Glasgow’s Riverside Festival 2019 is making use of an interactive Facebook chat bot, developed by Allbot Marketing, to help drive sales and improve customer service.

Riverside is taking place on 25 May 2019 at Glasgow Riverside Museum. It is Scotland’s largest electronic music festival, and comes courtesy of dance music heavyweights Soma and Electric Frog.

The team behind the festival found that too much time was being used responding to enquiries that come through their Facebook page on a daily basis. Directors Dave Clarke and Mark Mackechnie implemented Allbot to help save time, drive sales and easily capture data.

Dom Geraci, Riverside Festival marketing manager, said: “We are excited to be able to implement and utilise for the first time, “Claire” – our brand new Facebook Messenger bot for the Riverside Festival 2019. We are confident that the bot will be fun to use and will be able to answer relevant questions 24/7, as well as helping our audience to obtain clear information leading up to and at the event.”

Allbot Marketing specialise in developing computer programs that are designed for conversational interactions. Users can ask a series of questions that the bot will answer instantaneously, because they have the ability to understand and interpret conversations.

The bot can be programmed to answer frequently asked questions, collate data, schedule appointments and send messages to all customers have interacted with the bot. According to research giant Gartner, chatbots will be involved in 85% of all types of business to customer interactions by 2020.

Tom McEwan, co-founder and director of Allbot Marketing, stated: ‘We are delighted to be involved with RF19. We believe that ‘Claire’ will not only massively reduce time the festival team spend responding to FB messenger enquiries, it will also enhance festival goers RF19 experience.”