Meeting Data Where It Is

Best Practitioner: Travis Steed, Elevance Health Travel Services Manager 

Best Practice: As its meetings volume kicked into high gear, Steed collaborated with the Elevance internal meetings and events team to produce an attendee management dashboard that combines data from HR, BCD and Cvent to highlight discrepancies, streamline meeting reports like rooming lists, departure and arrival reports and flight costs, and upload room lists directly to hotels. The tool replaces the work of one to two full-time staff members (depending on the size of the event) who now may be deployed on high-value contributions to the increasing and complex event volume at Elevance Health. 

BTN: Talk to me about the meetings and events environment the Elevance team was in to give some context to the importance of the work you did with data. 

Steed: Meetings were the first thing to come back after the pandemic, and they were coming back really strong. We didn’t have the support staff for meetings coming out of the pandemic that we had going into it and all of a sudden we had all these meetings coming in and meeting requests. We had to look for ways to maximize their time and make the process as efficient as possible. We needed the human resources to focus on the event return of investment, rather than manual processes that we didn’t have the support staff to do.  

What was the discovery process in terms of landing on data innovation as the best focal point for productivity efficiencies? 

Steed: We knew this was a manual piece [of the process] and we were hearing from event planners that this is a heavy lift. But we knew we had the data in these silos and these different places, if we could bring it together, we could alleviate that. A lot of the beginning, though, was trial and error. So I’m lucky. There are a lot of programs out there that I admire—small ones and big ones—but you talk to them about their events program and it’s separate. I’m lucky that I’m integrated with my events team and I understand their process. I started to build a framework that I thought might work for them; then, I just took it to them and said, “Does this matter? Does this not matter?” And they told me what they cared about and what would really help—and that’s how we honed the tool to produce the data that was really important to the event planner.  

What about when things change and they need different data, or you put something into the tool that wasn’t needed, or maybe even turned out to be wrong? 

Steed: You obviously do a test period. There were definitely things that didn’t work, and we had to reconfigure. You also have to give the users the power to remove and change things. And to be honest, we actually had to do a complete revamp about six months after launching. We just tore it apart and said, “No, we’re going to start from scratch and look at this a different way.” It was only then that I knew we could make it work.  

There’s a real love of data at Elevance—what do you do that you think is critical to making data meaningful? 

Steed: I think every company can bring data together, but there’s vendor data and security data and agency data. Once you start to bring it together yourself and look at it independently from those canned reports, you start to see your programs in a different way and you start to see different ways to use data. Combining the HR data is a big piece. That’s always going to be missing from anything you get from a vendor. Knowing where someone is within the organization, who they report to, their title … all that stuff is important.  

But also you are combining meetings and travel data with this tool. Is that something that you think will become more important for companies to consider? 

Steed: I think it’s a trend that we’ll see more of. There’s a lot of travel attached to meetings. But my agency setup and event registration tools are kind of separate, so we had to combine them ourselves. Not that I’ve seen this in the marketplace yet, but maybe down the road there’ll be somebody that combines these data sets more organically. But to have a successful tool, you still need the HR piece to marry it all together.