How Self Service Portals Can Add Value to Events

Improving your levels of efficiency and increasing the value of your events are two key drivers that help distinguish a successful events company from one that might be struggling in our current economic climate.

Whether you’re a company specialising in events only, or whether your business happens to hold regular internal and external events, you will want to ensure you’re operating at maximum efficiency and giving your delegates a high quality experience.

One of the ways in which you can add value to your events, is by giving some of the power back to delegates. Empowering delegates to manage some of their own event experience gives them a feeling of control, ownership and involvement. A key way of achieving this is to use event software to implement a self service event portal.

A self service portal can be used in a variety of ways, but within the events industry, it is commonly used to take event registrations and to give delegates a profile or account so that they can manage their details and event experience themselves.

Self service portals allow delegates to register online, then gives them the ability to login and manage their own profile. This can include their contact details, dietary requirements, event history, purchase of relevant event merchandise and more. They can view upcoming events and select whether this is something they are interested in attending. Delegates can also manage their communication preferences so that they receive updates on events that are relevant to them, via a medium that they would most prefer.

Being an online service means that delegates are able to register for events or log into their existing event portal 24/7. Online registration is now a medium that people are happy to use. The convenience of being able to access it online from any place at any time, means that people are more likely to register and will have a less stressful registration experience since they are in full control. Registering via your official event website gives them a familiar, trusted view, yet giving them access to their own (branded to your own corporate style) portal gives them the control to manage their own account.

Giving delegates access to their own event portal means that many of the jobs that the event manager would have managed, is now in the hands of the delegate. Updating contact details, changing dietary requests, selecting what presentations the delegate would like to attend etc, can now be managed by the delegate themselves. This means that many of the communications between the event manger and delegate can be removed, saving the event manager time and allowing them to work on more strategic tasks.

Many of the bottlenecks associated with event management can also be avoided via the use of a self service event portal. Many delegates may learn about an event over the weekend and will have to wait until Monday morning to call the event company to register. This can lead to a sudden peak in demand on Monday mornings, which can be hard to manage and control. This is often how mistakes are made, since the event manager is under extreme stress and trying to cope with an unrealistic workload. However, letting people register via the Internet means that this bottleneck can be avoided, since registrations can be made 24/7. Any changes they may wish to make to their event booking can also be made at any time via the self service portal.

A key benefit of the self service portal for event managers is that it allows them to access all their delegate information from one central platform. This makes it easier to create reports, download data and create delegate badges and custom event packs.

The self service portal can also be integrated to a company’s CRM system. This means that any changes the delegates make themselves to their contact details are automatically populated into the CRM. So at all times, their official record on the CRM is up to date and correct. This helps enormously in terms of keeping clean, accurate data.

Self service portals are often supplied as part of an event software solution. These solutions include a host of event tools such as email marketing, invitation management, online registration/microsite management, integrated survey’s and reporting tools and more.

Thie article was brought to you by evocos leaders in online event management software solutions.

Tags: Event Management, Event Technology, Trevor Tinker

Category: General Event Industry News