We had been doing a lot of virtual meetings with customers, as everyone has been, and frankly we thought customers were being fatigued by the number of meetings they were in. Everyone looks the same on these generic platforms and we really wanted to have an experience for our customers that more closely mimicked what they would experience in a real person to person event. 

So we did a little searching around – mostly for a social gathering point – to try and re-create one aspect of our annual event, which had to do with meeting in a bar. And through that we found the LIVE! platform and then we learned about how that platform could be used to make a really compelling space for customers to have meetings with us. We took to that right away, it really was different. 

We were able to have virtual meetings with our customers really at any time because we have a very good well-aligned customer base. But in the virtual world, we had a lot of people to see, we had a compressed time to do it in and by having the LIVE! platform with the multiple meeting rooms, we were able to compress our schedule down to a much more efficient time frame. For example, if we wanted to have 15 private meetings with our key accounts, that would go over a three-day period. We were able to have those meetings all in one day because we were able to have multiple meetings simultaneously with exactly the key people in the key rooms simultaneously on the platform, but the customer still felt like they were having the direct, personal experience. So the efficiency of the platform was really what surprised us – how much we were able to accomplish in a short time-period. 

We have a lot of very sophisticated customers that we communicate with on a very high level. They share their long-term strategies with us and us with them, and doing that in a private setting is really what’s required. Doing that in the social platform, of course, is difficult because of the uncontrolled environments you can find yourself in. So having the private room, our customer was able to come to the event, more around the event and experience the things that they wanted, but at a specific time they were to go to the EVS host, be greeted by name, we knew exactly what room they were going to be going to and who was supposed to be there. And then once they were in that room, they were out of view of all the other attendees at the event, and therefore they felt comfortable that they could have that higher-level strategic experience with us without being concerned about leaking of information. 

Everybody is experienced with doing a virtual meeting – we’re all living that way these days. But using the LIVE! platform with it’s features was a new experience for us and we wanted to make sure our customers were comfortable and could take advantage of the platform. So the LIVE! team was able to give us a lot of education well before the event on how to use certain rooms, what kind of content would be good in one room versus another, ideas that they’ve seen work at other events.. And it gave us the ability to actually craft variable experiences for our customers. So it really allowed us to customize and tailor. The other thing was we had to bring a lot of our team into the virtual meeting to support the event – there hosts and things like that, and presenters – and not all of them were extremely well-experienced with operating virtual platforms. And so we had several days of training leading up to the event, and dry runs where everybody got to experience the platform – how to navigate it, how to use the tools – because that made our customers more comfortable when our people knew exactly what to do. And finally we of course had the LIVE! staff online in the background that if we ever ran into some trouble, all we had to do hit on the Help button and we were able to connect with a LIVE! staff member that either helped us or helped one of our customers get what they needed. So it was a really good 360 pre- and during the event support model.