Cvent's ambitions were on full display at its Connect conference last week in Las Vegas. The company is making major investments to grow its international footprint, modernize and unify its technology platform and capitalize on a data-intensive market.
"The biggest change we've seen is growth," Cvent CEO Reggie Aggarwal said about the past year. "We are growing faster now than [the company] ever has over the last 19 years. We have a bigger global footprint, [with] global offices around the world. We opened offices in Australia and Singapore last year, and in the next 90 days, we'll open offices in Dubai and Frankfurt." With a growing global presence and global client demand, the event technology platform also is expanding its language set.
The company counts 3,300 employees, up from about 2,500 employees 12 months ago. Of those 3,300 employees, 1,100 sit in technology development, said Aggarwal. "No one in the industry comes close to what we invest in R&D and product. We believe we invest literally 10 times more than anyone else in our space."
That's likely. Since being acquired by Vista Equity in late 2016 and immediately merging with Lanyon, Cvent has dominated the meetings and events tech space in nearly every measure: platform coverage, company size, company funds, customer portfolio. Yet the company faces challenges that call for an aggressive technology road map and major investments to get it right: merging the industry's two largest and most competitive technology stacks and client bases, plus building tight integrations for all the smaller acquisitions Cvent has added to the platform over time. There's also the matter of what industry experts have called "ancient code" in Cvent's legacy platform that could hold the company back as newer, more modern players enter the field.
Flex Leads the Way
Cvent's leadership responded to these challenges last year, introducing new venue-search capabilities, as well as Flex, Cvent’s reimagined website-creation, registration and email tools. Billed as the company's largest-ever technology investment, Flex came into focus more fully this year after 12 months of beta testing with more than 1,200 early-adopter companies and 55,000 events planned. Now on version 4.0, according to product manager Nathan Chin, Flex will launch out of beta to the general client population in October.
Flex specifically is limited to website creation, registration and emails, "but hopefully it's a sign of things to come," said Chin, as Cvent rolls out updated functionality across its platform and offers tighter integrations among separate modules.
Flex offers a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach to building a site. It requires no programming or coding knowledge and focuses on design, branding and ease of use with drag-and-drop widgets that show the organizer an instant display of how the website will look and respond to attendee users. It also draws key content through the process, minimizing data entry for users. Flex offers broad color palettes, various templates and the ability to upload images that will customize the look and feel of the site. Global design themes are easy to manage and allow the creator to establish brand standards but also switch among compliant styles instantly throughout the site and immediately reflect the same changes in related email campaigns. The tool has a "save now, publish later" function that allows creators to build changes and content over time. Flex also will save past versions of the sites in order to document changes and allow creators to revert to previous designs. Flex sites are mobile responsive, and the tool will alert site creators to potential registration-flow problems as versions are published.
In October, Flex will become the default website-creation module for all Cvent users. "We will have the feature set 85 to 90 percent ready to go," said Chin. When users create an event from scratch, they will get a Flex template. However, clients will be able to store their legacy templates for about six months after Flex launches and use them as required. All historic events themselves will be stored in the user's account, but the design templates will be retired after the six-month grace period. Chin said certain exceptions might come into play but all clients should migrate entirely to Flex in the next year.
More Platform Enhancements
While Flex was the marquee rollout at Cvent Connect, the company announced plenty of platform enhancements and outlined some of its longer-term vision:
OnArrival: The onsite registration and check-in technology, developed on an Apple operating system, is the fastest-growing product in the Cvent platform and is now available on Android. The Android version handles onsite check-in for previously registered attendees and soon will offer check-in for breakout sessions. Cvent will enable walk-in registration on Android in the first half of 2019.
One-Touch Pay: Apple Pay and Google Pay will integrate into Flex registration sites by the end of 2018. According to Cvent, 30 percent of registration site traffic comes through mobile devices, making mobile wallets a smart target. Cvent will not integrate mobile payment into any legacy registration tools.
CrowdCompass: Cvent updated the CrowdCompass mobile app with best practices to deliver content in line with the life cycle of the event. Navigation moved to the bottom of the home screen. Also, while home screen content prior to an event builds anticipation and helps attendees plan, home screen content during the event features activities for each day. After the event, the home screen recaps the user's experience and encourages feedback. The updated mobile app is available now.
DocuSign: This integration is designed to facilitate contracting. Users can upload all standard contracts and amendments and push documents to venues via DocuSign. The integration is available now.
Universal Appointments: Coming in the fourth quarter of 2018, Universal Appointments facilitates onsite meetings between event participants and onsite sales and marketing. View schedules, book times, see where the team is onsite and share what the meeting is about. It also allows onsite representatives to append participant profiles with comments and appropriate follow-up direction. It enables marketers to benchmark appointment performance across shows.
Universal Lead Capture: Available now for early adopters, Universal Lead Capture integrates with badge companies and allows onsite marketers to capture data consent in a face-to-face environment, to qualify the leads and to normalize them into the marketing automation or customer relationship management tool.
Longer-Term Vision
Portals: A self-service, centralized solution for meetings and events stakeholders, Portals aims to scale meetings and events programs and take some of the heavy lifting off centralized meetings teams. The solution will launch in beta to early adopters this year. The first release will include five capabilities: Access to Flex for building event websites, controlled access with permissions configurable per user, flexible meeting request frameworks, an enterprisewide event calendar for visibility, targeted reporting to different types of stakeholders.
RFP-Free Small Meetings: Cvent is working with its hospitality supplier network to open meeting and sleeping room inventory for small, instant-book meetings. According to Aggarwal, suppliers are more willing to explore this opportunity than ever before. Cvent intends to get a beta product into the hands of early adopters in the next 12 months. The long-term vision is to remove the hotel RFP process entirely for simple events. This effort is separate from the newly acquired Kapow platform, which enables instant booking for unique offsite venues and event packages without sleeping rooms.
Advanced Event Analytics: Cvent will introduce four reporting concepts in the fourth quarter of 2018 and continue to develop them into 2019 with additional data sets. Event Snapshot offers a standard set of event analytics and visualizations. Session Overview allows event organizers to understand their session mix, attrition rates, session arrival patterns, and how speakers performed and collect feedback on the content. Attendee Journey delivers information about individual attendee activities and engagements during the event. Event Insights will allow a customer to build the data points and visualizations he or she wants for an event and will offer advanced audience segmentation. These reports will be available in September with some of the data activated in marketing automation and CRM tools by the end of the year. Mobile app data will be activated in marketing and sales tools by 2019.
Analytics is the endgame for meetings and events as the industry proves its impact on organization's and businesses' success. "The role of the meeting planner and hotelier has changed dramatically over the years from just planning and executing the event to measuring ROI, driving engagement, optimizing attendee experience and integrating marketing data and analytics. You almost have to be a technologist to be successful today in our industry," said Aggarwal.
While Cvent was already pursuing this goal prior to its acquisition, Vista Equity cemented that vision. To ensure success, Cvent is investing more in educating meeting planners, managers and marketers not only in how to use the tools and capture the data but also in how to apply that data back to the business.
In his keynote address at the conference, Aggarwal said that beyond all the technology development and unification, the most important part of Cvent's current investment strategy was the ability to "deliver more thought leadership and best practices" to the industry. As part of that push, Cvent will begin offering ROI workshops and a full suite of ROI tools in August to guide event planners and marketers in developing event ROI plans tailored to their organization's business requirements.