Customer feedback is crucial for any industry and is a huge area of focus for meetings and travel industry as it helps to understand the major trends, address the gaps and enhance the offerings.
At the first ever Skift Forum Asia, Konrad Pant, our regional sales manager – Asia, emphasised on the importance of customer feedback, and how Cvent has evolved its products and solutions by constantly incorporating customer feedback. Watch the video below.
Narrating the Cvent story, Pant said, “Initially we offered solutions to help meeting planners automate their events and made their lives a lot easier, but then we started getting more feedback from them – that finding the venue to host that event in was a pain point for them. That led to the creation of Cvent Supplier Network, which is our database of event venues worldwide”. Planners can go to Cvent Supplier Network to source venues and send RFPs while hoteliers can promote their brand visibility to generate high quality leads. “Ever since that day, we’ve just been adding more and more solutions, both on the planner side and on the hotel side, just to make life a lot easier. We are a tech company, that is true, but what we’re really aiming at, is to become a one-stop-shop for event planners and hoteliers alike”, he added.
Capitalising Customer Feedback to Boost MICE Business
Venue sourcing is the key that connects planners and hoteliers, and to make the sourcing process easier, every year, Cvent releases a Global Planner Sourcing Report. “We’re gathering feedback from two sides of the pond — the planners and the hotels”, he said, “then sharing those results in data-rich studies like the 2018 Global Planner Sourcing Report.” Through the planner sourcing survey, meeting planners share their thoughts about the Cvent platform, the user interface and their experience while dealing with hotels. For hoteliers, the key is to get a deeper understanding of the planner decision-making process to foster those relationships that power MICE business. For instance, 84% of planners are not completely sure about the venue when they send out an RFP, which means that all hotels tagged on that RFP have an equal opportunity to win that business. Hotels need to be smart and act nimbly in order to take advantage of this situation- they need to respond to the RFPs on time, bid for the business appropriately by offering competitive pricing and finally win that business. Doing so, will help them stay on top of the game.
The 2019 Global Planner Sourcing Report has also been launched recently. Click here to read the report.
Sharing another interesting insight from the report, Pant stated, “For APAC, specifically, the average number of hotels copied for RFPs is five, so, if you are a hotel your chances of winning that business is one out of five. Out of these five hotels, one does not respond, and one declines the proposal, so effectively you are just one of three.” This means the chances of winning the business revenue is a lot more for everyone.
Customer Feedback Drives Business Innovation
The meetings and events industry is evolving faster than ever with more and more planners adopting event technology. Talking about the recent trends in the MICE industry, Pant stated how technology has progressively changed our lifestyles where we want everything to happen over a click, thanks to the mobile devices. Planners may find the conventional venue sourcing a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, hence, there is still a hunger to make this easier — to enable a direct online booking of a meeting without a RFP process specially for small or simple meetings. “If you focus on small and medium sized events, that’s where we’re seeing the highest growth”, Pant said.
This has been talked about for a while but given the increasing pressure from large planners for this capability, Cvent is definitely working towards making this a reality.
