Chatbots have played a vital role in streamlining the processes like customer service support, sales, and marketing. Brands like American Express, Patron, and British Airways are utilizing the power of Artificial Intelligence to drive engagement and retention. Most of the businesses are planning to deploy AI Chatbots to automate the sales and service support to ensure customer engagement and seamless communication.
To give an overview of how AI chatbots are helping businesses, have a look at some of the statistics.
- In 2016, the chatbot market was valued at $703 million. (Marketsandmarkets, 2017)
- By 2020, over 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation implemented (Business Insider, 2016)
- Chatbots could save businesses up to £6 billion per year cross industries. (Juniper Research, 2017)
- 57% of consumers are interested in chatbots for their instantaneity. (HubSpot, 2017)
- 27% of consumers predict they would buy a basic item through a chatbot. (Drift, 2018)
Given the above statistics, Chatbots will prove to be the mainstream in driving revenue to the businesses and making customers happier.
AI Chatbots in Events
AI Chatbots will be the major disrupter in the event industry, just like Mobile Event Apps have played a vital role in increasing attendees’ engagement. When it comes to AI chatbots in events, there are a number of opportunities for event managers. Let’s have a look at it.
Offer Personalization and Recommendations
The biggest challenge for event manager is the personalisation for exhibitors and event attendees. But not anymore because chatbots are the game changer when it comes to personalisation and recommendations. For example, if there are 1000 attendees present at your event and you have manually filled the form to know the interests of each individual. It is quite daunting and requires much of the manual work along with cost.
On the contrary, AI chatbot can extract data from social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Attendees can either schedule a meeting before the event starts or reject the recommendations from the system. It will help in improving the next set of recommendations.
As far exhibitors are concerned, knowing the potential customers helps in improving the products/services offered. Knowing exactly about their potential customers, exhibitors can tailor their offerings and benefit while the event managers can customise the event space and resources according to the preferences.
Enabling Smarter Networking
The purpose of any event is to help attendees’ to network and collaborate. As discussed above, the data collection through social media profiles is possible through AI chatbot. With these profiles, networking opportunities can be limitless. The event managers can incorporate this data into their mobile event app to help connect attendees with likeminded people.
The AI chatbots can be helpful in saving time and money for the event managers. Moreover, a smoother experience and seamless networking will offer a valuable face-to-face interaction and collaboration.
Ticket Purchase
A chatbot is just as a customer sales representative who is responsible for assisting the customers. Event managers can use chatbots as a landing page. For instance, people who are interested in attending the event would like to ask about the speakers, sponsors, agenda, and sessions.
For such queries, chatbots can not only help in assisting attendees but also saves time by automating the sale of the ticket. Imagine if a person asks a question to a human and takes 10 minutes, how much time it would require on average for 1000 people who are interested in attending the event. Similarly, it is not easy to inform everyone about the increase in ticket price.
Session Planning and Reminders
Session planning and reminder are the core of any event. Attendees have to keep track of every session that they are interested in. Setting reminders for each session seems daunting. Moreover, it is impossible to manage each individual to inform about the sessions and speakers.
Chatbot can help in this regard by asking simple questions at the start of an event such as what industry they work in and what topics are they interested in. The answers given by attendees will help chatbots to filter out the preferences. Based on this data, chatbots will send reminders before the start of it.
Support Group Chats
Events are all about networking and conversation. Chatbots in this regard can help people connect and network with each other based on occupation and interest. The likeminded people and people of same interest can be notified about each other without doing much. If you want to make your events more engaging, deploying a chatbot would lead to better attendees’ experience and network like never before.
Follow Up with the Attendees
Events don’t end, as they are the means of collecting feedback from attendees and endless networking opportunities even after everything is over. Chatbots can help in collecting attendees’ feedback and conducting surveys. Based on these feedbacks, the event managers can learn about the things that were most liked by the attendees, which sessions and speakers were helpful in educating them, and improving product/service offering.
Lead Collection for Sponsors
Speakers and sponsors would like to interact with the attendees even after the conference has ended. Chatbots can be helpful in generating leads for sponsors by collecting data of those who were engaged the most in different sessions and took part in it. Moreover, people who have signed up for trial product or service can be pitched through chatbot from time to time. This would help in turning the potential prospects to customers and customers to returning ones.
Conclusion
Just like mobile event apps, chatbots will be the mainstream in the coming years. Most of the event managers have already realised the potential of conference chatbots, but have not yet deployed. In fact, chatbots are the present and the future of events management for better attendees experience and engagement.
