How Fantacalcio automates 95% of customer service with an AI chatbot

With over 5 million registered users and 6 million unique monthly visitors, Fantacalcio.it is Italy’s premier digital ecosystem for fantasy football, combining sports news coverage with an interactive gaming platform. 

And Andrea America, Quality Assurance & Customer Service Lead at Fantacalcio, knows that providing responsive customer support is crucial for keeping players engaged throughout the soccer season — especially during peak periods when thousands of users need help simultaneously. 

Managing a complex gaming ecosystem 

Fantacalcio’s platform enables users to create and manage their own fantasy football teams based on Italy’s Serie A League. As “FantaAllenatore” (fantasy coaches), users join private leagues with friends, draft players, set weekly lineups, and compete based on real-world player performances. 

“The platform has numerous customizable settings for scoring, bonuses, and team matchups,” Andrea explained. “This complexity means our support team plays a central role in helping users navigate the game mechanics and resolve issues quickly.” 

With 15-20% of their user base regularly seeking assistance and support requests spiking to 3,000 per day during season launches, the customer service team faced a major challenge in keeping response times low while maintaining quality support. 

From days to hours: Transforming response times with AI 

The main bottleneck was gathering complete information from users to resolve their tickets. “Users often submit requests without including essential details,” said Andrea. “This created a growing queue of ‘in-progress’ tickets as we went back and forth asking for additional information.” 

By implementing an AI chatbot built on Sinch Engage across both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, Fantacalcio automated the initial interaction and information gathering process. The bot handles standard inquiries, provides links to relevant tutorials, and ensures human agents receive complete information when intervention is needed. 

“Thanks to the bot, we are able to reduce the reply time by 50%,” Andrea noted. “All chats that require human assistance are now resolved within an hour maximum.”

Building for the future 

The success of the chatbot implementation has inspired Fantacalcio to think bigger about automation. “For the future, we would like to optimize the use of our chatbot and maybe to further diversify the support channels for all our projects,” said Andrea. “We’re exploring dedicated chatbot channels for each of our different projects.” 

With the chatbot handling 95% of initial customer interactions, Fantacalcio’s support team can focus on complex issues that truly require human expertise, ensuring players get the help they need to enjoy their fantasy football experience.