There’s nothing quite like the excitement of an event day. Your guests are ready to really soak in all that the day has to offer—but with all the fun and excitement comes the potential for incidents.
Problems inevitably arise, but can be resolved quickly when guests are able to easily communicate incidents to the right team.
Worldwide, use of instant messaging and communication software technologies such as SMS (i.e. “text messaging”) and WhatsApp are common methods of communication. Event managers, facility operations teams, and other professionals involved in event venues know this. Increasingly, customer communication software is helping teams quickly identify, address, and resolve customer requests and incidents before they become major problems or liabilities.
What Is Customer Communication Management Software?
Customer communication management software allows guests to instantly communicate with event staff through text messages or other popular instant messaging software such as WhatsApp messaging. The software is effective, affordable, and web-based. It empowers your team to mitigate incidents while they’re happening (or even before).
Here’s how it works—spoiler alert, it’s a fairly simple process!
1. Implement customer communication management software.
Event venue staff register for the software and undergo training for successful implementation. Users learn about the technical side of:
- Increasing awareness to anticipate and prevent threats
- Deploying real-time communication that leads to real-time data
- Capturing complete and accurate digital documentation for real-time analysis
- Customizing data the way your operation needs in order to improve and optimize
With the right software provided by the right company, users have access to expert assistance, a learning community, and ongoing customer support.
2. Guests sign up for one-on-one communication.
Promoting the one-on-one communication service is the first step in getting your guests to sign up. You can do this by sending emails to guests a few days before the event that explain the benefits and include the short code to sign up. The same information should be provided on signage throughout the event space so that guests can sign up on the day of the event.
Once they’re signed up, guests can send and receive real-time communication through their preferred conversation channel, whether that’s SMS text messaging, or even WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is a messaging app that offers end-to-end encryption, making it a secure way for businesses to communicate with customers through features such as the ability to create groups, send files, and make voice and video calls. WhatsApp has become one of the most popular messaging apps, with:
- 100 billion messages sent each day
- Over 2 billion monthly active users
- Billions of users who message businesses each week, and a business-specific app that has seen widespread adoption during its first release yearAvailability for use in nearly 200 countries, with thorough adoption throughout Europe
3. Guests report incidents; staff resolve issues.
The main benefit of customer communication management software for business is to improve the customer experience. This happens when:
- Fans and staff can share information about seat availability, bathroom and concessions lines, and other important announcements.
- Coordination between security and other personnel improves by sharing information about crowd control, safety hazards, and other issues.
- Mass messaging during an emergency provides information to all attendees, such as evacuation routes, the location of medical assistance, and other important updates.
- Guests who lose personal belongings can coordinate with the right personnel to find the lost items.
Your No. 1 priority is to create the best possible customer experience. Although a big part of this is putting on a good show, it’s also important to provide your guests with the right resources in the case of both big and small incidents.
What Are the Benefits of Customer Communication Management Software?
A phone call was once the fastest way to communicate with someone from a distance. But the number of phone calls made is now declining.
Why?
Instant messaging software provides a faster communication channel. In large event venues, instant communication software is often the fastest way to report incidents to the right personnel so they can be resolved as quickly as possible.
Here are some major highlights for your guests and staff:
It's a familiar technology.
There are over 300 million smartphone users in the U.S., and this number is forecasted to grow. So it’s safe to say that smartphone-based modes of communication—text messaging and WhatsApp, for instance—are going to be familiar to your guests. Also, consider younger generations: 75 percent of millennials prefer texting over talking.
It empowers your guests with immediate communication.
You hope the unthinkable never happens at your event venue, but imagine your guest speaking to a 911 dispatcher, being asked countless details needed for first responders to arrive on the scene quickly.
Most guests lack the emotional training and internalized logistical familiarity of your venue to rapidly inform first-responders on how to quickly reach the location of the incident. Unfortunately, many guests may hesitate to call for this very reason. A quick low-involvement instant message can quickly inform your team so you can get staff and other emergency responders on scene as quickly as possible.
