World Surf League Bot
Idea
The World Surf League team is passionate about surfing and wanted to deliver the best performances to their fans by creating a chatbot. The bot is dedicated to all things surfing-related and is especially focused on their awesome year-round surfing events across the globe.
Discovery
Surfers are very interested in what happens in the Surfing Universe. The first thing that pops up when a user enters the FAQ chatbot is the offer to subscribe to notifications about live events and receive a personal digest based on their subscriptions list. This is the easiest way for a user to be notified of the content and events that are within their interests.
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Users are also able to search for their favorite athletes directly by entering their search query in Facebook Messenger.
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WSL cares about personalizing their chatbot experience. Despite the fact that the bot is made in English, half of the flow is written in Portuguese: if you ask “Você é um bot?”, the FAQ chatbot answers “Sim, sou o bot da WSL!”.
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The Help Card is another valuable feature. It would help you if you are new to the world of chatbots and feel a bit lost with this new technology; or if you would like to learn more about the things the bot is capable of.
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Surfers are expressive, that’s why we made the WSL chatbot emojis-friendly. Send your favourite emojis to check out its cute responses in the surfer style.
To make the WSL FAQ chatbot/user experience even more engaging a custom game was developed. Everyone from surf fans to professional athletes can check their knowledge of waves.
What We Created
WSL FAQ chatbot was built on the Chatfuel platform. Google Site Search plugin was set up in the bot to allow users to search for athletes bios by entering their search queries directly in Facebook Messenger. Customized RSS feeds were generated to deliver information about schedules and events, latest news and WSL athletes list. Users were also invited to subscribe to notifications about live events and receive personalized digest based on their subscriptions list.
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Client
World Surf League -
Duration
3 weeks -
Team size
6 people -
Platform
Facebook Messenger, Chatfuel -
Industry
Social Media, Surfing
Technology
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Chatfuel platform
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Facebook
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Flask
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Messenger platform
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Python
Chatfuel platform Facebook Flask Messenger platform Python
Quality Assurance
Master’s comment
The FAQ chatbot for WSL is probably the coolest bot for surfers ever. Did you see their videos? The process of testing this chatbot was also really awesome. We created the “Name the Wave” game and as QA I had to play the game many times ;) Also we performed usual functional and non-functional testing. We gathered and analyzed data everywhere we could get to prepare for performance and load testing. We were following Facebook Messenger Platform Guidelines and Usability to make the interaction journey with a bot as smooth as possible for users.
Outcomes
WSL FAQ chatbot launch has been a huge success with over 4K active users within a week after the release date and 100-140 new users checking out the bot daily. User retention rates are great as well staying at 19.6% on the fifth day of the bot performance. Building the WSL chatbot has been a challenging and exciting experience for the MOC chatbot development team. It was released according to schedule and successfully met all objectives. As a result, besides its fresh and cheerful communication style and positive attitude, the WSL chatbot stands out from the crowd with its engaging features.
Master’s comment
Viktoriia Tymoshchuk — Chatbot Product Manager