gther case study
gther transforms event registration with Sendbird AI chatbot
Introduction
gther is a B2B event management platform built to reduce the stress associated with organizing conferences, events, meetings, and tradeshows - whether live, virtual or hybrid. Because communication to and among attendees is a critical piece of event engagement, gther partnered with Sendbird to leverage its Chat API and AI chatbot to embed two-way and autonomous communications in its platform.
Supporting conversations in the event app
A significant benefit and appeal of attending events is the people you meet and network with. For virtual and hybrid events, event organizers need a way to connect the audience and the speakers. That’s why gther incorporated a way to facilitate conversations between sales teams of exhibitors and delegates to build community and drive lead gen at events. gther used Sendbird’s Chat API to make a seamless chat interface in its event app and hybrid platform to support both public and private online chats. “Our event app uses the same chat system as our hybrid platform, so it's all powered by Sendbird Chat,” says Nick Rosier, Managing Director of gther. “It shows the versatility of Sendbird as we use Flutter for the app and Vue.js for the web platform, and it works seamlessly.”
Boosting event registration with AI chatbot
The success of events is measured by the number of attendees, so event managers closely track the conversion rates of registration page visitors to event registrants. Event registration can be a challenging process for both event organizers and attendees. Event attendees often wait until the last minute to register, making it difficult for organizers to plan the event. Organizers want a way to nudge visitors to register on the event website, while visitors often have many questions about the event before committing to registering for it.
“Typically, you have a couple of event managers behind the scenes desperately answering emails and inquiries submitted at the last minute right before an event. And nine times out of ten, the questions answered are contained in the website itself, but people haven't found it,” says Rosier. “And so we figured an AI chatbot could handle 70% of those simple queries to give that time back to event managers.”
If visitors to the event registration page drop off, it could be because they lack the information they need to commit to attending the event. Rosier and his team hypothesized that an AI chatbot could provide the information required to help convert these visitors. Hence, gther’s product team decided to embed a customized AI chatbot experience into its event management solution using Sendbird’s UI Kit. The team named the AI event assistant GeniePT.
Using Sendbird to build an AI chatbot
gther’s developer team first thought about building the AI chatbot using their ChatGPT subscription with access to Open AI’s APIs, but then learned about Sendbird’s AI chatbot solution. Since gther’s developer team was familiar with Sendbird for its Chat SDK, when the team learned about the release of Sendbird AI chatbot, they jumped on it with the idea of developing the first AI-powered event assistant.
"Sendbird was a nice option for building our AI chatbot because there is great documentation, the platform is easy to build upon, and our developers are already comfortable with it. We looked at other solutions, but there was a real sort of plus for us using Sendbird because it meant we didn’t have to learn another code base. Having access to the GitHub repos was invaluable because that was just like keys to the castle in a way. We could get the AI chatbot up and running in just one day."
Nick Rosier, Sr. Managing Director at gther
During the implementation, gther’s team ensured the AI chatbot's responses were accurate and contextually relevant. The team had to train the bot to handle various inquiries and maintain the balance between automated and human interaction to ensure a personal touch. Rosier claims that Sendbird’s dashboard made the process of training and fine-tuning the bot relatively easy. “It's super easy to put a few conditions in the system prompt to make sure the chatbot speaks in their voice and doesn't answer off-topic questions and things like that. Then, the AI chatbot becomes an expert in that specific event, or even products and services that that client might be offering as part of that event.”
How gther trained its AI chatbot
gther tweaked the starting system prompt to keep the AI chatbot on topic. The team instructed the system to limit the response length to a few sentences and not answer topics unrelated to the event. Initially, gther found that the AI chatbot would go off topic. “We asked the bot to tell us about cats and the chatbot would answer about cats, but then interestingly end with, ‘But I’m an event assistant and should focus on events, so can you ask me something about that?’ This was cute in a way, so it didn’t bother us,” laughed Rosier.
Through trial and error, the gther team learned to instruct the bot to invite users to register using the registration link after every second question they ask. “It acts as a proactive salesperson as much as it answers questions. Otherwise you can go into a black hole of Q&A and never convert that user to a registrant. Event registration conversions are what we are ultimately after,” says Rosier.
Measuring the performance of the AI chatbot
gther’s team leveraged the analytics available in Sendbird's dashboard to monitor chats and gain insights into user interactions. “We love the analytics available in Sendbird’s dashboard. It’s great to get stats on usage across the day and then process the data to find trends,” states Rosier. “That's where we can add value for our event manager clients. Not having to build all that ourselves was a massive time saver for our team.”
Benefits of Sendbird’s AI chatbot as an event assistant
The implementation of Sendbird's AI chatbot brought several critical benefits to gther:
Process efficiencies in registration: The automation of common inquiries and registration steps through the AI chatbot streamlined the process, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy. The efficiency and user engagement have seen notable enhancements, contributing to higher satisfaction rates among event attendees.
Improved productivity: The AI chatbot saves event managers several hours per week leading up to answering basic questions, allowing them to focus more on planning and preparing for the event itself.
Increased user engagement: gther’s AI chatbot facilitated more interactive and responsive communication with event attendees, enhancing their experience from registration to event completion.
Analytics and insights for process optimizations: With Sendbird's analytics, gther gained valuable insights into user behavior, preferences, and engagement levels, allowing for data-driven decisions to refine the event registration process further.
“Our AI chatbot has already been used for 15 events and we’ve seen the number of conversations across those events in the triple digits, so we know people are actively using the AI chatbot. The usage is significant relative to the size of the events the AI chatbot is servicing. The AI chatbot is taking a non-trivial amount of work off the desks of really busy event managers,” explains Rosier.
Innovating the events industry with generative AI
gther's unique implementation of Sendbird's AI chatbot represents a forward-thinking approach to event management, prioritizing efficiency, user experience, and data-driven decision-making. gther’s GeniePT demonstrates the potential of AI in transforming the event industry. “The first time we showed the AI chatbot being used as an event assistant at ETL Vegas, people who saw it were stunned,” recalls Rosier. “They had never seen anything like it, so it was fun for us to showcase something so innovative." Create a free custom AI chatbot today with Sendbird. No coding is required!
Amazon Bedrock and Amazon OpenSearch, provided by AWS, are the core components of Sendbird's Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) model, which alone delivers 96% accuracy. Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWS native services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.