2018 IAEE Expo Expo
Aaron Dorsey, PMP
Sr Director, Strategic Client Technology
Experient, a Maritz Global Events Company
Jamie Murdock
VP, Sales
Experient, a Maritz Global Events Company
Business Objective: Attendee Experience/Engagement
Topic Area: Other
Company Information:
As one of the world's leading event management companies, Experient provides the expertise and experience that helps organizers deliver exceptional event experiences. Experient's core services include meeting and event management, hotel and site selection, housing, registration, lead retrieval solutions and data analytics.
Product Information:
Experient’s Behavioral Science Toolkit - Experient has developed a stack of tools that allow us to understand guest behavior through various phases of an event. These tools include ways to measure engagement, understand satisfaction and to collect feedback from guests real time during the event cycle in order to drive decisions through data.
Benefits include:
- Reduced check-in times for attendees who opt-in to face recognition
- Decreased staff burden due to self-check-in capabilities
- Flexibility in registration location thanks to portable kiosks which can be placed in hotels, airports and more
- Delighted attendees who are amazed by this quick and accurate technology
- Increased professionalism: you will be seen as an industry leader by employing the latest technology.
Case Study Information:
Experient has developed a stack of tools that allow us to understand guest behavior through various phases of an event. These tools include ways to measure engagement, understand satisfaction and to collect feedback from guests real time during the event cycle in order to drive decisions through data.Experient has created the Page Performance Report, an automated report that measures how guests are using our websites when registering and booking their housing. By tracking how much time a guest spends on a specific task in the registration or housing process, coupled by the percentage of exits on that page, we can understand where guests are succeeding or struggling without directly getting input from them. Analyizing this data and comparing it to an aggregated view of all clients allows Experient to benchmark performance and suggest best practices. This report is available at the touch of a button to all Experient clients and we have had great success in utilizing this data when evaluating the user experience. If a potential problem area of the website is identified, our teams utilize a server-side monitoring tool to observe and record guest interactions as they proceed through customer websites. This tool helps us turn our assumptions into understandings by allowing us to experience the site through the end user’s eye. One client’s registration website was producing abnormally high dwell time and exit rates on the membership lookup page. Once the data showed an anomaly, our teams recorded a subset of users going through the website and identified the problem. In this case, the issue was resolved by simply reducing the number of search methods to find the guest membership record. The Experient team consulted with the customer and made the necessary changes to the process and the results were amazing. Over 16% fewer exits on the membership lookup page, and 17% less time spent on the page, resulting on more converted registrations. Another client witnessed similar results using the same Experient tools but this time on the hotel search page of their website. Using the Page Performance Report to measure exit rate on the page, we made a significant aesthetic change and saw the exit rate decrease by 16%. This means more rooms booked within the block and more revenue to the client! Experient is finding these type of victories across the board using the tools available in our Behavioral Science Toolkit.Another tool that is allowing our teams to gather more feedback than ever is the Page Level Survey Widget. Experient has found that adding a quick feedback mechanism at the bottom of each webpage in the registration and housing process is much less daunting for the event guest and has resulted in exponentially more data insights. Experient has set up reports to allow our client’s to see this daily and the actionable data allows us to quickly pivot if something is not successful in the process of online registration and housing. One Experient client that used to ask a survey at the end of the registration process saw results increase from approx. 100 responses in prior years to over 23,000 responses implementing the survey per page this year. That is an incredible amount of data to have from real guests! Experient has found that implementing the Page Level Survey Widget produces an average of approximately 2,500 responses per page in the registration process. Another current client had an abnormally high volume of customer service inquiries historically with their event. Experient gathered all of the data from previous years to create a targeted FAQ document on the website, along with an auto-responder email with quick links to helpful sites based on what we learned from looking at the data. This technique resulted in 37% less customer service interactions. That translates to 2,000 less emails, 100 less chats and 1,800 less calls to customer service. Imagine the time savings and guest satisfaction!
When implementing new ideas to enhance the registration and housing process, Experient has created a method to implement A/B testing on customer websites. This means we can randomly select guests to test different ways to solve a specific problem, measure the results and then make a decision based on the data. For example, Experient can alter the website flow so one guest sees a page that has a red button and others see the page with a blue button. That is a simplified example, but measuring the conversion rate based on experimenting with actual users leads to making better, more informed decisions, improved user experiences, and higher throughput on websites. All of these tools described are available to all Experient clients as part of our Behavioral Science Toolkit. This toolkit and way of thinking has helped Experient leverage data to make decisions and take our client’s events to the next level.