Last month, soccer fans in the U.K. were introduced to the “Jeff Bot”, a new chatbot to mimic Sky Sports’ irrepressible Jeff Stelling, host of its wildly popular Soccer Saturday show. Within a day of its launch it had already achieved 10,000 signups, with the average user sending 35 messages.
“The engagement and retention we are seeing from the Jeff Bot are amazing,” said Alex Beckman, Founder and CEO of GameOn, a fan-focused mobile engagement platform that built the Jeff Bot. “This founding team has been in the user experience and app building market for almost 10 years and we have never seen anything like it.”
While fans have quickly embraced the Jeff Bot, the partnership that developed between Sky Sports and GameOn was also quick to develop, with Beckman first meeting Sky Sports digital director David Gibbs last October. However, Gibbs said that even before this meeting, Sky Sports had been interested in the potential of chatbots and how they might make content services work in a messenger environment. Currently, the Jeff Bot is available across Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, and Telegram.
“We looked into what else GameOn had done after we first met and we were impressed with their NFL work, but it was really the work they were doing around personality-based bots that caught our eye,” Gibbs said. “GameOn introduced us to the idea of a personality-based bot, and Jeff Stelling, who Jeff Bot is based on, immediately sprang to mind.”
To U.K. soccer fans, neither Stelling nor the show he fronts, Soccer Saturday, need introduction. It has become a staple of Saturday afternoons for fans across Britain, despite it not showing any live, in-play action from the English Premier League. Instead, prominent ex-professionals describe in detail the action taking place. Even in the absence of live action, the show has run successfully for over 25 years, with Stelling presenting it for 22 of those years.
“It was just a really obvious fit for us. We wanted to deliver real-time scores and updates, but in a fun and entertaining way and that really sums up Soccer Saturday,” Gibbs said. “Jeff is a brilliant presenter and has such a good rapport with the rest of the Soccer Saturday panel. That really comes across on screen which is why the sentiment around the show, and Jeff in particular, is so positive. We wanted to recreate that feeling around our bot.”
Get The Latest Soccer Tech News In Your Inbox!
Meanwhile, the job facing GameOn in recreating Stelling as a chatbot was something that it relished.
“Jeff is funny, sarcastic, witty, clever, and even the best bots at times can feel stale and robotic,” Beckman said. “The Sky team, with Jeff included, and GameOn wanted to bring something to the chat space that was filled with character and humanity while delivering with the precision, speed, and scale of a bot.”
As the user experience is broken up into three parts — customization, push content and pull content — another important issue for Sky Sports in developing the Jeff Bot was also being able to take control of it and to control what is being pushed out to fans, according to Gibbs.
Speed was also of huge importance to Sky Sports. “The key thing for us was to get something out quickly because the technology is continuously evolving and we didn’t want to waste too much time trying to perfect something that might be out of date before we launch. The best way for us to learn is to have a product in the space,” Gibbs said.
Since being launched in December, the typical user experience has tended to consist of three requests focusing on upcoming fixtures, team news and score information in the Premier League, with Facebook Messenger and Skype being the two most popular channels. Given their collective dominance over the fight for first place, it likely isn’t too surprising to learn that Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester City are also amongst the most favored teams by fans.
However, most interestingly of all, since its introduction is that the fourth most common message sent by users is to say thank you to the Jeff Bot. “When I mentioned this I share it with great pride,” Beckman said. “People are treating Jeff Bot like a person and that is step one in creating something powerful.”
With the successful introduction of the Jeff Bot, Gibbs detailed that Sky Sports may bring fans further AI-focused services. “It’s something we’re absolutely open to,” he said. “The experience with Jeff Bot thus far has been a good one and there is potential to branch out to other major sports with big personalities.”
However, he noted that the Jeff Bot is still in its infancy and that the next step for it will be to expand the number of Premier League teams it covers. “Once we’re satisfied we’ve created the best bot experience around football, we’ll turn our attentions to other sports.”
Meanwhile for GameOn, Beckman is focused on “expansion” this year and adding to an already healthy list of partners including the NFL and Time Inc. “We will be expanding to let fans chat about more sports, cricket and F1, as well as providing more opportunity for engagement inside our chat experiences,” he said.