Chatbots for Events - How to Automate Event Management

The events market faces a major crisis as everything from concerts to awards shows and weddings face extended delays or a slow restart. Those looking to recover, deliver innovation or make messaging improvements as the industry seeks to catch up with a massive lag in bookings can use chatbots and AI to help.

The events industry around the world has been hit hardest by the social distancing rules as nations get back to work at varying speeds. From tourist towns to theatres and music festivals, from local gigs to wedding singers and planners, events management has been crippled, staff furloughed or laid off and many independent workers left without support.

In the UK, many entertainment locations turned red recently to highlight their plight, using the #wemakeevents hashtag to trend on social media. Behind the scenes workers, management and many notable artists put their case for support and a path to reopening.

Even as they marched, raised awareness or talked to politicians, more bad news came as popular pantomime seasons were cancelled. Yet there is hope, with a Newcastle socially-distanced live show setting up a roster of gigs and acting as a template for others to follow.

But, at the business level, those in events and entertainment need to rearrange a great many details and functions in operations and communications. At the simplest level, those in the industry, from event planners to bookers and artists, need ways to communicate more efficiently beyond leaving phone messages and rafts of emails for each other.

Chatbots provide a basis for intra-business engagement, to rearrange schedules, and manage complex events, such as trade shows or symposia. They can also be used on customer-facing websites or apps to provide people with the latest news or rearranged dates, how to change bookings and provide transport information, or address other customer service issues.

Chatbots for Event Engagement

Chatbots helped out massively in many markets, from health to transport providing fast-changing information and advice during the crisis. Many traditional companies are also using them for business continuity all helping demonstrate how event planners, locations and festivals can use them as they restart. 

Within any entertainment business, bots can help out. Take a small local live gig venue. Rather than phone around every act to establish availability, they can send an invite to talk to a bot that can survey artists to see if they are available, when they can play, what backup dates they might have and any show requirements. Link the chatbot to a spreadsheet or calendar, and the artists can find times and dates that suit them, allowing them to auto populate, and let the business team get on with promotion, sales and other more important tasks.  

For customers, a ticket booking chatbot can help handle those sales, and it is easy to link a bot to a sales or checkout system to handle the financial transaction, helping speed up that process. Anything that allows event planners to focus on the 101 other things they have on their plates adds value to the business.

Bots are cheap, easy to create and quick to add to a website or app, and can be made multilingual for wider audiences. The best chatbot platform for a full suite of free features is SnatchBot: we provide easy access to AI tools that make the bot smarter than just following a script.

That first bot can help with internal tasks, be easily upgraded to handle customer queries and then expanded further (or you can create different bots) that handles specific queries for an event, take a trade show where lots of people might want to know:

• What’s the event  WiFi network and password?
• When does the keynote speech take place?
• Where can I find a particular exhibitor?
• Where can I find free parking at the event?
• What’s the cost of entry for the event?
• Where can I eat at the event?
• Information on next years event

These can all be found in a FAQ or brochure, but by putting them in a chatbot, you can update the information instantly should those details change, and you can direct people to other sources, or upsell them better tickets or party invites, or pre-sell them for the next show.

The Joined-Up Future of Events

While these quick-to-build bots can help out in the panic-mode of post-COVID. They are becoming a common part of the business landscape for all types of companies, and the events market needs to gain an understanding of their benefits and value fast.

As one example, AI bots will soon help a family book their theatre tickets, the post-event meal and an Uber taxi home, all from one digital conversation and location, no apps required. The bot’s owner will take a cut of all three sales using existing booking schemes that the bot links to, just one example of the added-value that bots bring. And the bot might recommend a hotel if there’s a late start, with other opportunities to build a package or upsell based on the customers’ interest.

Within the industry, acts and shows plan their tours around the predicted interest. Any act that sees a sudden boom (a breakout single, a major celebrity joining the cast or political awareness) will use AI bots to move them to a bigger venue and shuffle other acts around, while informing all the ticket holders of the changes, and alerting people who want to see the bigger show of fresh availability.

Doing all that via a bot is more efficient than traditional customer handling solutions, and reduces the amount of effort for the business. And as bots become more interactive, they can alert customers to travel or public transport delays on the day of a show, adding value to the customer, helping take reviews of an event, or asking/suggesting to people what they might want to see next, with every interaction making the bot more useful to customer and business.

Those in the events market looking to recover and catch up with a massive lag in bookings can use chatbots and AI to help.

To get started and quickly create an events chatbot, choose from our many templates, all free in the chatbot store.