The corporate events landscape has changed drastically over the past several months. Companies around the world have had to adapt or scrap their plans for large-scale conferences, congresses, and expos. For the health and safety of their workforce and customers, companies have had to embrace virtual events over live ones.
While there are myriad, obvious differences between live and virtual events, the foundational principles of good planning apply to both. As a host, you should strive to make your guests feel welcome, valued, and empowered, regardless of your event’s medium or format. As Salesforce Research notes, “84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business”. A warm, personal touch goes a long way towards winning your audience over and getting them to actively engage with your programming.
As your guest list grows and your staff to attendee ration dwindles, chatbots can help your guests feel seen, heard, and in control without the need for additional boots on the ground. For live, virtual, and hybrid events, they can ease things up for you in the pre-show, day-of, and post-game phases of your event.
Consider the impact they can have on the registration process. Live attendees will savor the convenience of being able to skip registration lines by signing up in advance through your website or registering online through their mobile devices. Virtual guests will appreciate the warmth a well-programmed bot can bring to otherwise impersonal check-in procedures.
Once your guests—live and virtual—arrive, chatbots can act as their digital valet, bringing essential information to their fingertips and allowing them to take control of their individual event experience. Users can receive schedule updates, access to downloadable content, and answers to important questions. On-site attendees can get room change notifications (inevitable during complex, high-attendance events) as well as security alerts.
The impact chatbots will have on your event varies depending on how you personalize them. In the words of Richard McGrath, Founder of All Chat Solutions, “The goal of personalizing your chatbot is to make the user feel more understood and make their life easier”. A little data gathering on the front end—through registration forms and pre-show surveys—allows for deeper personalization and a richer guest experience. Based on guest responses, your chatbot can make programming recommendations that align with the individual guest’s job role and interests (e.g. a Junior Marketing Manager might be interested in an Executive Q&A session), lead virtual attendees to additional digital resources (websites, articles, etc.), or offer local dining suggestions to on-site guests.
As your event rolls along, surveys and polls run through chatbots can help you both track and drive engagement with your guests. With a few carefully chosen questions, you can gather valuable intel on what topics and content are resonating with your attendees, while giving them a sense of community. Chatbot-driven exit surveys are also a great way of measuring success with an eye towards planning future events.
When making chatbots part of your greater event strategy, be sure to carefully consider security issues. Building and hosting a bot in Facebook Messenger may be relatively easy and painless, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of security. We recommend working with a developer to host your bot on your event’s website or integrate it within your event’s app. This will allow you to maintain strict security standards, which is especially vital when working with highly regulated industries, such as pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. At a minimum, you will want to protect your users’ data with encryption and two-factor authentication.
Events of all kinds bring folks together in the spirit of networking and knowledge sharing. At scale, they can become overwhelming for the individual, casting them adrift in a sea of people and programming. A well-constructed chatbot can add an extra element of comfort for your guests while simplifying administration and data gathering for your organization.