Digital signage is quickly integrating into nearly every industry, taking over billboards, posters, and advertisements, and growing at a massive rate of over 8% per year.
Newer technologies like Internet of Things, System-on-Chip displays, and efficient touchscreens mean digital displays seamlessly integrate into consumer and employee-facing applications, offering information, guidance, and entertainment, sometimes while driving ad revenue.
Digital signage is also increasingly proving valuable in organizations to facilitate messaging, branding, and communication. This is especially true in conference rooms, where digital signage takes on roles ranging from booking to branding and equipment management, offering value to both internal organizations and event-industry organizations offering conferencing to guests.
While digital signage requires a large investment and you shouldn’t purchase an installation without extensive research and cost-benefit analysis, digital signage has a lot to offer. In conference rooms, these benefits typically align with digital room management, equipment management, engagement, and reducing costs.
Digital Room Management
Room management is a struggle for professional conferencing organizations and offices alike. Double bookings, lack of room availability, and confusion regarding rooms and assignment are issues that plague every side of the conferencing industry. Traditional solutions include door signs which must be printed and updated, emailing schedules, using booking tools through a secretary or Microsoft Teams, and occasionally making mistakes.
Digital signage simplifies this process in several ways:
1) Digital Booking Tools
Digital booking tools mean that the room’s existing booking and availability is available on a digital screen whenever the room is brought up.
Depending on the organization, this can be a simple appointment booking application or an extensive room-booking one with customer and brand information.
The important thing is that anyone can see when the room is full, for how long, and by whom. The result is no more double bookings, no waste-time as employees go to rooms only to find them full, and faster room reservation.
2) Digital Door Signs
Digital door signs offer easy ways to update and remind users as to room schedules. Small displays are affordable to install on doors, and then can update in real-time to show who’s in a room, for how long, and who’s booked the room next.
Hotels and conference organizations can use these tools to offer branding, wayfinding, and value for the customer in the form of instructions and updates. Organizations can use these tools to keep employees up to date, reduce frustration, and offer employees the information they need going into meetings.
Highlighting Information In-Room
Digital displays offer easy ways to share information in a conference room. Data can be linked to equipment management, booking tools, customer information, fleet management, and to real-time data to pull KPIs, news, weather, and other information.
So, a team can step into a room and use the display to highlight information from a kickoff, to share project updates, and to collaborate in real-time. Leaving the conference, the screen can update to share information for new room-arrangement for the next user, allowing staff to quickly rearrange the room and change out equipment.
Boost In-Room Engagement
Digital signage offers interactivity, real-time data, and quality graphics no matter the light saturation of the room. A higher quality experience means higher engagement, more interaction, and more usability.
This is especially important in instances where conferences frequently include presentations, sharing graphics, and visual demonstrations. In-room digital displays can be utilized by conference members using remotes, cloud interfaces, and tablets. These can be utilized to share media, to access files, or to collaborate in digital whiteboarding and blackboarding environments depending on the organization and the display.
Simply adding multi-media support with video, touchscreen interaction, live streams, live data integration, and virtual interaction will greatly improve engagement in the conference, because information remains interesting, relevant, and changing.
Support Video Conferencing
Offering seamless video conferencing through a video wall or display adds value to any conference room, simply because it means individuals can log in and connect with other teams, team members working from home, or stakeholders in a video-native environment.
Digital displays make video conferencing simple, because large screens allow even multiple callers to be on-display and the center of attention. While video conferencing requires microphone and speaker placement throughout the room, the payoff is often quite high in increased conference flexibility.
Reduce In-Room Equipment Management
Digital signage is a fixed installation in a room, typically suffers from very few maintenance issues, and that offers options for equipment management in and of itself. Conference rooms with digital signage reduce the need to offer and install projectors, which require frequent maintenance and bulb changes, reduced needs for room-rearrangement, and reduce the need for staff to manage room details.
Digital signage can automatically link to equipment and room management tools. For example, modern digital signage software offers rule-based data display to automatically share updates relating to if a room must be re-organized for a new visitor, if the room needs to be cleaned, the maintenance status of equipment inside, and the needs of anyone in the conference.
So, if a room is booked as a U-shape setup with a large central display and a podium, the door-sign and in-room display can update to share this between meetings, so that staff can simply enter the room and manage tasks.
While digital signage is not a silver-bullet for all your conference room management problems, it can greatly simplify room booking, room assignment, and how media is shared and displayed in the room.
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