ON24 Digital Key Systems Automation Guide | Step-by-Step Setup

The hospitality industry is undergoing a digital revolution, and at the forefront is the adoption of Digital Key Systems. These systems promise seamless guest experiences, from mobile check-in to keyless room entry. However, the true potential of a Digital Key System is only unlocked when it is deeply integrated into your broader operational workflow. This is where the powerful combination of ON24 and advanced automation platforms like Autonoly creates a transformative impact. ON24 serves as a robust data hub for your digital engagement, capturing critical attendee information and interaction data from webinars and virtual events. When this rich dataset is automatically fed into your Digital Key Systems, you move from manual, error-prone processes to a streamlined, intelligent operation.

The strategic advantage lies in automating the entire guest journey initiation. Imagine a prospective guest attending a virtual property tour hosted on ON24. With Autonoly’s seamless ON24 integration, their registration and engagement data can instantly trigger a personalized follow-up sequence and, upon booking, automatically pre-provision their digital key credentials. This eliminates the traditional data silos between marketing efforts and operational execution. The tool-specific advantages are profound: real-time data synchronization, elimination of manual data entry errors, and dramatically accelerated time-to-value for every guest interaction. Businesses that leverage ON24 Digital Key Systems automation achieve 94% average time savings on administrative tasks, allowing staff to focus on high-touch guest services instead of manual data processing.

This automation provides a significant market impact, offering a competitive edge through superior guest experiences. ON24 becomes more than a webinar platform; it transforms into the foundational engine for advanced Digital Key Systems automation, driving direct revenue through increased operational efficiency and heightened guest satisfaction from the very first touchpoint.

While ON24 excels at capturing high-quality engagement data, leveraging this information for operational systems like Digital Key Platforms presents several significant challenges that hinder efficiency and scalability. Hospitality operators often face a critical disconnect: valuable attendee data from a beautifully executed ON24 webinar remains trapped within the platform, requiring manual extraction and re-entry into property management (PMS) and digital key systems. This manual bridge is where pain points proliferate, leading to data entry errors, significant processing delays, and a fragmented guest profile.

The inherent limitations of ON24 without an automation enhancement become apparent in daily operations. While ON24's API provides access to data, it lacks the native intelligence to execute complex, multi-step workflows across different applications. This creates a bottleneck; the data is available but not actionable without manual intervention. The costs of these manual processes are substantial, including increased labor hours, higher potential for room assignment errors, and missed opportunities for upselling or personalized welcome messages that require immediate action post-webinar.

Furthermore, integration complexity is a major hurdle. Connecting ON24 directly to a Digital Key System and a PMS often requires custom development work, which is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to maintain. Data synchronization challenges emerge, such as mapping ON24 registration fields to guest profile fields in the PMS, handling data formatting inconsistencies, and ensuring secure authentication between platforms. These technical barriers often limit the scalability of ON24’s effectiveness. As webinar volume grows or new properties are added, the manual processes become unsustainable, creating scalability constraints that prevent hospitality businesses from fully capitalizing on their digital marketing investments and delivering the modern, seamless guest experience that digital keys promise.

Implementing a robust automation strategy between ON24 and your Digital Key System is a methodical process that ensures long-term success and maximum ROI. With Autonoly’s pre-built templates and expert guidance, this journey is streamlined and efficient.

The first phase involves a deep dive into your current ON24 Digital Key Systems processes. Our expert ON24 implementation team conducts a comprehensive analysis of your existing webinars and virtual events, identifying key data points—such as attendee registration, poll responses, and attendance duration—that are most valuable for triggering automated workflows. We then calculate a detailed ROI projection specific to your operations, quantifying the potential time and cost savings. This phase also involves defining clear integration requirements, including establishing API access for both ON24 and your Digital Key System/ PMS, and outlining any technical prerequisites. Finally, we prepare your team for the transition, developing a change management and training plan to ensure smooth adoption and ON24 optimization from day one.

This technical phase is where the magic happens. We begin by establishing a secure, native connection between Autonoly and your ON24 account, handling all authentication and permission protocols. Using Autonoly’s intuitive visual workflow builder, we then map your specific Digital Key Systems processes. This involves designing triggers (e.g., “ON24 webinar concludes” or “ON24 attendee downloads a resource”) and actions (e.g., “create contact in PMS,” “send custom offer email,” “provision digital key access”). The critical step of data synchronization and field mapping is configured to ensure that information from ON24 flows accurately into your guest management systems. Before launch, we execute rigorous testing protocols for all ON24 Digital Key Systems workflows to guarantee flawless execution and data integrity.

