Village Cinemas, part of Village Roadshow Group, is one of Australia’s largest cinema operators. Village plays movies for its patrons on 704 screens across 74 sites in all Australian states and territories.
Riley + Village Roadshow: Building real-time, voice responsive phone chatbots in the cloud
The challenge
Village Cinema's runs a ‘1300 VMOVIE’ business phone service for movie session times.
Previously, when users dialled the phone service for session times, they were presented with a recorded message. Customers were then required to wait for their cinema of interest to be announced, before making a two-digit selection in their keypads to communicate with the existing bot. This degraded the user experience; customers listened as tens of cinemas were read out by the bot.
On their end, Village staff were required to generate recordings for each session time manually at all 74 cinemas each day. Updating the recording was a costly and time-consuming task.
Riley's cost and time-efficient solution
In succession to Riley's chatbot solution was a drastic 30 hour (per week) reduction of laborious manual data entry for staff, in addition to streamlining the customer experience from upwards of 10 minutes down to 30 seconds.
When the phone service is dialled, customers are now prompted to state their required cinema directly to the chatbot. The system then sources and responds with real-time information from the Village Cinemas website API. It further assists the customer by now indicating sold-out session times.
Village was able to reduce the costs of running the service, receiving an immediate positive ROI, whilst simultaneously improving customer satisfaction.
