When technology is powerful it can do a great deal, including improving the quality of an event.

Anyone who decided long ago to use it at every stage of organising and running an event knows this well: from design to delivery, from the day-to-day management of rooms and spaces to the measurement of data and performance. One of the areas where this is most evident is access control and “person-less” check-in systems.

The first things that come to mind when you think about access control are undoubtedly necessary and useful: the accuracy of the measurement, which is essential when a commercial result depends on how full a space or a room is, or when time spent in a room is tied to a certificate, as it is with accredited training.

With check-in, letting attendees handle the process themselves, with no need for dedicated staff, has translated into speed and convenience of operation and, not to be underestimated, into lower costs as well.

Often, though, the real power of technology lies less in what machines can do than in what people can ask them to do, because their minds can imagine it before turning it into concrete action. So could we turn the moment attendees arrive at an event into a welcome, one that helps them get their bearings in the space and points them to the activities that interest them most?
Could we, in short, turn the check-in system into a genuine digital butler?

Yes, because when the check-in system talks to the rest of the event’s IT architecture you can turn the moment an attendee physically checks in at the venue or at a room into the last link in a chain that begins even before that person decides to attend and registers.
How?

For example by using communications, notifications and surveys as tools to record the preferences and the interests of attendees. Or by creating personal areas inside the event app or website where people can plan the activities that interest them most, arrange meetings and travel, store materials and book stands and exhibition space.

All of these activities produce information that a system can not only store but manage and, more important still, connect together. In this way the final step — the last of one cycle and the first of many others — check-in, can easily turn from a simple administrative moment into a genuine “welcome ceremony”, conducted by a virtual concierge that not only opens the doors but directs, suggests, reminds and prompts activities and actions, exactly as an attentive butler would for every attendee.

That is no small added value at a time when events necessarily become richer in order to rise above the competition and the noise, and therefore often more complex and more tiring for attendees, so much so that they risk giving up on the idea of getting the most out of taking part, or even on taking part at all.

Feeling welcomed and expected in a place you do not know, on the other hand, helps you get past any difficulties, and it also encourages more active, constructive and positive participation. It helps people be more positive, more open and more willing to experiment, with the constant sense of being supported. It helps them get the most out of every experience, raising two of the most important factors: satisfaction and engagement. As well as having a positive effect on the activities and on the other people involved, these produce information and data that feed back into this virtuous circle, of which data-driven marketing is another essential cog.

All of it from an advanced check-in system.
Or rather, from an alert and attentive virtual butler.