Deltic Nightclubs deploy conversational AI with Filament

The Deltic Group is the UK’s largest operator of late night bars and clubs, managing over 60 venues. Its brands include Bar&Beyond, ATIK and PRYZM. Each venue needs to be able to communicate effectively with its consumers, whether this is about upcoming events, special offers or dress codes. Since each venue has its own Facebook page, a Facebook Messenger chatbot was a good solution to provide instant answers to commonly asked questions, 24/7.

Deltic venues have a footfall of 8 million customers per year and the majority of their customers choose to communicate with the venues through social media channels. In total, venues receive 360,000 messages per year; however, due to capacity restraints, 90% of queries are going unanswered. The challenge is further exacerbated by their late-night operating hours, clients either initiate contact while the venues are still closed or during peak traffic periods. Each venue needs to be able to communicate effectively with its consumers, whether this is about upcoming events, special offers or dress codes.

The key challenge was how to manage this at scale, enabling 60 different venues to interact with their clients on venue-specific topics without needing to maintain 60 separate codebases.

To address this challenge, we developed a ‘multi-bot’ solution. Our solution can power 60 conversational agents from one core codebase. Deployed on Facebook Messenger and integrating with Deltic Group’s APIs, the bots provide a unique experience for each of the venues, answering FAQs and up-selling tickets to nightclub events.

Each venue has control over their conversational agent’s content through the Filament Bot Management Portal, allowing the tone of voice and information to be customised.

The custom integration with Deltic’s social media monitoring platform permits smooth human agent handover to the relevant venue’s social media team. Once the team have successfully handled an enquiry, the bot can be reactivated for the user by the click of a button. The functionality to easily switch the bot on or off at an individual user level enables the team to proactively reach out to users over Messenger without having the bot respond unnecessarily.

Facebook Messenger benefits from having very high engagement compared with other marketing channels, this drives an ongoing relationship with each individual customer, using push notifications to inform of future events, driving sales and pulling post-event feedback. We made use of Facebook Messenger webviews to enable users to book tickets for upcoming events directly through the Messenger channel, instead of being redirected to a website, creating a ‘one-channel’ user experience.

Using the multi-bot, Deltic now has a 100% response rate which has increased the flow into the upper portion of the marketing funnel.  The solution has the operational benefit of enhanced customer service without increasing staff costs.

The bot has increased customer engagement through tailored communications and instant responses to user’s questions. Furthermore, these queries can be converted directly into sales through the bot’s ability to up-sell tickets to nightclub events.

“We receive over 360,000 inbound Facebook messages per year at all hours. In our ever changing millenial market, the chatbot is a game changer. Filament harnessed Watson to bring this creative solution to reality.”

Tim Howard, Marketing Director, The Deltic Group