Village Entertainment has announced the forthcoming launch of its Amazon Alexa Skill, in association with the highly anticipated Amazon Alexa voice service. The news follows Amazon’s announcement that Amazon Alexa and Echo devices will be available for pre-order from today.
The Village Cinemas Alexa skill is capable of providing detailed answers and supporting information to a range of questions as specific as, “Alexa, ask Village Cinemas when is Star Wars on tonight?”;… what kid’s movies are showing at Southland?” and “…when is Black Panther coming out?”, to further enhance the customer journey at Village cinemas.
Of the decision to drive this digital innovation, Mohit Bhargava, General Manager of Sales and Marketing at Village Entertainment says the choice to develop the Village Cinemas Alexa skill is in fact data driven and intended to further enhance a key step in the customer journey.
“We’re constantly working to develop concepts and initiatives that will be helpful to our customers, and we rely heavily on data to inform all such initiatives. Cinema session time information is the number one search query serviced via all our customer facing channels, amounting to millions of customer contacts each month via the web, call centres and social media to seek out this information.” Mr. Bhargava commented “Voice offers a very natural addition to our channel mix that we hope will enhance the user experience during this phase of the customer journey. Amazon Alexa leads the way globally in this space and we think our customer will truly benefit from and enjoy using the utility we offer in this environment”.
“Our goal is to leverage technological advancements to simplify the customer experience, cinemas run hundreds if not thousands of movie sessions each week and the Village Cinemas Alexa skill enables our customer to dissect straight to their preferred session or seek out recommendations without having to even unlock their smart phone, this we see as a great step towards creating memorable customer experiences even before the customer has entered our cinemas. We are truly excited and look forward to learning and developing on this capability further.”

The Village Cinemas Alexa skill will be available from early February 2018