Meetings technology provider Groupize has expanded its capabilities and now manage complex meetings, not just simple ones, the company announced. Previously, Groupize served as a complement to larger suppliers that handled bigger meetings and events for professional planners yet didn't offer a do-it-yourself solution for simple meetings and events.
Groupize then found that 79 percent of its clients didn't have another tool and already were using it for both types of meetings, prompting the company to build out its offerings, Groupize founder and CEO Charles de Gaspe Beaubien told BTN.
"We are now playing with the big boys," de Gaspe Beaubien said. "The market pulled us upstream. It's [usually] hard to deploy a full [strategic meetings management program], and it's expensive. But we offer a more modern approach and are easy to deploy."
Dubbed Groupize 3.0 by the company, the upgraded solution offers several new features for clients. One, a registration module on the homepage, can help companies increase their visibility into the meetings are being planned and their spending. New events are added to a company calendar and a duty-of-care map. "In the old days, it was a five-minute form," de Gaspe Beaubien said. "In 2020, it's eight fields and you're done."
There's also a budget tab that includes a calculator to help better determine the cost of each meeting. "You can upload a total budget or items, and you can attach multiple contracts and invoices and store them in one place," de Gaspe Beaubien added. "You can request a meetings card from finance to pay for the meeting, and that's how we are seeing adoption." The company already is working to expand this feature in the near future.
The product can house the company's meetings policy and be set up with rules that guide users down an appropriate path. For example, users planning an event for 50 people and 25 rooms would be led to the tool's DIY mode, in which the user, whether a professional planner or administrative assistant, can deal directly with hotels. If the event instead is for 1,000 people over three days, the tool would deem the meeting complex and the registrant would be required to complete a meeting request form, which is new to Groupize, and that form would be sent to the meeting planning desk, where professional planners will fulfill it.
When shopping hotels, the tool can show preferred properties and promotions as well as hotels with canceled space. Groupize doesn't yet have the ability to push those property attributes to the top, ordering options instead by distance, but the company is working on that feature, de Gaspe Beaubien said. In addition, as BTN reported in November, the company is adding about 20,000 non-hotel venues to the product. They are expected to be available during the second quarter.
Groupize also has expanded its reporting capabilities with Tableau, which it added last August. "When it was first available, it was more an offline matter. We would run reports for customers and send them," de Gaspe Beaubien said. "What is new is they have direct access into their own data, and they can share it and slice it. There are 30 more reports available and we keep growing them."
Groupize is adding a new client with 40,000 employees, de Gaspe Beaubien said, adding that its single sign-on feature is a must when dealing with that many potential users. He said the product was now accessible to more meetings stakeholders. "Our key buyer was always the travel manager, and admins were in the mix," he said. "Now we are seeing more stakeholders involved in managing meetings and have different drivers. Procurement is a big one. We've seen meetings report to security and that's obviously for duty of care and knowing where people are. Risk mitigation. Who is signing what contract? Data privacy. We check the boxes for them."