Offering online support at your event can significantly improve attendee satisfaction. Depending on your needs, you can set up a Help Desk Live Discussion or a Help Desk Booth. A Help Desk Live Discussion allows for public group conversations, while a Help Desk Booth provides private, one-on-one support.
Differences between a help desk live discussion and a help desk booth
Setting up a Help Desk Chat Room would allow Attendees to post questions and request assistance from selected members of the Organization in a group discussion setup. This Help Desk Chat Room, therefore, takes the form of a Live Discussion. All the messages are public and everyone can benefit from the conversations happening in the chat room.
On the other hand, creating a Help Desk Booth allows Attendees to connect with your Support Team through a private channel monitored by your own agents and/or Swapcard's.
How to set up a Help Desk Live Discussion
1. Set up Discussions in the Studio
Go to the Event Studio → Content → Discussions and click on New Discussion.
Fill out a name (mandatory field) and a description (optional) and click on Create.
2. Set up a Discussions page
To make the Live Discussion accessible, create a page by following these instructions:
Navigate to Event Builder > Pages & Menu > Add Page.
Select Discussions.
Add a label and edit the button color if necessary as well as the background image.
Look for the Discussion previously created to link it to this page.
The newly created page will appear on your Event's Home Page to all the Groups for which it's been enabled in the page's Visibility tab.
How to set up a help desk booth?
1. Custom field setup
When setting up a Help Desk Booth, technically speaking, you are setting up an Exhibitor Booth that you will use as a Help Desk.
However, to differentiate this Booth from the others in the system, it is required to set up a Custom field. This allows you to link that Exhibitor Booth (a.k.a. your Help Desk Booth) to a page on the Event Homepage.
The Custom field, only used for this Booth, allows you to "filter out" the Help Desk Booth from the other Exhibitor Booths.
To achieve this:
Go to the Studio → Content → Exhibitors
Click on Exhibitor Settings.
In the Custom fields tab click on Create Custom Field.
Fill out the Label as "Help Desk" to make it easier to find, and select Single choice as the format, click on Create the field.
Under Values, fill out the value "Help Desk" (click on the green "check" icon to validate the value).
2. Help Desk Booth creation
Go back to Content → Exhibitors and create your Help Desk Booth by clicking on the Create Exhibitors page.
On the next screen, you will have to pick among three setup methods. Help Desk Booths are most commonly set up manually (as opposed to a batch Excel import), but you can retrieve them for your Event if you have already created one at Community level, just like any other Exhibitor Booth.
For the purpose of this article, we will proceed with the manual option. Then, pick a name, click on Create, and voilà!
3. Help Desk Booth customization
Once the Help Desk Booth has been created, it will be displayed in the list of Exhibitors. Add all the essential information, documents, links, etc, as well as the necessary branding and images. Add the Team Members who will be in charge of supporting your Attendees, and finally, make sure you select the "Help Desk" Value within the "Help Desk" Custom field that you set up (during step 1. Custom field setup above).
4. Help Desk page creation
In the Event Studio, create a new Content from Event builder → Pages & Menu → Click on Add page.
In the list of Pages types, select Exhibitors. Name it ("Help Desk"), pick a color and a picture, and hit Create page. The newly created page will appear on your Event's Home Page to all the Groups for which it's been enabled in the page's Visibility tab.
Once the page has been created, click on the pencil right next to its name. In the Data tab, you will have to Add a Condition and only enable Help Desk, the Custom field value that you previously set up. See below:
Note that it is good practice to exclude the Help Desk Booth from the main Exhibitors list of your Event, or any additional custom list with Premium Exhibitors or any other type of categorization.