Every year, Chennai has a large festival with about 2,000 concerts over the course of 30 days. There is a lot of different music, and it’s complicated for people to navigate through.

So The Hindu built a chatbot allowing people to make their own schedule. You can see it in action here.

The target market is relatively small at about 60,000 to 100,000 people. But those who attend are invested in the experience. In fact they were so invested, they often spent five to seven minutes at a time querying this database, asking all kinds of questions. 

The chat experience brings more investment from the user side. It’s an active media experience, not passive. And they found the more invested the user is, the deeper the questions go with people wanting to know more. 

Pundi Sriram, chief product officer at The Hindu, told us they learned a lot in that process, including what else our user wants to learn. 

One surprise was that when people were planning their schedules, it was assumed they would want to know about the concerts — but they also wanted to know what to eat in between concerts. They noticed a whole new set of questions around this topic and ended up uploading menus of canteens and places where people can eat. This made the experience deeper still and fulfilled a specific user need. 

The other thing they noticed was that questioning led to a lot of other content consumption.  People wanted to know about the bands and artists — coverage The Hindu had and was able to surface. 

Pundi finished off by saying: “Maybe the interactive nature of chat, as opposed to a more passive query, brings about a different type of engagement.”

Here are a few learnings I take away from this at a product level:

1. Starting from a specific topic — rather than a blank slate — encourages engagement as users see a specific output.

2. Chat can be useful as a top-of-funnel search mechanism for content.

3. Chat can show us a lot about user needs and enable us to adapt quickly.

4. Chat users are highly engaged users as it’s an active experience. 

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