The Miami Dolphins, well known for football, also own Hard Rock Stadium, which hosts a wide range of sports and entertainment events. With so much going on, the Dolphins need to handle a high volume of requests for information about events and facilities. To free its service agents from repeatedly answering routine questions, the organization used Microsoft Power Virtual Agents to build a chatbot that’s now available at all times on its web properties. Multi-authoring capabilities make it easy for subject matter experts to update the bot themselves so that visitors always get current, accurate information. So far, the bot has handled more than 40,000 conversations and has successfully resolved 97 percent of them, leaving the remainder to service agents, who now have more time to focus on delivering exceptional service and increasing ticket sales.
The Miami Dolphins give fans the information they want when they want it with Power Virtual Agents
Providing a great fan experience across many events
The Miami Dolphins are best known as a professional football team, but the organization has a broader entertainment portfolio thanks to its ownership of Hard Rock Stadium, where the Dolphins play. Although football is the main business driver, the stadium hosts a variety of other events, including college football, concerts, international soccer games, and the Miami Open tennis tournament.
As a result of the ownership arrangement, the Miami Dolphins organization controls the holistic fan experience, from the ticket counter to the action on the field. And it aims to make that experience as frictionless as possible at every touch point.
“It’s important that we meet our customers where they want to be when they communicate with us,” says Kim Rometo, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for the Miami Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium. “Whether it’s a phone call, a web page, or an email, we prioritize an omnichannel approach that gets them the information they want when and how they want it.”
The organization has skilled customer service and sales staff who answer inquiries about tickets and events, and they strive to deliver a highly personalized experience with each interaction. But the Miami Dolphins noticed that these employees had to spend much of their time handling routine inquiries for basic information, giving them less time to provide that individualized service.
“They were dealing with questions whose answers were readily available on our website, but people weren’t finding that information easily,” says Maxwell Stiss, Director, Delivery, Information Technology for the Miami Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium. “We wanted to help our customers find what they need faster and free up our employees’ time to focus on more complex queries.”
This situation became even more of an issue for service and sales agents when COVID-19 created uncertainty about games and events, which led to a massive rise in call volume at a time when staffing was a challenge due to workplace restrictions. By that point, however, the Miami Dolphins had a valuable ally: Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, part of Microsoft Power Platform.
“With Power Virtual Agents, we’ve taken a lot of the manual work out of customer service and empowered ourselves to provide amazing experiences for the people coming here.”
Maxwell Stiss, Director, Delivery, Information Technology, Miami Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium
Building a chatbot to deliver consistent, accurate information
Using Power Virtual Agents, the Miami Dolphins quickly and easily built and deployed an intelligent, scalable chatbot for customer interactions. Website visitors can type into the bot the same way that they might text a friend. The bot picks up on key words and phrases and activates the proper answer or asks for clarification. During the call center’s open hours, the bot gives customers the option to smoothly switch the conversation to a live agent, if necessary, but the bot doesn’t stop working when the humans do.
“Because our bot is online 24 hours a day, no matter when questions come in, they’re answered immediately,” says Ryan Davenport, Vice President of Ticket Sales and Service for the Miami Dolphins. “That 24/7 availability is very important to us and to our fans.”
The organization also appreciates its ability to put control of the bot’s conversational content into the hands of subject matter experts. “We love that Power Virtual Agents doesn’t require a developer to add and update content,” says Rometo. “Our IT team put the framework in place, but from then on, employees from each part of the business can continually decide how the bot should answer questions related to their function.”
Using Power Virtual Agents, employees can promptly update bot conversation trees through an easy-to-use graphical interface to account for new information. And storing the knowledge in this centralized location helps ensure that fans get consistent and correct answers. The bot currently provides standardized replies to questions on everything from ticket sales and game status to lost and found items and directions to Hard Rock Stadium.
Given the range of employees contributing to the bot, an important feature of Power Virtual Agents has been its multi-authoring capabilities. “We have numerous employees building, enhancing, and testing conversations at the same time,” says Rometo. “We can be a lot more productive and efficient with multi-authoring in Power Virtual Agents. It becomes a real team effort.”
The Dolphins anticipate that they will make even more use of multi-authoring as the bot grows. For example, the organization might enhance the bot by adding multiple languages. With multi-authoring, subject matter experts with foreign language proficiency can work alongside colleagues who use English. They can create and update bot conversations together, maintaining consistency in the information shared across the multilingual audience.
Looking back on a successful first year of deployment
The Miami Dolphins began their work with Power Virtual Agents before COVID-19 became a concern, and then they expedited the actual deployment across all of their web properties to account for the call volume spikes as the pandemic threw daily life into disarray. The bot went live in May 2020, in time to support the Dolphins as they experimented with new ways to offer fun, positive experiences, even if fans couldn’t sit in the stands for football games.
“We started holding drive-in movie nights, and we also made Hard Rock Stadium into a COVID-19 testing site and then a vaccination site,” says Rometo. “The chatbot was able to answer fans’ questions about these events, even as information rapidly changed, which freed us up to focus on more productive and creative tasks without the need to add extra staff.”
The Dolphins had anticipated that the bot might handle 10,000 inquiries in its first year, but the actual volume has been more than 40,000. And the bot has exceeded expectations for successful resolutions. “The chatbot has answered about 97 percent of our site visitors’ questions,” says Rometo. “At the end of every conversation, the person can rate the experience, and the sentiment has been very positive.”
Using Microsoft Power BI, the Miami Dolphins gain deep insights into bot usage through a variety of reports that the organization monitors regularly. And it connected Power Virtual Agents to its Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service implementation, making it easy to track fans’ information to better understand their inquiries and follow up as appropriate. The Miami Dolphins have used Omnichannel for Customer Service to configure intent-based routing rules for the Power Virtual Agents bot so that visitors can connect to appropriate personnel when conversations escalate to a live agent. Using Omnichannel for Customer Service also provides agents with contextual customer identification, real-time notification, integrated communication, and agent productivity tools to ensure effective customer interactions.
Overall, the Miami Dolphins have been grateful to have the bot to help navigate a difficult year. “The amount of traffic we would have received through phone lines and email would have been a challenge for our staff to handle,” says Stiss. “With Power Virtual Agents, we’ve taken a lot of the manual work out of customer service and empowered ourselves to provide amazing experiences for the people coming here.”
Find out more about the Miami Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
“We love that Power Virtual Agents doesn’t require a developer to add and update content. … Employees from each part of the business can continually decide how the bot should answer questions related to their function.”
Kim Rometo, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Miami Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium
Explore related stories
Fuel innovation with Microsoft
Talk to an expert about custom solutions
Follow Microsoft