Chatbots conquer the Westfalenhallen

Scaling AI chatbots

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The Westfalenhallen Group is one of the largest trade fair and congress organizers in the region and, with the Westfalenhalle, has been a top location for concerts and shows for decades - for organizers and visitors alike. Every year, 200 events in the B2C and B2B environment, including leading international trade fairs such as InterTabac and Jagd & Hund with up to 77,000 participants and a further 1,000 congress events, generate an annual turnover of 60 million euros and are therefore an important tourism factor.

1. Initial situation

Westfalenhallen is one of the pioneers in its sector, having used chatbots early on to reduce the workload of its employees and further improve the service for trade fair visitors and organisers. Following the takeover of the original provider, a change of platform became necessary in order to be able to continue to flexibly implement the individual requirements for chatbots. The aim was to implement a scalable concept that could take into account both generalised questions for a central chatbot of the corporate group and specific content for individual trade fair chatbots. Kauz.ai prevailed in the selection process with its user-friendly chatbot solution, aiStudio, in combination with close customer support.

2. Challenge

The positive experiences with chatbots have gradually led to an expansion of automated communication, which should be taken even further and implemented in multiple languages using generative AI. The variety of topics and the number of trade fairs require further development of the content by creating synergies between the individual chatbots.

3. Implementation

The content and organisational complexity of the chatbot deployment is stringently managed by the scalable multi-client system. All chatbots access a central database for general information and thus benefit from the content enhancements of each individual chatbot, which can be flexibly activated or deactivated. This approach also applies at configuration level: every trade fair chatbot benefits from improvements in prompting and model adaptations. Documents can be uploaded or links stored to answer specific questions. Thanks to the analytics features, the internal project team knows exactly which dialogues are taking place and which content areas need to be optimised and expanded in order to guarantee a satisfactory quality of information.

4. Results

The use of chatbots has already led to a reduction in the volume of e-mails and thus a reduction in the workload. Trade fair visitors from other time zones now also have a reliable source of information at all times. Content adjustments can be implemented independently and easily within the company using aiStudio. If questions or challenges nevertheless arise, the Kauz.ai Customer Success Team is characterised by a fast response time. Thanks to the platform approach, Westfalenhallen automatically benefits from developments in the AI market, as these flow directly into product development. New trade fair chatbots can now go live within a few weeks on average.

5. Outlook

The Group's chatbot infrastructure is constantly being further developed through the event and trade fair programme and the experience gained. The positive acceptance of chatbots, which has once again increased significantly due to the boom in ChatGPT, is driving the further expansion of communication automation in the Westfalenhallen with Kauz.ai as a technology partner.