Valero Alamo Bowl scores touchdown with Lucky Orange chat

Valero Alamo Bowl isn’t a newbie when it comes to college football.

For the past 25 years, the non-profit organization has hosted a premier college football bowl game between the leading teams of the PAC-12 and Big 12 conferences in San Antonio, Texas. As many as 66,000 college football fanatics have flocked to the Valero Alamo Bowl to cheer on their favorite team to victory.

Needless to say, expectations are high among these spirited fans. Tens of thousands of fans visit www.alamobowl.com each month to find out everything they can about the game, even months before the college football season even kicks off.

However, that doesn’t mean the Valero Alamo Bowl’s staff have it easy. Expectations among fans are high, organization budgets are tight, and the staff is limited.

Thankfully, the Valero Alamo Bowl has a secret weapon in winning over guests: Lucky Orange.

No more hail marys

In the world of American football, a Hail Mary pass is a very long forward pass made in desperation with a small chance of success. For the Valero Alamo Bowl, their own “Hail Mary” was attempting to adequately address the needs of their guests before turning to Lucky Orange.

There simply was not enough staff to field questions that poured in to the office. It was time to search for alternative solutions. This solution came in the form of Lucky Orange.

Lucky Orange proved to be much more than just your average conversion optimization package.

Though its reporting was a welcome addition to improving website design and user experience, it was chat that ultimately opened the Valero Alamo Bowl to a new world of customer service opportunities and possibilities.

No time wasted

Researching conversion optimization tools was the hard part; deciding on Lucky Orange and installing it was simple in comparison.

Within 15 minutes, the Valero Alamo Bowl had Lucky Orange installed, chat customized, and staff trained.

Lara Smedley, Senior Manager of Events and Marketing for the Valero Alamo Bowl, said Lucky Orange was easy to use, understand, and opened a door of possibilities to staff and visitors alike.

Best yet – it was a solution that helped the non-profit stay on budget.

“[We needed a] better understanding of our website traffic along with the flow of customers through our website,” Lara said. “The most valuable feature [of Lucky Orange] has been the Chat feature.”

Chat makes all the difference

From a customer service perspective, Lucky Orange chat was more than efficient. One operator could manage multiple chats at once, even during the busy post-season. Visitors left satisfied with answers in hand, and staff avoided burning out.

Lucky Orange chat did more than just offer a method with which an operator could chat with a visitor. It also provided the visitor’s location, browser, and device information for further analysis if technical issues were identified.

In addition, Lara’s team could quickly co-browse with guests and lead them directly to the pages they were wanting to find. Sending the guests links or contact information was also as simple as copying and pasting an answer into the chat field.

Chat logs were quickly available and kept for future reference to address troubleshooting or quality assurance concerns if needed.

Best yet, chat wasn’t just initiated by visitors.

An auto-response could be set up if a visitor lingered for more than a few seconds on a specific page, and operators could also reach out to live visitors themselves. This live visitor information also led to a recording, further helping operators in identifying what a visitor may be wanting to find.

Small staff with first-class service

The Valero Alamo Bowl opted to set up an away form, which had two direct benefits that assisted the staff:

• It enabled staff, especially during the slower months, to not be “on call” during all hours of the day and night. Chat operators could still address the needs of visitors in a timely manner.

• If an operator was unable to pick up a visitor-initiated chat within 10 seconds, the away form would also be populated so the visitor’s question would still be answered and s/he would not be left waiting for an unreasonable time for an operator to pick up the chat.

Whether it was directed through a live chat operator or through a returned away form message, visitors have been impressed with the Valero Alamo Bowl’s efforts and keep coming back for more. Their efforts have indeed made an impact on the success of the game and keep the Alamodome filled year after year.

Lara and her team may not be able to guarantee which teams would make it into the bowl, but with Lucky Orange at their fingertips, they can still give visitors the information they needed at any point as they planned their trip to San Antonio.

Her team is ready to tackle whatever the next visitor chat is that comes their way.