As the venues and events sector worldwide slowly begins to open up again post COVID many operators are looking at ways to drive efficiency and productivity within their organisations, whilst still delivering world class visitor experiences.
We take a look at some of the latest technologies available which can help to streamline operations, deliver automation, improve efficiency or create better visitor experiences.
Venue & Event Management
There are a number of venue and event management platforms available in the market now that provide robust and effective solutions to help manage and run day to day operations. The general focus is to automate existing manual processes, ensure all team members have easy access to all relevant information provide greater transparency and reporting to streamline the operation.
VenuePro is one such global technology platform that simplifies the management and operation of venues and events. It’s made up of 14 distinct modules (with more modules in development) which together create a powerful end-to-end platform. But clients can also select individual modules that are relevant to their operation, to create a tailored solution that fits their specific requirements.
The platform aims to ease the pain points, solves the issues and overcome the challenges that venue operators face on a daily basis to help deliver a more effective and efficient operation.
The Internet of Things
It is likely that the threat of COVID will be with us for some time to come, so businesses need to continually adapt to keep visitors and staff safe but allow large gatherings again to get back to full capacity.
Using IoT technology venue and event operators can utilise a combination of internet connected sensors, analytics and reports to gather valuable intelligence and business insights helping to increase efficiency, ensure visitor health and safety, improve experiences and deliver a better ROI.
The use cases and benefits of IoT are significant ranging from helping to create better in stadium experiences by engaging and connecting better with fans, helping visitors to find car parking spaces more easily, monitoring and recording facility usage, identifying any malfunctions and equipment breakdowns as they happen, monitoring energy usage, tracking and managing visitor flows and faster transmission of data and understanding visitor behaviour.
Augmented Reality
A technology that has been with us for a number of years now, but is becoming more mainstream as a way of creating better experiences for visitors in a wide range of situations. Augmented reality can not only help operators and marketing teams serve relevant, engaging content to visitors and guests but AR can also create better experiences and user journeys for guests.
For example it is possible to offer an interactive way for every visitor to navigate, by helping them find their seats, join their friends or discover points of interest more easily. It can also provide relevant and useful information at specific location points of a venue to assist visitors at a specific moment.
As the prevalence of 5G augmented reality will help to drive innovations in stadiums & bring immersive experiences to physical places.
Wearable techology
Again wearable technology is nothing new but COVID has helped to accelerate the advances and adoption of this innovation as operators have needed to find ways to ensure social distancing through contactless entry and payments.
Items such as smart wristbands and badges using near-field communication (NFC) chips allow contactless entry and keep lines and crowding to a minimum. They also ensure a more secure environment by reducing potential fraud, controlling access to certain areas and make processes more streamlined such as checking in or exchaning contact information as well as the obvious productivity benefits of cashless payments.
Wearable tech can also help with monitoring of visitor flows and visitor behaviour as well as tracking of staff locations to quickly deploy teams to new locations as and when required.
And used well the aggregated data and analytics garnered from deploying wearable tech can provide valuable insights and intelligence not only in real time but also post event, which can help to make the operation more effective and efficient going forward.
Geofencing
This location-based technology essentially creates a virtual ‘fence’ around a specific geographical location, which could be a stadium, arena, exhibition centre, theme park or any other venue.
Attendees entering the geofenced area and location points within a venue can then trigger specific actions, such as an event check-in, push notifications, or advertising related to the event via their smart phone.
From an operational perspective this can be useful to allow for seamless registration and check in, along with automatic app downloads once they are on site. But the geofencing technology can also be used to send information and also marketing messages, so provides an additional revenue opportunity.
Once again aggregated data and analytics can be extracted from this technology which can be used to understand stats such as average attendence or dwell time.
To find out more and see how VenuePro can help your operation please get in touch at contact@approved-tech.com
