NightOwl Entertainment is an Australian-based hospitality company that creates and operates unique, experiential venues such as Flight Club, The Lookout, and Magnet House.
Create a differentiated hospitality experience and scale across Australia
NightOwl Entertainment has evolved from a traditional hospitality business to an experiential entertainment business. While holding onto its roots in food and beverage, it is focused on creating unique moments and engaging experiences that add value to customers and propel the hospitality industry forward.
To deliver on its vision and expand across Australia, NightOwl needed a solution to scale and deliver hyper-personalised experiences. As a conglomerate of different brands with diverse customer journeys, the company also needed the agility to cater to different needs and manage related challenges. These included weekly and seasonal spikes in demand for customer support.
What’s exciting about Agentforce is that it frees employees for creative work and to support customers who need a human-to-human conversation.
David HeatonCEO, NightOwl Entertainment
Agentforce helps NightOwl deliver 24/7 service at scale.
While fostering human connection is at the heart of NightOwl’s business, it recognises customer preferences have changed. It’s designed venues to cater to these differences and is using Agentforce to scale support across customers' preferred channels.
NightOwl’s first agent autonomously engages with customers 24/7 on all its venue websites. The agent draws on each venue’s knowledge base to instantly respond to common questions and uses conversational language tailored to each venue’s tone of voice. The results have exceeded initial expectations, with nearly 85% of web inquiries resolved without the need to escalate to a human.
The business has now expanded the use of Agentforce to interact with customers via Facebook. It has also updated its knowledge base so agents can better address the questions most frequently requiring escalations.
Next, NightOwl plans to enable agents to handle multi-step tasks such as updating bookings with custom requests. Also on the roadmap is an agent that can take bookings directly. This will further reduce the administrative load on employees while enabling faster customer service.
Agentforce Service helps NightOwl elevate productivity and capture new revenue.
To better manage fluctuating demand and diverse customer needs, NightOwl is transforming sales and service with Agentforce Service.
The business began using the reporting in Agentforce Service to gain deeper insight into its operations, including patterns in call times and durations. The data revealed a critical insight: there was a spike in calls on Friday nights—after the team’s shift had ended—with customers calling to create or add new people to their bookings. NightOwl realised that by extending its Friday shift, it could capture this revenue opportunity and provide a better customer experience.
NightOwl has automated and streamlined workflow for those handling sales inquiries and customer support. For example, it has enabled skills-based routing and leveraged Salesforce Voice for AI-generated call transcriptions and case summaries.
These enhancements have reduced average call wait times by 80% and enabled the business to eliminate a backlog of 2,000 tasks in just months.
We’ve reduced average case wait times by 80%. That is a huge improvement in the customer experience and the revenue opportunity for our business.
Nik ThompsonChief Marketing Officer, NightOwl Entertainment
Data 360 delivers new insights to measure and drive engagement.
NightOwl is now connecting booking, ticketing, loyalty, and in-store experience data with behavioural and transaction data to better understand its customers and how to build lasting relationships. Unifying its data in Data 360 has also helped NightOwl transform how it measures engagement. Now, instead of only analysing separate metrics such as customer bookings or spend, it has used Calculated Insights from Data 360 to consolidate metrics into a single engagement score. This allows senior staff to gain top-level insights at a glance and gives department heads a North Star that’s based on owned data and used to guide decisions and performance.
Looking ahead, MuleSoft and Data 360 will help NightOwl integrate with and harmonise data from systems used by Dave & Busters, a US restaurant and entertainment brand that NightOwl is launching into Australia. This will help streamline processes and enable NightOwl to maintain a unified view of the customer across different brands.
Agentforce Marketing enables personalised engagement at scale.
With Data 360 and Agentforce Marketing, NightOwl has built highly segmented audiences and targeted campaigns to increase engagement and cross-sell. The business first brought in Agentforce Marketing to better engage with customers across channels and reduce reliance on social media and ads. It has successfully achieved these aims and increased email open rates up to 4x through more personalised campaigns and journeys. These include a return journey, encouraging customers to return to venues during less popular times of the day.
In addition to these results, NightOwl has sustained this level of engagement despite a 1.5x increase in monthly communications.
Agentforce Marketing is invaluable in driving personalisation at scale. We now send around 740,000 emails monthly while maintaining engagement.
Nik ThompsonChief Marketing Officer, NightOwl Entertainment
Agentforce has augmented NightOwl’s workforce with digital labour, enabling customers to get answers 24/7 and freeing staff for more valuable conversations, like helping customers finalise arrangements for events. With Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud, NightOwl can deliver dynamic personalisation using automated journeys for every customer. With these capabilities, Salesforce has become an important part of NightOwl’s competitive edge.
“If we can get to our customers better than our competitors, we are one step ahead,” said Heaton.
NightOwl worked with Salesforce consulting partner Skie (now Bluprintx) on its implementation of Agentforce. Skie helped them to shape the initial use case and connect the data required to power its customer service agent. The business’ internal resources have since worked closely with Salesforce to evolve its use of the platform.
The hospitality business has taken a data-driven approach to transforming service, leveraging reporting in Agentforce Service to identify gaps and opportunities. For example, by analysing call density and intent, the team pinpointed potential missed revenue opportunities and optimised rostering. The business also transitioned to an omni-channel setup with skills-based routing, ensuring the right tasks were prioritised and delegated to the right team members. These actions and the use of AI to support team members and the creation of knowledge articles all combined to reduce case wait times by 80% and clear NightOwl’s task backlog.
