Buyers Struggle To Navigate Tech Maze

Development of corporate meetings management technology tools has gained speed this year as companies from small attendee management service providers to large travel management providers unveil new tools aimed at event sourcing and management. However, corporate meeting buyers may have trouble separating fact from fiction in the capabilities of these tools, consultants said.

One of the first myths to dispel when looking at meetings management technology is that products available on the market are still years behind transient travel tools, said Michelle Lee, managing director of the internal client services group at New York-based Credit Suisse First Boston. The benefits of using technology around data reporting, control and security are obvious, she said, but many meeting managers are concerned about how technology affects attendees and may be slow to adopt new products.

"What's most important to us on the event planning side is what the end-user experience is and making sure that is as seamless and easy as possible," Lee said. "We're moving forward quite a bit on the technology side for events."

Adoption of new technology generally follows a theory put forward by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm, published in 1991, said Jeff Rasco, president of Wimberley, Texas-based Attendee Management Inc. and a principal in Tech3 Partners Consulting. Visionaries and pragmatists may adopt a new technology easily, but it's up to providers to develop mainstream products that will cross the divide into universal acceptance.

"Companies that are producing technology get to the chasm and are afraid they will fall in," Rasco said. "Then, they don't make the investment and take it to the next step to make it broad-based."

Another technology myth that pervades the meetings industry is that by adopting "end-to-end" solutions, anyone in the company would be able to plan small events and there no longer would be a need for designated meeting planners, buyers said.

"Automation does not replace people," Lee said "We use it for everything we do, but it will never replace the team that we have."

Tools are a benefit to productivity and efficiency, but they are best used within a managed policy and meetings program, said Lynn Ridzon, director of global meeting management for New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.

"I have a real problem with some of the electronic tool providers who go out and sell their tool as a fix-all to everything," Ridzon said. "That is total fiction. Every tool needs oversight. You need to define what a meeting is and you need to decide how you're going to benchmark it both from a strategic meeting expense management perspective as well as an individual meeting project and attendee management perspective. It takes expertise to do the program."

Though some buyers are hesitant to adopt an expensive technology product, fearing it quickly would be outdated (Meetings Today, April 3), legitimate technology companies offer free and frequent updates, Rasco said.

Lehi Mills, vice president of strategic business solutions for Woburn, Mass.-based travel management company Travizon Inc., said the company has launched a new Web site and tech tool for its growing meetings management services. Updates automatically are passed on to customers because the product is a Web portal.

"The final product is going to be released to customers in September of this year," Mills said. "What the meeting portal will do is bring all aspects of a company's group business, meetings or incentives into one location."

Mills said group air booking and fulfillment also is built into the tool, which integrates with other technology products. About 25 percent of customers using the tool are new to Travizon, and the rest were existing customers who adopted the tool.

Mills said the most exciting developments in meetings management technology involve radio frequency identification tags that allow managers to track attendees.

"We're doing it, but it's so new that customers don't know about it. It's great to be able to showcase stuff like that because it opens up new doors for them and things they haven't thought of," Mills said.

Meetings technology providers also have touted global tools that allow multilingual and multi-currency data collection. Buyers should ask technology providers to specify what those tools do, consultants said. For example, buyers should question whether multiple languages are supported on one registration page. The more demands a buyer makes, the better idea providers have as to which tools to develop.

Stanley Chin, COO of Santa Clara, Calif.-based OnVantage Inc., said such tools as electronic requests for proposals have become absolutely necessary as corporations funnel more meetings in a shorter period of time through a managed program and hotels swing to a seller's market.

"A couple of years ago, when availability was loose, there wasn't as much of a need for electronic RFPs. They could use the phone system to call a couple of hotels. Now with availability so tight, they can't necessarily do that efficiently," he said.

Corporate meeting buyers also should establish a clear definition of "integration" from the technology providers, consultants said. Though many tech providers claim that their products work seamlessly with other tools, that might not always be the case. For example, if the online registration product is truly integrated with a group air booking tool, attendees' information automatically would be uploaded to the booking tool, and then reservations data should be sent back to the registration tool.

"The only end is a dead end. At some point, one part of the technology doesn't truly talk to another part of the technology," Rasco said.

True integration and end-to-end systems still are "the holy grail," he added, "when a person going to a meeting can enter one site, make all of their arrangements and have the information flow back into their profile, while the airline and hotel all have what they need."

Ridzon said Bristol-Myers Squibb last year implemented a new group booking tool for its internal events.

"We've found that it worked pretty well. It wasn't perfect when we first rolled it out," Ridzon said. "Just as with any tech tool—like five years ago when we began to use an electronic attendee registration tool—the group booking tools aren't perfect at this time."

Problems arose when attendees were timed out of the system or were confused over the process and did not complete it correctly. As Bristol-Myers Squibb rolls the system out to meetings that include attendees from outside the company, Ridzon said she is collecting suggestions on how to improve the booking process. For external meetings, attendees are given the choice to use the online group booking tool or to arrange their tickets through the old system.

Though many of the tools being unveiled for the meeting management industry may need additional fine-tuning, Rasco said all new technology generates misconceptions. "Every new technology produces its own myth, and then the shakeout occurs and we find out what was fact and what was fiction," he said.