OPTIMISING THE WORKFLOW FOR MID-MARKET PLANNERS IN THE CVENT SUPPLIER NETWORK

Abstract

Event managing and planning can be a very challenging and stressful job for planners, requiring effective time management, efficiency, and coordination through each stage. Being the third most stressful job in the world (World Scholarship Vault, 2022), event technology can be useful for saving time by automating manual processes. Event technology helps enhance an experience and allows for more professional ways of planning and reliable execution (O’Connor, 2016). Event planning involves several stages that can be categorized as pre-event, during-event, and post-event, according to Wiley (2018). In the pre-event stage, which primarily involves logistics and planning before the event takes place, one of the jobs of the event planner is to source a suitable venue. This involves the planner searching for a location/destination/venue that will be appropriate for the event or meeting. Cvent offers SaaS-based solutions that automate the process of event planning. One of these solutions is the Cvent Supplier Network (CSN) which automates the venue-sourcing process for planners. The focus of this project is to gain insights into how mid-market planners (MM planners) leverage CSN for sourcing venues, understand their needs and challenges, and identify all the gaps or friction points they encounter. The ultimate goal is to recommend solutions that can help optimize the workflow for mid-market planners and make their CSN Phoenix (CSN PHX) experience seamless, intuitive, and easy to use. CSN Phoenix is the new experience that proceeds the older version called Normandy. The main objective of the new planner experience is to increase adoption and planner engagement in CSN. There are different categories of planners, which include enterprise/corporate planners, third-party planners, and casual/occasional planners but this project primarily revolves around discussing the ways to tap into viii mid-market planner capabilities. The key to gaining a deeper understanding of mid- market planners was the primary study that involved unmoderated interviews with client-facing internal stakeholders. The stakeholders belonged to the product, sales, research, and client services team. The interview findings were consolidated and analyzed by conducting a thematic analysis. Some of the important insights surfaced usage of the platform by mid-market planners. Since these planners are within the system only a few times a year, and leverage the most basic bundle as their licence module, they do not have an active client success team assigned to them as it is not very profitable. As a result, they lack awareness of the system’s features, functionalities, and updates. Additionally, MM planners are not very well-versed with the system and lack the necessary support to address the challenges encountered on the platform. As a result, they find the system very complex to use and is not customized to their needs. Once the emerging findings were analyzed and prioritized to formulate the key pain points/HMW statements, the next step was to move to the Ideation stage. To achieve this, a brainstorming workshop with participants from cross-functional teams was conducted. the subsequent steps involve analyzing the emerging ideas, creating paper prototypes, low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, and concluding with testing.