By using Events AI to automatically assess key audience characteristics, you can keep your customers engaged, increase spending and lock in repeat business.
We’re often told not to follow the crowd, to avoid the masses and adopt a maverick approach but when it comes to running events, there’s nothing more vital than keeping the atmosphere of your audience positive. From the moment they spill through the entrance to when it’s time to shuffle out the exit, it’s critical to understand your audience and respond in real-time.
Where event managers once relied on manual head-counting and visual surveillance to capture the atmosphere of the audience, AI technology has taken the main stage. It empowers managers with exact data every step of the way, swapping human error for unerring precision.
DCM’s technology taps into existing CCTV image data to create a rolling count of crowd size, mood and social distancing. Interpreting this data enables you to measure happiness: the elusive, holy grail of events data, crucial for building a loyal audience. Here’s why it’s so important:
1. Happy customers spend more
The happier your punters are, the more likely they’ll take a punt on refreshments, upgrades and merchandise, spending money in line with how much they’re enjoying spending time. Retail customers spend 140% more with businesses they’re happy with, so it’s not a stretch to see that keeping your crowd keen will make them less likely to part ways with you and more likely to part with their cash.
But how do you know they’re happy? AI technology such as DCM is the key unlocking the ability to measure crowd mood. Monitoring this automatically and then smoothing out any issues flagged by the data will keep the balance in your favour, ensuring your audience is less likely to leave early and more likely to stay until the end, maintaining a steady stream of spending as the night goes on.
2. Negative experiences stick long in the memory
Due to collective negativity bias, we’re far more likely to remember the no-shows, let-downs and screw-ups rather than the good ones. It might seem like simple pop psychology, but anyone who’s ever had a bad time will know that they’re not easy to forget, especially when they’re immortalised online via TripAdvisor polemics and damning Twitter threads.
Automated crowd management, though, gives you the power to identify triggers of audience dissatisfaction, from long, serpentine queues to uneasy crowd mood (which both exacerbate each other to make matters even worse). This in turn lets you fix the issues in real time, making sure that any unhappiness lasts seconds not hours, soon forgotten in favour of favourable moments.
3. Plan ahead for future events
Events aren’t always perfect, but with the advent of advanced Event AI, there’s no excuse for not being able to respond effectively to increase impact and customer satisfaction. Monitoring crowd happiness and recording issues with mood, distancing and density doesn’t just impact the current event, but also helps you better plan for the future, preventing one-hit wonders that leave you confused about their success, or nightmarish reissues of past disasters.
Any time you use technology such as DCM, you’re making an investment in your upcoming events, arming yourself with key learnings about customer satisfaction to inform how you can best plan and operate your next show.
The customer, then, isn’t just the king, but has the potential to play God when it comes to the success of your event: making and breaking it via individual actions of spending and collective co-operation as part of the crowd. Keeping your audience happy is the secret to increased spending, diluting any negative experiences and ensuring that there’ll be a reunion between you and them.
Rather than trying to manually gauge crowd happiness, DCM’s technology empowers you with exact knowledge of your audience’s mood, letting you not just follow the crowd, but make sure the crowd wants to keep following you.