NHL Seattle and Satisfi Labs, an AI management platform, announced their work together in the leadup to the franchise's debut for the '21-22 season. Satisfi to date counts roughly a third of the league's teams as partners. Satisfi earlier this fall rolled out its chat feature on the NHL Seattle website to field questions from the team's 32,000 season-ticket depositors, assist in the seat-selection process and respond to general inquiries about the franchise. NHL Seattle Senior VP/Digital & Fan Experence Todd Humphrey said that for every one email the team now receives, there are 35 interactions via the web tool while there has been 17 uses for every one inbound call to the club. Roughly 90% of the general questions at launch were about the team name, colors and future coach. The gravitation to the chat feature has been much faster than the club originally expected, Humphrey added. "The biggest win for us to date has been just alleviating the back and forth with the account managers," he said. "For the hundreds of questions that we've enabled in the tool, it's been a really seamless mechanism for those fans to be able to communicate." Satisfi co-Founder & CEO Don White added, "This is truly amazing that [NHL Seattle is] going to understand from day one what their fans' needs were and how they'll go about their experience for years to come."
PROVIDES IMMEDIATE RESPONSE: Humphrey explained that one of the key benefits of the chat feature is the immediate response it provides fans as they are able to ask hundreds of questions. Once the club progresses through the seat selection process, it will still have numerous months to interact with fans, both on web and eventually through the team app, before the team hits the ice. Humphrey said he anticipates populating the management platform with questions on fan experience, food and beverage selections, game presentation and other queries about what fans need to attend games. "This tool will help us refine how we think about the fan experience and again, just getting to know who that fan is and what they want. ... We fully anticipate, especially with the early success that we've had, that this will be a fully baked tool for us in multiple channels," he said.
