Cvent's Eric Eden Talks Three Tech Priorities

Cvent Blue Release, Cvent Express and mobile meetings apps were on the docket when BTN editorial director David Meyer sat down with Cvent senior vice president of marketing Eric Eden during the Cvent Connect conference at Las Vegas' MGM Grand, which drew almost 2,500 attendees. Most of the 1,600 meetings buyers among them were corporate, like Cvent's client base, which also includes several thousand association, government and not-for-profit clients.

It seems the most significant innovations you introduced in the past two years for the corporate market are the open architecture of the Blue Release and Cvent Express for less complex events.

The Blue Release, which came out last year, is about making the product easier to use. We have to balance [times] when our clients ask us to add new features with ease of use. The more something does, the more complex it could be. One of our biggest investments in technology has been making the platform easier to use but still having the functionality you need. If you go to Amazon.com, you don't need training to order something. We wanted it to be more intuitive and that's one of our biggest investments: making things simpler. Cvent Express is similar to that in that if you need to create a small event for 50 people, you should be able to do it, without training, in five or 10 minutes, and that's what Cvent Express does. That's also the thinking behind our hospitality cloud. We want to make it easier for planners to interact with hotels. It should be easy for the planners, and it should be easy for the hotels. It's about making things mobile friendly. That's what the Blue release is about.

Did you develop Cvent Express with customers?

We got tons of feedback because a lot of customers will put on one large conference but then they will do a thousand small meetings, and they want to have reporting that goes across all of [their] events. And they want to upload their database and their contacts so that they can invite people to small and big events and get reporting across both and have the data all in one place. We developed this because we had that feedback. It will be in beta within the next few weeks. We will test it with at least 50 to 100 customers for at least several weeks. A lot of our customers have meetings that only involve a couple of hundred people all year. They want to make a really great experience for the attendee, manage the food and beverage and room nights and get accurate counts and not have to manage it all in Excel, which doesn't allow you to share data across multiple people without merging control. Doing it manually just doesn't make any sense.

What you are looking at in terms of a new global product.

A lot of it is around languages, making it so that planners in France can use the back end of the system in French. Another part of it is that payment processing in Europe is different. We've had to help, for instance, customers manage [value-added tax]. You run into different types of complexities. On our hospitality cloud, the way people do sourcing in Europe is different. Seventy percent of it is through intermediaries that have a different workflow.

You also just launched a Community Portal to share best practices. So that is basically just a website?

Yes, it is essentially a website where customers can go and share with each other. We have customers who are in our product every day all day long. Of course they can ask questions of Cvent staff, but sometimes it is better for them to hear from each other how to solve problems or get the most from the system. We also have user groups by city where people can get to know other users and hear directly from them how they are using the system and what works for them. Some of it is just process.

What is Cvent’s status regarding the migration to mobile?

It is extremely important to the future of the company. We started with doing basic things like making emails that go out from our product mobile friendly, making our customers’ event websites mobile friendly, but the demand that we are seeing for mobile apps for conferences and events is through the roof. It is our fastest-growing product. The power of it for us is that it makes sense, if people are using us to register for a conference and choosing their schedule when they register, that the mobile app would link to that so that when they get to the conference, they can look at their schedule on their iPhones. We are building thousands and thousands of apps with our clients.

Why so many? Because they are customized?

They are configurable. We encourage customers, if they are doing 10 events, to create one app that can be used for the 10 events. Some big customers need separate apps for each one. The demand is there. Nobody was doing it a couple of years ago, but now everybody sees that you do not need to print out a huge conference brochure. Sponsors want to be in the app. It can give them reports on how many people clicked on their documents and sponsorship materials and read it. It fuels social media. It is a big shift. You have to market the app before the event. You have to get 80 percent of your attendees to download it. The benefits are huge because of data capture.