Introducing Technology to Your Event

Every year, your event needs to evolve - creating fresh experiences and new memories for those who attend. Whether that comes from an updated format, or switching the mix of exhibitors / performers, it’s that constant looking to the future that will keep your event on everyone’s calendars year after year.

The one thing that nobody escape from is the increasing integration of technology in all aspects of our daily lives. Not just in the obvious way of keeping us more connected (at the last count, there were well over 100 social media sites), but also impacting our health, entertainment, lifestyle and education.

With technology developing at such a rapid pace, staying on top of these new trends and developments requires active engagement on behalf of event organisers.  They will need to master these new innovations, using them to communicate, engage and promote events in new and exciting ways.

What’s more, the capabilities of technology have vastly evolved, and increasingly consumers are expecting new standards of excellence, engagement and experiences at the events they attend.

So, no pressure, but we all need to become tech experts as well as keeping up with the day job…!

In this whitepaper, we explore how incorporating this new tech into your events can create a truly engaging user experience, as well as identifying a few of the key event tech trends that you might want to consider for your next event.

Device use isn’t just limited to an in-home or office environment. Visitors to your events will be documenting their experiences on Instagram stories or via

Facebook Live, indirectly influencing potential visitors to your current and future events.

How can #eventtech impact on customer experience?

Whilst “customer experience” is sometimes written off as a buzzword created by fluffy marketing-types, there is increasing evidence to prove that positive visitor experience can help drive the success of future events.

With the shift of focus moving away from the acts or products available at events, customer’s experiences, memories and feelings regarding an event are becoming a key factor to success.

Events that ignore positive customer experience will find it increasingly difficult to command a leading edge in a fast-moving competitive environment.

What is customer experience in relation to events?

Customer experience refers to the perceptions and relationships they have developed with an event. These experiences can affect behaviour, enhancing their overall rapport in either a positive or negative manner.

Customers are becoming more demanding, and with customer loyalty decreasing, and new events competing for the “customer wallet”, real-time customer reviews are becoming more and more an important measure of event success.

Events which focus on integrating strategies that provide a better customer experience are far more likely to achieve superior customer satisfaction rates. Creating a happy customer increases the likelihood of them becoming advocates for your event and potentially attracting new visitors, as well as returning themselves.

With more and more new technologies emerging, and the increase in pressure on attracting and keeping customers, providing a great customer experience can be your most potent differentiator.

What is customer experience in relation to events?

Customer Experience has shifted from being just a marketing tactic, to now being a core strategic business function. New technologies can be great tools when integrated into your event, but they aren’t helpful unless they are given a purpose.

One of the best ways is to put your clients first, by creating a simple and easy customer experience. 

For example, an excellent customer experience delivered by initiating

communications tailored to each individual customer can strengthen relationships with them.  This offers a platform where instead of comparing their visit or ticket purchase on price alone, customers consider the experience aspect as well.

Customer experience has clearly become extremely important. However, before you can plan and implement your own customer experience roadmap, you must first identify and establish your company’s own core values that both focus on and understand customer expectations.

Connected Customers

Everyone is online nearly all the time. With the emergence of the era of the connected customer, this can be a major benefit for events with the amount of data and feedback provided for your event.

Large volumes of detailed and up-to-date information about your customer’s preferences and behaviour can be readily available to you. This information, presented from the customer experience technology, provides the perfect platform to empower events.  This allows better connection with customers and helps make better decisions on how best to serve them.

Event organisers need to be able to connect with their customers, providing the information they demand whilst satisfying their sophisticated needs. Additionally,

they need to build platforms where they are able to communicate with the consumer directly and provide the information that they are looking for.

Get ahead of the trend

Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, big data, chatbots and cloud computing are some of the technologies beginning to take centre stage, opening up new opportunities to

engage with customers at your event. Events that are willing to embrace the creativity offered by technology will stand out from competitors and provide customers with a new and richer experience.

There is a lot of interest surrounding technology, with around 80% of businesses aware of its implications. However, only a small percentage of these events have

incorporated it into their strategies – so position yourself ahead of the competition and enhance your overall customer experience at events.

We’re all aware of the exciting potential presented by new technology, but understanding exactly what can be done with it is sometimes less obvious.

RFID

RFID stands for Radio Frequency identification and has been around for many years now. It is used extensively throughout many industries and all of us have come into contact with it in our daily lives, often without even knowing.

RFID has shown that it is an effective tool in the retail business, but that’s just the beginning.

You may have never heard of it, or you may not know the various ways that you can incorporate it into your event, but RFID is already demonstrating its ability to

enhance a customer’s experience.

RFID technology has helped to streamline the data capture process and enable the real-time tracking of customer behaviour and interactions with various aspects of the event. This also allows event organisers to measure the performance of an event less obtrusively than traditional methods.

RFID can be used for all event types to improve the experience for your attendees. From shorter queues, resulting from “waveable” wristbands or badges over entry sensors; interactive experiences with photo booths; to gaining real time insights of the whereabouts and actions of your attendees.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

VR and AR have the ability to change the way we discuss, attend, and interact

at events. “AR” is a broad term that covers everything from broadcast graphics overlaid onto live TV - to mobile apps that make print or products come alive when viewed through your phone. More recently, some event experiences even used smart glasses that overlaid graphics & info into the scene before you.

