Accidental Planner: An Easy Button?

New Cvent Essentials designed to power everyday events

You shouldn’t have to be an event tech expert in order to invite, check in and engage attendees at your field meeting. You just need to get the team together for a sales training or a client event. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easy button that would help with sourcing, creating a branded email invitation, printing name badges and even giving you the option of conducting polls and post-event surveys on site while collecting all the data needed to analyze the ROI?

Cvent announced the next generation of its Essentials portal to address this simplified use case. We cornered Senior Director of Product Management McNeel Keenan in Nashville at the Cvent Connect conference and asked him what that means for executive assistants, training coordinators and marketing managers.

You announced 70 product innovations and a $1 billion technology investment. What will be different for those who log in occasionally to plan an event or check the effectiveness of a meeting?

Event planning is complex. We are making Cvent more approachable to occasional users by allowing central administrators to build out templates with guardrails that supply the colors, fonts and logos, even the layout in websites and emails with bundled sequences for confirmations, reminders and follow-ups. This will ensure compliance and visibility without adding work to the administrator or the brand event professional.

How is the rest of the experience integrated once the registration is set up?

Onsite, they can check in attendees using a QR code, print badges on demand and run Q&As and surveys without requiring an app download. It will also capture all of that data, so it is easier to know who was in the room, make decisions about future events and report results.

Budgeting, contracts and payments will all be in one place so everyone has visibility into the process.

“We are bringing together all the capabilities under a whole new way to navigate the experience through the lens of AI. ”

AI was a big part of the MarTech product announcement. How are you using predictive technology to make event management less stressful?

Historically, there’s always been an inherent trade-off between providing deep capabilities requiring more training and expertise and straightforward usability with limited scope. The promise of AI might be removing the trade-off. Now, we can get those capabilities in the hands of users at exactly the moment that they’re looking for it just by talking to an AI assistant, telling it in plain language what you need and getting a response that’s tailored to your account. You don’t need to take a certification course or watch half a dozen videos. And it responds in seconds, not days or weeks.

What else will $1 billion in tech investment look like?

We are bringing together all the capabilities under a whole new way to navigate the experience through the lens of AI. A powerful planner assistant will unlock more capabilities inside the platform and link to external workflows.

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McNeel Keenan, senior director of product management at Cvent, oversees the development of event technology that helps planners streamline operations and enhance the attendee experience, drawing on years of experience building solutions for on-site, virtual and in-person events.