A successful launch employs a phased rollout strategy. We often start with automating a single, high-value ON24 webinar series to demonstrate quick wins and refine the process before scaling to all events. Concurrently, we provide comprehensive team training focused on ON24 best practices within the new automated environment, empowering your staff to monitor and manage workflows. We establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for continuous performance monitoring and optimization, such as time-to-key-provision and attendee conversion rate. Most importantly, Autonoly’s AI agents begin learning from your ON24 data patterns, enabling continuous improvement by identifying new automation opportunities and optimizing existing workflows for even greater efficiency over time.

Investing in ON24 Digital Key Systems automation is a strategic decision with a clear and compelling financial return. The implementation cost is offset remarkably quickly by the substantial savings and new revenue opportunities it unlocks. A typical implementation with Autonoly is designed for speed, often achieving a full return on investment within the first 90 days, with a guaranteed 78% cost reduction on automated processes.

The most immediate impact is quantified in time savings. By automating the transfer of attendee data from ON24 to your PMS and Digital Key System, you eliminate hours of manual administrative work per event. For example, processing 500 webinar attendees could take a staff member 4-5 hours manually; with automation, this is reduced to minutes. This 94% average time savings directly translates into lower labor costs and allows your team to focus on revenue-generating activities like guest engagement and sales. Furthermore, automation virtually eliminates human error, leading to significant quality improvements: no more misspelled names, incorrect room assignments, or failed key provisioning due to data entry mistakes.

The revenue impact is equally powerful. Automated, instant follow-up sequences triggered by ON24 engagement (e.g., sending a personalized booking link to attendees who stayed for 80% of a virtual tour) dramatically increase conversion rates. You gain a competitive advantage by providing a frictionless journey from digital engagement to a confirmed booking with an already-activated digital key. When projected over 12 months, the ROI includes not just hard cost savings but also increased booking revenue, higher guest satisfaction scores, and improved staff morale from eliminating tedious tasks. The business case for ON24 Digital Key Systems automation is one of both efficiency and growth.

A regional hotel group with 15 properties used ON24 for virtual weddings and events tours but struggled with the manual follow-up process. Leads were often entered incorrectly into their PMS, causing delays. Autonoly implemented a workflow where ON24 registration data automatically created a lead in their CRM, and attendance triggered a personalized email with a booking link. Upon booking, the guest data was seamlessly pushed to their Digital Key system for pre-arrival provisioning. The result was a 40% increase in converted leads from webinars and a 50% reduction in administrative time per event. The implementation was completed in just three weeks, and the group now confidently scales their ON24 strategy.

A large beachfront resort complex faced challenges synchronizing data between massive ON24 marketing webinars, their central reservations office, and their proprietary digital key app. Their process was fragmented across departments. Autonoly’s solution involved creating complex, multi-departmental workflows. Now, ON24 attendee data segments guests into workflows for spa offers, golf bookings, and room reservations. The system automatically provisions offers and digital access rights based on the webinar they attended. This strategy achieved scalability for handling 1000+ attendees per event, improved cross-departmental visibility, and increased pre-arrival activity bookings by 25%.

A small, luxury boutique hotel had limited staff but wanted to use ON24 for personalized virtual concierge sessions. They lacked the IT resources for a complex integration. Autonoly’s pre-built ON24 Digital Key Systems template allowed them to launch quickly. After a one-hour session, a workflow automatically sends a thank-you note, a special offer code, and pre-provisions a digital key profile if the offer is redeemed. This resource-light approach delivered quick wins within days, enabled a personalized touch at scale, and became a key growth enabler for their digital marketing efforts without increasing headcount.

Beyond basic workflow automation, the integration of ON24 and Autonoly unlocks a new tier of AI-powered intelligence for hospitality operations. This transforms your Digital Key System from a reactive tool into a predictive asset that enhances guest satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Autonoly’s AI agents are trained specifically on ON24 Digital Key Systems patterns, enabling machine learning optimization that continually improves your processes. By analyzing historical ON24 webinar data, the AI can predict which types of content and engagement levels are most likely to lead to a booking, allowing for more targeted and effective automated follow-ups. Natural language processing (NLP) scans chat transcripts and Q&A sessions from ON24 events, extracting valuable insights about guest preferences and concerns. These insights can automatically flag special requests (e.g., "high floor," "early check-in") and populate them into the guest profile before arrival. This capability for continuous learning from ON24 automation performance means the system gets smarter with every event, automatically A/B testing subject lines in follow-up emails or optimizing the timing of digital key delivery to maximize open and usage rates.

