If you visit a website, you’ll most likely come across a chatbot asking you how you’re doing, or if there’s anything that you need help with. Chatbots are already more common on many sites nowadays. But, what happens when they start engaging with consumers off the websites? And can a chatbot help with events?
Now, chatbots are being used to help event organizers capture audiences and attendees. So, instead of having people download an app to stay up to date, they’ll turn to current apps like Facebook Messenger for updates and notifications.
Using an event chatbot can help you sell more tickets to your event. But, in addition to that, they can even help you engage more with your audience. It can even act as a personal assistant for attendees before, during, and after the event. This automation helps in event marketing which enhances the user experience for your visitors. With that said, these are the six ways that artificial intelligence chatbots can better your event organizing experience.
Why use chatbots for events
People who are interested in going to your event will most likely prepare themselves for the big day. However, stress can weigh heavily on participants days (or weeks) before the event, or on the morning of. They’ll need event information immediately at their disposal. They need to know when the event starts, what materials they’ll need to bring for registration, etc.
Rather than check back on an event website, entrants want their information straight up, even if it’s a simple refresher. That’s where a chatbot comes in!
The events chatbot acts as a virtual assistant, so that a user can ask questions about the event. The AI chatbot will be able to recognize any question that’s being asked. Because of this, it can easily provide the best answers, based on the event information that’s already programmed into it. Thus, providing automated and accurate answers to questions helps reduce stress in participants. It also gives event organizers peace of mind that entrants are getting the right information.
“When problems spring up before, during, or after an event, attendees will need to have points of contact,” said Victoria Allan, journalist at Simplegrad and OXEssays. “We can’t always rely on emails, social media and website postings to answer people’s questions. Nowadays, people want instant answers to their questions — they don’t want to wait. If you have your attendees wait for you to respond, then that’ll impact your event’s reception in a negative light. Conversational AI can cut the wait time in half since chatbots process information and get to attendees faster than regular email or postings.”
No matter where chat sessions come from (the website, a mobile app, from social media), you can count on chatbots to reach attendees wherever they are. This allows attendees to receive push notifications on upcoming events, or ask them for feedback on the event they just went to. You can even set your bot to allow people to connect with live agents, if they don’t want an automated response.
The most tedious part of organizing an event is speaking to anyone and everyone that goes to it. This leads to you having to handle several communication channels all at once. But you know you can’t handle all the inquiries at once. There has to be an easier way to do this, right?
AI Chatbots are useful, when it comes to offering customer service all day, every day. Handling multiple inquiries at once, these bots offer quick service to all those asking customer service questions. And since they work around the clock, configuring time zones of different attendees, or setting up what the date and time is, are no problem.
The best thing about this is that bots can be configured to understand more than one language, so there’s no need to worry about language barriers. Instead of hiring a lot of multilingual customer support reps on your team, you can stick with a few; however, chatbots can do the job for you.
Basically, you can use a chatbot for all your events, even if the attendees won't be speaking English.
Check out our article on small business survival during the lockdowns.
Push notifications are useful when staying up to date on important events. Companies have taken this into task, when promoting their event(s), and they want to capture the attention of as many people as possible. So, how exactly can you make your event stand out above others? How can you make sure that people flock to your event, instead of your competitor’s?
Event bots tend to use conversational marketing tools such as Facebook Messenger to attract people to your event. While traditional ways of promoting events are dying, texts on Facebook Messenger have a greater chance of being clicked on. They boast a read rate of up to 70%, and a click rate of 40%. Therefore, this is a great way to make waves for your sponsors, promote upcoming events, and request feedback from participants.
Once the event is over, your participants will either be happy that they came to it, or they’ll have something critical to say about it. But how can you tell if people had a great time at your event, or not so much? And how would you know where to improve in your next event?
Marketing Chatbots allow you to keep in touch with those who had attended the event, and ask them for their feedback on how they enjoyed (or didn’t enjoy) the event. Your event bot will even be able to show you analytics on how many people interacted with it. You'll be able to see what information they were looking for, if they ran into issues during the event, etc.
You can even create polls, surveys, and comment sections on your bot to collect feedback from your participants, and you can even use dynamic QR codes to get participants online from offline touch-points at the event. No matter how you use those features, you’ll be able to determine what went well, what to improve on for the next event you host, the works.
Joshua Hillier, tech writer at Top UK Writing Services and Essayroo, believes that you can save on promotional costs with a bot. "Believe it or not, creating a bot for your event is cheaper than constructing a dedicated app from scratch. Not only will you save money on creating a bot, but it also saves you time that you can use for making sure that your event will run smoothly upon launch.”
This goes to show that time and money should be spent on the event itself, not so much on the marketing aspect of it. Using a chatbot will help reduce the amount you spend to market your events phenomenally.
Conclusion
Based on the reasons above, having a chatbot makes organizing and managing events much easier. Not only is it a great tool for conference management, but it can also enhance the experience for attendees, and ensure a smooth-running event. And if any problems arise, you can rest assured that they can easily be resolved using bots.
If you're considering getting an intelligent chatbot for your events, you can build a multilingual one to suit your business perfectly on Engati, without needing to code it.
