Meetings technology company StarCite this week publicly will inaugurate its first corporate meetings benchmarking and assessment tool, but meeting buyers disagreed as to whether corporate meeting programs have the proper metrics in place to allow for benchmarking.
StarCite will roll out its strategic meetings management assessment survey this week at the National Business Travel Association's International Conference and Exhibition in Boston, with an online launch to follow shortly after, said Kevin Young, StarCite vice president of worldwide marketing.
Survey answers will be used to compile a scorecard detailing the maturity of a company's strategic meetings management program. A follow-up consultation will allow for a more in-depth benchmarking against StarCite's client database.
"A lot of our customers have asked us to understand how they compared to their peers," said Young, adding that the company began the process in May after realizing that they were "in a unique position to gather data and gather enough data that it would be representative of industry verticals as a whole."
StarCite started collecting benchmarking data—information about basic spend, economic value and management process maturity—last week and expects to have a "robust database" by the end of this month.
"We have a very rigorous survey. We are going to capture the data and then we're going to use that data in statistically valid means," said Young. "StarCite clients will get the most benefit from this information," he said, adding that the company will "be able to help prospective customers build the business case for why they should adopt a strategic meetings management initiative."
The scorecard will allow meeting buyers to see where the weak areas in their programs are.
"They will be able to see how mature their process is compared to their peers," StarCite's Young said. "They will be able to see in what areas they can improve, and what they should do to improve in those areas. They will be able to get an idea for how much value they can generate for themselves if they improve in that process area."
"We can help each individual customer improve and we can take what we have learned and apply it to any one company and help them meet their goals," he said.
Meetings are an increasingly popular arena for benchmarking efforts. Atlas Travel International, which this month launched a multi-agency corporate travel benchmarking tool
(BTN, July 9), is planning on launching a meetings benchmarking tool by the end of the year, said Rock Blanco, Atlas chief technology officer.
"I think this would be a really content-rich database for doing that kind of analysis. It was something that we had in the plans for an expansion of the Travel GPA report card," Blanco said.
Ernest Guerra has been a proponent of benchmarking since becoming travel manager at Xerox more than a decade ago. Now the Nashville, Tenn.-based director of global travel and meeting services for American Standard Cos., he works in a formal benchmarking group with other buyers to check the progress of his travel program—including meetings—and to see what others in industry are doing.
"I have always been an advocate of benchmarking and I am not reluctant to call up somebody to see how they are doing," he said. "It gives you an opportunity to see how you are doing when compared with others. That is where the benefit comes in, when you share your ideas with other people."
Some key areas of focus have been room rates and cost per attendee, but it can be challenging to find other companies willing to share their information with others, he said
"People may feel that they are not ready for benchmarking," Guerra said. "Hopefully, you look for partners that are committed to improving, that want to bring something and are taking stuff away."
Meetings standards can be challenging to benchmark, though. "You have to find a company that has a meeting program in place, a company that has developed the key metrics and is tracking them," Guerra said, adding that he had not heard of a benchmarking group that focuses solely on meetings.
Others in the industry said that the meetings area as a whole is not standardized enough to allow for benchmarking at this time.
"We obviously want to, but to the best of my knowledge there are not any standard metrics across multiple companies," said Kari Knoll Kesler, global manager of Honeywell Meeting Solutions. Kesler said she would love to compare lead times and cost per attendee, "if there was some common baseline to stem from across multiple companies."
A reason for this is that companies often do not have their arms around meetings, she said.
"Companies are having such a challenging time being able to confidently say, 'We have all our meetings under scope.' Most companies are not to the point yet where they are capturing and dissecting their data in a way to make benchmarking possible," according to Kesler, adding that the corporate meetings industry is getting to that point, following the same path as travel managers did.
"I think that technologies in the marketplace right now, in general, are dependent upon their agency partners for really good data output and analysis," Kesler said, "which I think is unfortunate."