It’s a two-way communication method.
There will be cases when the user of the software needs more information from the guest reporting the incident. If it’s a dangerous situation, the guest may need to relocate for safety.
What’s better: being distracted by a phone call, or responding to a message as soon as they’re in a safe location?
It gives your staff the tools to be proactive.
The primary duty of your staff is to keep your guests safe and satisfied. They can’t manage what they don’t know, and they can’t control what they can’t manage.
Customer communication management software gives your staff the one-click reports, analytics, and comprehensive stats they need to track and use analytics to reduce incident response time, by identifying historical incident and response patterns.
It helps to prevent future liability.
The potential for liability during unchecked incidents comes with the territory of putting on an event. You know this, and you need to ensure that you’re covering your tracks. Even though it’s up to the guests to report incidents, it’s up to you to make it easy for them.
With customer communication management software, you can store every single conversation between you and your guests in the database. That way, in the worst-case scenario, you can prove that you did everything possible to quickly resolve issues with the information available to you at the time.
What Should You Look for in Customer Communication Management Software?
You might be ready to start shopping around, but the truth is that the market has grown significantly over the past few years and is projected to grow even more in the future.
You don’t want to go through the headache of figuring out which features you should look for, so to help you get started, here are eight must-have features of customer communication management software:
1. Configurable inboxes
You need to know the types of communication coming into your platform. Are they dangerous incidents? A request to clean up one of the bathrooms? Obviously, these issues require different responses and personnel.
Ensure that the platform of interest allows you to configure your communication inboxes based on the type of incoming communication. This is possible by developing and assigning short codes to each inbox to ensure they are used for different purposes.
2. Multiple communication channels
Which communication channels do your guests prefer and are most familiar with? A reliable customer communication management software will support multiple messaging channels and protocols such as email, SMS (long-code and short-code), and instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp.
3. Color-coded message management
Customer messages must be easy to quickly and accurately manage. Users must be able to quickly identify which messages are unread, read, in-progress, and resolved. Color-coded messages quickly communicate each message’s status to ensure that no communication is overlooked.
4. Response templates
Once you implement customer communication management software and put it to use, you’ll notice a pattern—a lot of messages deserve the same response. With one-click configurable response templates, let your guests know:
- When their reported incident is received
- When someone is on the way
- When the incident has been resolved
5. Conversation thread history
Your personnel need to know how to prioritize tasks, not only based on the type of incident but also on the order in which the incidents are reported. Your platform should provide the date and time stamp of all conversations. This can also help with liability issues, if they ever arise.
6. Event day alerts
Your guests are excited to attend your event, so they’re probably not paying much attention to traffic, weather, parking, or news alerts. If you can get them to sign up for text or WhatsApp alerts before the event, you can send them updated information on these topics so they stay focused on what really matters: having the best time possible.
7. Schedule conversations
Not every message is going to be sent from a guest reporting an incident. Instead, you’ll be reaching out to guests from time to time to provide information on event specifics and other general information. Be sure you can prepare those messages before they’re ready to go with a function that allows you to preschedule a date and time to send.
8. Reporting and analytics
Your customer communication management software needs to generate comprehensive reports that provide conversation history, response times, and resolutions. Additionally, you need a function that schedules and sends summary reports directly to your inbox, so you can keep track of everything without logging into the system.
9. Integration capabilities
A reliable one-on-one communication solution should integrate with your incident management system (IMS) and computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) so you can simply send a conversation thread to either platform, or link the conversation thread to an incident record or work order.
Implement 24/7 Software’s Customer Communication Management Software
With all the fun and excitement of your event day, you need to prepare for both big and small incidents before they arise. When they do, you need to quickly communicate with your guests to find a resolution.
With 24/7 Software’s customer communication management software, you benefit from the features we’ve listed throughout the article. From configurable inboxes to color coding to reports and analytics, we have it all to help your guests stay safe and have a good time.
Want to take our software for a spin? Request a free demo today!
