Our chatbot transformed Glastonbury for festivalgoers
With a focus on emerging technology, we explored the capabilities of AI and chatbots to find a way of improving the experience of the Glastonbury Festival for their attendees
Challenge
As loyal Glastonbury followers ourselves, we discussed issues we had experienced at the festival with learning who the 'secret acts' where and when they were performing.
Although the official Glastonbury app and website are updated promptly, sometimes the mobile signal is so poor that people aren’t able to find information quickly enough.
With the growing popularity of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp reaching over 1.2 billion users, and the launch of bots for brands such as Domino’s Pizza and BBC news, we found that a chatbot could provide both high engagement rates and levels of customer satisfaction. As an additional bonus, the data usage for Facebook Messenger is very low, and therefore the chatbot worked quickly and responsively on both 2G and Edge networks.
Adam Greenwood
CEO at the human tech agency
"As we have been learning more about the capabilities of AI and chatbots, we wanted to use this technology to enhance people’s experience of the festival."
What we did
We built a lightweight, simple chatbot using Facebook messenger with very simple functionality that provided quick, up-to-date information for festival-goers.
The chatbot provides information on the various acts and stages. We connected to an open source feed of information that would allow us to serve this information to our users. We also monitored Twitter and rumour feeds to learn who the secret acts might be.
Users were asked to opt-in for updated information on the secret acts, meaning their information was stored and used only to broadcast information on secret acts.
Result
The bot launched the week before the festival and received over 50,000 messages over the course of the weekend.
We had a team of people working throughout the weekend, monitoring the bot to make sure that it was operational and that it wasn’t getting asked questions that we hadn’t anticipated.
Our research paid off as the most popular questions were either “When is [act] playing” or “Who is playing on [stage]”.
However, the bot was asked some very unusual questions; some which we quickly programmed it to auto-answer, and some that we answered ourselves - cheap beer and weather being the second most popular questions. We have plans to continue our learning with this particular bot and use its knowledge to enhance more festivals in the future.