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Meeting and Event Check-In Made Easy

By Andrea Williams
event registration app

Registering for and checking into an event can be cumbersome or difficult. The excitement you have for an event can be overshadowed by waiting in long lines to receive your badge and rifling through registration papers. Once you pass that gate, you likely want to know where to go, who is speaking, and which of your friends have arrived. This is only the start of the meeting and it is already potentially littered with stressful or confusing touchpoints. Let’s shake that up...

Let’s bring the social concept of ‘check-in’ into the events and meetings fold. Naturally, attendees want to engage online. You can meet their needs by setting up a digital experience that creates a centralized hub for interactions with your event and meeting logistics, starting with the first on-site, in-person gate: checking in.

66% of event attendees engage in online activities during an event: 20% comment/post, 17% check-in, 16% like/follow

Setting a Precedence For Event Attendees

Popularized by companies like Foursquare and Gowalla years ago, the checking in has branched into smarter versions of its former self for social networking sites and other app partners like Swarm, Yelp, Facebook Places. In fall of 2011, there were 750 million ‘check-ins’ online and now with the ease of mobile apps, Foursquare has accumulated over 10 billion ‘check-ins’ as recently as 2016. So what’s the draw?

Similar to these social network features, checking in to an event or meeting is a geosocial approach to location-based services for active user engagement. A ‘check-in’ feature allows attendees to bypass the lines and papers, and effectively reduce intake time from 10 minutes… to 2 minutes with a 3-second interaction.

Since the release of their 'check-in' feature, Yelp has reported 50% growth month-over-month in the number of check-ins.  A check-in feature not only creates a digital touchpoint with the customer, but also allows the business to influence future decisions by offering perks and discounts.

event app check in

In-App Event Check-In

Faster check-in significantly improves the customer journey when integrated with your mobile app initiatives. Rather than using separate or siloed apps and programs to manage your event logistics, a more holistic approach has a an instant 'check-in' feature integrated into the overall app experience.

An attendee going to a meeting can receive a notification that recommends they ‘check-in’ through the mobile app. As they do, users can see who else has checked-in and their social profile, and receive all the pre-reads and documents that will be covered in that day’s session.

Other ‘check-in’ benefits include:

  • Paper Free Wait times are reduced instantly. Paperwork and physical allocation of event or meeting collateral can be sped up with automatic badge printing.

  • Resources Untethered With all the processing happening directly in the app, you can reallocate managerial busy-work at check in towards more human-level interactions or other integral meeting and event touchpoints.

  • Logistics Relevance The customer experience continues through the mobile app with pertinent meeting information being shared and sent that is relevant to getting attendees when and where they need to be.

  • Processes Automated Push/pull communications are sent to event and meeting organizers to communicate the who and when to their attendees. Lists are instantly updated reducing the need for extraneous paperwork or consolidation.

  • Activity Centralized The who’s who of your experience is updated automatically in the activity stream giving users an idea of general attendance and specific updates for key people they are interested in networking with.

Each of these touchpoints decrease the amount of effort exerted by you and your team so that you can provide an optimized customer experience in a mobile dominant age of business. Streamlining your process with a ‘check-in’ feature ultimately allows you to provide an improved customer journey with improved attendee insights -  giving your company an innovative edge to the ebbs and flows of your live event marketing program.

 

#EventTech

Tags: Blog, Events, Features, Meetings, Social

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