Case Study
LA Zoo Reopens Its Doors and Relaunches their AI-Powered Virtual Assistant
Summary
We launched a partnership in February 2019 with The Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens (LA Zoo), which receives nearly 1.8 million visitors per year and is owned and operated by the City of Los Angeles, covering 133 acres of land. In February 2021, we helped LA Zoo relaunch its AI-powered virtual assistant to help reduce the call volume to zoo staff and inform guests about new policies and operating procedures to ensure a safe and enjoyable zoo experience.
Challenge
LA Zoo reopened its doors to guests in February 2021, and in anticipation of the increased volume of guest questions, they relaunched their Satisfi Labs AI-powered virtual assistant.
LA Zoo was seeing a rapid increase in customer service calls and with questions surrounding newly changed protocols, their limited staff needed assistance keeping up with the inquiries. Additionally, reopening led to an increased demand for ticket reservations, so it was imperative that the solution also communicated important arrival information to guests to ensure they felt safe and prepared to return to the zoo.
Solution
To ensure they could meet the increase in guest questions and answer them sufficiently, we provided a relaunched virtual assistant with AZA specific knowledge to answer a variety of inquiries that had never been seen before. With a reopening guide surfaced in the welcome message and the assistant deployed across multiple channels, LA Zoo was about to quickly create comfortability as customers planned visits. The scaled communication made it an efficient way to ensure visitors arrived at LA Zoo with timed ticketing reservations and were adequately prepared for new operating procedures and new features to expect upon returning.
Results
Since relaunching in February, our AI-powered virtual assistant saved the LA Zoo staff the equivalent of over 47 weeks of work. Also during this time, the LA Zoo virtual assistant has seen a 110% increase in the number of daily active users. Each visitor asked the virtual assistant 2.56 questions on average.
Providing immense help to customer service staff, more than half (55%) of all questions are about Ticketing, and of these ticketing questions, 26% of those questions are requests for Membership information.
%
Increase In Daily Active Users
%
Of All Questions Related to Ticketing
%
Of Ticketing Questions Related to Membership Information
Staff Member Work Weeks Saved
“Despite being closed for an extended period of time last year, our guests have been eager to come back and learn about the hundreds of species that our zoo is home to, and Satisfi Labs’ virtual assistant ensures they’re prepared for their visit with the most up-to-date information. We’re also thrilled to be able to understand insights about what our visitors care about the most; as membership information is a top inquiry topic. We discovered that they weren’t just eager to come back once, but want to continue coming back to create memorable experiences”
Kait Hilliard
VP of Marketing and Communications, GLAZA