Situation
In peak season the mine welcomes over 200 000 visitors a month, and the Reservations and Information Department answers about 900 enquiries a day. Roughly a third concern tickets; the rest are requests for guidance, tour schedules and details of the offer.
The marketing team wanted a tool that answers tourists outside hotline hours, keeps one communication standard and helps shorten queues at the ticket counters by pointing people to online tickets.
Implementation
Within three weeks eight virtual assistants went live, split by topic and language: two virtual guides (Polish and English) for the tourist routes, two for conference and event organisers, two for the Health Resort and two for guests of the Grand Sal Hotel.
The knowledge was vast: regulations, price lists, route descriptions, safety rules, history and geology. The real challenge was the rule structure:
- Many routes, many languages: the Tourist Route runs in eight languages, the Miners' Route in two, each with its own schedule.
- Individual versus group tours, with different capacity limits and booking conditions.
- School trips with separate educational packages and preferred entry times.
- Packages and discounts: family tickets, routes combined with the Graduation Tower, tours with meals or concerts.
The first versions got lost in this thicket of exceptions. The ChatLab team and the mine's Marketing Department met daily, testing dialogues and refining the rules. Today the bot recognises the route, the tour language and the type of visit, and points to the right schedule and tariff.
Result
By July and August the bots served over 140 unique users a day, five questions each on average, which is 17% of daily information enquiries. Every third question arrives after 18:00, when the hotline is closed and the bot handles everything.
- Conversations grew almost fourfold in four months: 1 200 in May, 4 600 in July.
- Guests from 25 countries talked to the bots in 20 languages.
- Sessions that included a chat lasted almost three times longer (17 min 16 s) than sessions without one (7 min 25 s).
- In 69.3% of sessions with a chat a key event followed: a purchase, a catalogue download, a contact form or a price list. For other sessions it was 42.9%.
Information and reservation staff now focus on organised groups and visitors with special needs. For the mine the project also fits its strategy of opening cultural heritage with new technology.
