Ready to elevate your event management? The Dynamics 365 Customer Insights events planner leverages automation through Real-Time Journeys to ensure smooth events.
Events have diverse goals and are delivered through a mix of mediums. Thankfully, the Customer Insights event planner has many administrative and integration options for organising your events. Let’s look at some examples.
Digital Events
Does your business organise online? Customer Insights natively integrates with Microsoft Teams for hosting virtual events. You can quickly select the Teams toggle option in the event form and generate a custom URL that you can share with attendees. You can also add a contact-specific Teams event button inside your Journey emails and record attendee check-ins. You can select Teams Webinars, Meetings or Live-events for different event formats and functionality.
When configuring your Teams event, you also have the opportunity to configure options, such as allowing attendees to unmute, automatically record and enable reactions. This flexibility meets the diverse needs of businesses hosting events and ability to manage attendees experiences.
Using Real-Time Journeys, you can distribute communications to people registered to your event. For example, they can directly join the Teams event from an email. It’s also possible to send surveys via email or SMS to collect feedback from attendees post-event.
In-person conferences
If you organise in-person events for hundreds or thousands of people, the event planner has many administrative functions to support the smooth running of your event. For example, there are built-in Dataverse tables that help you keep information organised. These include:
Speaker management: Your in-person event will likely have keynote speakers or those holding round-table sessions. You can add these people to your event, which can be related to the contact table. You can also include their fee, identify the speaker engagements and even arrange their hotel.
Venue management: The events planner uses a hierarchy of Dataverse tables to simplify venue organisation. The Building table captures details like the address, capacity, room count, disabled access, and WiFi. Beneath it, the Room table tracks resources such as whiteboards, video conferencing, and reservations. Finally, the Layout table helps map floor plans, room sizes, and capacities.
Sponsorship management: If you are receiving support from other organisations to host your event, you can record this too. You can choose if they are providing financial, equipment or service support and the value of their contribution.
If you organise events that host many people, it’s important that your team can retrieve information quickly. For example, if you have a front desk enquiry about disabled access, retrieving that information is valuable and where the event planner shines. You could also use this information to create audience segments and email journeys.
Customer Insights event planner supports businesses to organise their event information efficiently.
Workshop events
If you organise workshop events, you can use Customer Insights to manage registrations and use Real-Time Journeys for communications for pre-event materials and post-event feedback. Another use for this is issuing certifications based on attendee check-ins.
You could also customise registration forms to understand desired outcomes of your event from attendees, select break-out sessions and record other information such as dietary requirements.
Paid passes can also be created for each event and integrated with a payment gateway, supporting your workshop to be commercially viable with convenient digital transactions.
By personalising communication and offering seamless access to resources, you ensure attendees stay engaged from registration to post-event follow-ups.
Trade Shows and Exhibitions
Many organisations such as trade associations want to host or contribute to large-scale events that showcase their company’s offerings while attracting potential customers and partners. Customer Insights events has the flexibility to help you manage this:
- Event registrations have their own ID and QR code, helping you to quickly check-in attendees at the trade show front desk for a seamless entry experience.
- Segment registrants into categories (e.g. exhibitors, attendees, VIPs) for tailored communications.
- Automate follow-up communications based on interactions, such as sending product brochures to attendees who visited a specific booth.
- Notify attendees of schedule changes, keynote speaker sessions, or special promotions via real-time push notifications, SMS or emails.
Thought Leadership Forums
If you need to create a platform for industry experts or thought leaders to share insights and engage with a targeted audience, Customer Insights can support you. You can manage registrations and RSVPs with waitlists to create exclusive events. You can also tailor your sign-up forms for capturing attendee preferences for topics to tailor future discussions.
Your event could be a a hybrid of virtual and in-person, providing access to people who can’t attend in person, but also provide an enhanced experience for people who have, enabling them to ask questions or engage with industry leaders post-session. You could segment these audiences post-event to send personalised communications. The application also integrates with Teams Live Events option which provides different functionality to the Webinar option mentioned above such as engagement reports and Q&A options.
Final Thoughts: Seamless Event Planning with Dynamics 365
Impressively, the Microsoft’s events planner in Customer Insights is rich with data input and flexibility. Typically Microsoft provide a small selection of fundamental fields then enable you to extend it. Whilst customisation is still available, we welcome this granularity detail from installation.
In addition, with native Teams integration and sharing the same Dataverse as Dynamics, you will be able to create a joined-up experience to provide positive event experiences in many environments.
If you need support with configuring your events, require consultancy on event planning or automation options or need to extend it further, please contact ServerSys to get started.
Further reading:
Glossary – Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys & Marketing
