated in real-time so that new and edge-case responses could be added as they arose over the course of the event.
Additionally, Botzilla took advantage of Automatic Semantic Understanding (ASU), boost.ai’s proprietary deep learning algorithm that helps virtual agents find complicated connections between sentences - even those with multiple intents - and removes dead ends from conversations by eliminating false positives. This facilitated seamless transfer to Slush’s volunteer support staff when Botzilla fielded questions that were outside of its intended scope.
Result
During the week of Slush, Botzilla smashed all expectations and delivered incredible results:
- 10,000+ messages
- 3,500+ conversations
- 90% resolution rate
- Less than 100 conversations transferred to human support
Slush had staffed for 12 volunteer support agents as per the expected volume of traffic based on experience from its previous events. This ended up being an overestimation of resources as Botzilla successfully automated 90% of queries it received across both conference days, freeing up support staff to help with more complex, edge-case inquiries.
“Our volunteer support staff were ready for a high volume of questions from attendees but the virtual agent was so great at assisting it turned out we had drastically over-prepared. Botzilla far exceeded our expectations.” - Santeri Tenhunen, Info Chat Group Lead, Slush