Frictionless customer service at scale for Australia's largest music festival
To support a massive fan base with instant customer service, we developed an on-brand solution that dynamically adapted to customers’ most pending needs.
Australia's most popular music festival.
Splendour in the Grass is Australia’s largest music festival. For the last 20 years, Splendour has brought the world's biggest acts to the North Byron Bay Parklands in NSW. The festival has become infamous for its fast sell-out times, with 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. Inbound messages spike significantly around lineup announcements, ticket release days, and other significant milestones.
Handling high message volume during significant events
Given the cyclical nature of music festivals, it's 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, users will ask questions about the lineup, and after the festival, users will ask questions about lost items. While knowing what to expect is easy, 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 timeframe would've been impossible for the customer service team, and hiring additional staff to assist with these messages would be costly and ineffective. In previous years, this resulted in messages going unanswered, leading to lost sales and unhappy customers.
A fun and dynamic digital personality
As a brand that largely sells to Millennials and Gen Z, ensuring that the Chatbot accurately reflected the brand’s personality was imperative. Working closely with the Splendour team, we created a Chatbot that was informative, fun, and on-brand.
During our research, we discovered that the incoming messages vary dramatically before, during, and after the festival. As such, the Bot had to be able to dynamically adapt as the festival played out.
Before the festival, the Bot focused on ticket sales and promotions; during the festival, the Bot assisted festival-goers and delivered urgent announcements; and after the festival, the Bot assisted with lost items, general enquiries, and promotions for the following year.
- 📩 Targeted mailing list: Splendour now has a hyper-engaged channel to send interactive content directly to its community. A big deal for die-hard Splendour fans.
- 🙋 Always-on support: Splendour festival-goers now have a channel to receive always-on customer service about various aspects of the festival. (No, the lineup still has not been announced.)
- 📈 Messenger-related sales: For the first time, Splendour could leverage its engagement on Facebook Messenger to generate hype and sell tickets.
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