Virtual reality involves the use of a headset where a computer-generated simulation is shown to the user, blocking out the surrounding real world and immersing the user in the generated environment.

The company Merrel utilised VR, using the Oculus Rift, to create an immersive hike that had people feeling like they were hiking around crumbling ledges and over a treacherous terrain in the mountains.

Deep Learning

Deep learning is a gate-way that takes big data and re-analyses it to create business value.  Deep learning can be used to collect and learn from almost any data from a variety of sources at an event, including voice, photo, and video.

With the right data collected, deep learning can provide events with the knowledge to predict how their attendees have responded to previous scenarios. This will provide an insight on what can be improved to enhance the attendees experience further information.an

 

Apps

The use of apps at events can provide the perfect platform for audiences to engage with and share content with one another.

Apps allow the creation of branded mobile applications which contain the information attendees need.  Material, such as news, schedules, maps, attendee and exhibitor information, details regarding acts or speakers, and much more.

Attendees are able to download the Apps straight on to their mobile devices, thus gaining quick access to important event-related information. 

Chatbots

Chatbots, or just Bots as they are more commonly known, are a technology that connects event attendees with you, the event organiser, in real time. They are easier to access for attendees, since they don’t require an App download or website login.

Chatbots have the technological capability to learn from previous interactions and personalise conversations and continually improve their functions and communication with the user.

In the future, the technology could enable events to move away from having a dedicated event App, instead having all events content delivered through a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

 

Case Study - Secret Act Chatbot, Glastonbury Festival

Greenwood Campbell, a leading digital agency based in Bournemouth, discussed and identified issues that they had experienced at previous Glastonbury Festivals. They wanted to know about the “Secret Acts” whilst at the festival, and where and when they were performing, knowledge that previously was not readily available.

Greenwood Campbell had already seen large brands, such as Dominos Pizza and BBC News, successfully use chatbots to both influence and generate high engagement rates.  So, they looked at both the Facebook Messaging Platform as well as WhatsApp as potential carriers for their Glastobot – with both services combined reaching over 1.2 billion users.

Greenwood Campbell decided that Facebook would be the perfect platform to build the Glastobot. Not only is it the more popular of the two options, but the data usage for Facebook Messenger is very low, and therefore, the chatbot would work quickly and responsively on both 2G and Edge networks, having all events content delivered through a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

Although the official Glastonbury app and website are updated promptly, sometimes the mobile signal is so poor that people aren’t able to find information quickly enough.

 

What was created?

A lightweight, simple chatbot using Facebook messenger with very simple functionality was clearly the way forward to provide quick, up-to-date information for festival-goers.

The final chatbot functionality was very simple: it provided information on the various acts and stages. The team of developers at GC connected to an open source feed of information that allowed them to serve this information to the Chatbot users. They also monitored Twitter and rumour feeds in real-time to learn who the secret acts might be.

How was it received?

The bot launched the week before the festival and received over 5,000 messages over the course of the weekend.

Greenwood Campbell had a team of people working throughout the weekend, monitoring the bot to make sure that it was operational and that it wasn’t getting

asked questions that they hadn’t anticipated. Their research paid off as the most popular questions were either: - “When is [act] playing” or “Who is playing on [stage]”.

What was learnt?

During the course of the weekend at Glastonbury, the team monitoring the bots’ usage found that it was asked some very unusual questions; some which needed some quick programming so the bot was able to auto-answer, and some that required the team to answer themselves – with cheap beer and weather being the second most popular types of questions.

 

Key steps to integrate technology at your event

What are the key steps to take to incorporate tech at your event and create a truly engaging user experience.

Do your research

• What else has been used before?

• What technology has been successful

• Does it meet your needs?

• What work is required?

Be clear on your events vision and objectives

• What do you want to achieve?

• How will it contribute to your events goals?

Event goal vs customer experience goals

• Understand your user

• Who will be the user?

• What platforms will they be using?

• Do they have experience using the technology you want to use?

Map each stage of your customer experience

• Against the objective, what is the current customer experience – what stages are required for the customer to have a good experience

Select an approach that meets your budget

• Will the technology meet your budget?

• How much usability will your budget get?

Test, test, test

• Ensure you test before your event to reduce any problems arising at your event?

• Marketing your technology before your event?

• Ensure your event attendees know about the technology?

• Use it as a USP?

Review

• Take feedback – was it successful or not?

• What needs to be developed?

• What needs to be removed or introduced?

There are no indications that this level of tech adoption is going to slow, and we can only predict that with the advancement in functionality of our mobile handsets, our engagement with tech at Events is only going to be more commonplace.

For Event Organisers, this can be a difficult concept to understand – but with an increasing amount of resource available to you, as well as fantastic free-to-attend event in London called Event Tech Live, there are plenty of ways to keep you up to date with the new and exciting technologies that are emerging.