The platform is built for what’s next. Our AI evolution roadmap ensures your ON24 automation remains at the cutting edge, ready to integrate with emerging technologies like voice-activated room controls or augmented reality property tours launched from an ON24 webinar. The architecture is designed for infinite scalability, effortlessly managing an increase from ten to ten thousand ON24-driven bookings without missing a beat. This future-ready approach provides a significant competitive positioning for ON24 power users, turning your marketing platform into a sophisticated, AI-driven revenue and guest experience engine. You’re not just automating tasks; you’re building an intelligent hospitality ecosystem that learns and adapts, ensuring your Digital Key System delivers maximum value long into the future.

Embarking on your automation journey is a straightforward process designed for immediate impact. The first step is to schedule your free ON24 Digital Key Systems automation assessment with an Autonoly expert. During this 30-minute consultation, we will analyze your current ON24 setup and Digital Key processes to identify the highest-value automation opportunities and provide a customized implementation plan.

You will be introduced to your dedicated implementation team, each member bringing deep ON24 expertise and hospitality sector experience. To see the value firsthand, we will activate your 14-day trial complete with access to our pre-built ON24 Digital Key Systems templates, allowing you to visualize the automated workflows specific to your needs. A typical implementation timeline sees initial workflows built and tested within 2-3 weeks, followed by a phased rollout.

Throughout the process and beyond, you have access to our comprehensive support resources, including dedicated training sessions, extensive documentation, and 24/7 support from engineers with specific ON24 integration knowledge. The next step is clear: contact our team today to schedule your assessment, launch a pilot project, and move toward a full, ROI-positive ON24 deployment. Our experts are ready to help you transform your digital guest experience.

How quickly can I see ROI from ON24 Digital Key Systems automation?

Most Autonoly clients see a positive return on investment within the first 90 days of implementation. The timeline depends on the volume of your ON24 webinars and the complexity of your existing manual processes. Key success factors include clearly defining your goals and having clean API access to ON24 and your PMS. For example, one client automated their post-webinar follow-up and digital key provisioning and recouped their investment in just six weeks by reallocating 40 hours of staff time per month to revenue-generating activities.

What's the cost of ON24 Digital Key Systems automation with Autonoly?

Autonoly offers flexible pricing based on the volume of ON24-driven automation workflows you run monthly, ensuring scalability and cost-effectiveness. Our typical packages range from a starter plan for small businesses to an enterprise suite for large hotel chains. When evaluating cost, consider the guaranteed 78% cost reduction on automated tasks. The investment is quickly overshadowed by the savings in manual labor, reduced errors, and increased conversion rates from ON24 events, making the cost-benefit analysis overwhelmingly positive.

Does Autonoly support all ON24 features for Digital Key Systems?

Yes, Autonoly provides comprehensive support for ON24's API capabilities, enabling automation based on virtually any activity within the platform. This includes triggers from registration, attendance, poll responses, resource downloads, and custom engagement alerts. Our pre-built templates are optimized for the most common Digital Key Systems use cases, and our platform can handle custom functionality for unique workflows, ensuring you can automate any process that involves ON24 data.

How secure is ON24 data in Autonoly automation?

Data security is our highest priority. Autonoly is built on a secure, SOC 2 compliant infrastructure and employs end-to-end encryption for all data in transit and at rest. Our connection to ON24 uses secure OAuth authentication, and we adhere to strict data privacy protocols. We ensure full compliance with industry standards, meaning your ON24 attendee data and guest information are protected with enterprise-grade security measures throughout the entire automation process.

Can Autonoly handle complex ON24 Digital Key Systems workflows?

Absolutely. Autonoly is specifically designed to manage complex, multi-step workflows that are common in hospitality operations. This includes conditional logic based on ON24 engagement (e.g., if a user attended more than 75% of the webinar, send Offer A; if not, send Offer B), seamless data mapping between multiple systems (ON24 -> CRM -> PMS -> Digital Key Platform), and executing advanced automation with custom payloads and API calls to handle even the most sophisticated Digital Key Systems requirements.