If your events are complex, Cvent just might be your answer
October 27, 2015
If your events are complex, Cvent just might be your answer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Modules Used
- Events
Overall Satisfaction with Cvent Event Management
Our Corporate Events Team uses Cvent Event Management for a wide array of corporate events. We create and execute client and internal events that span everything from large conferences, volunteer events, employee appreciation, client entertainment, internal education, international meetings and receptions, etc.
The Corporate Events department is the primary user of this tool and our events span all department of our company; however our Intermediary Investments group also uses it for their numerous events.
Cvent allows us to create and send tracked and brand approved invitations, report metrics, manage responses, maintain a database for our contacts, track budgets, send post-event surveys, and much more. It centralizes all of these functions in one location with the flexibility to customize our program relatively efficiently according to our needs.
The Corporate Events department is the primary user of this tool and our events span all department of our company; however our Intermediary Investments group also uses it for their numerous events.
Cvent allows us to create and send tracked and brand approved invitations, report metrics, manage responses, maintain a database for our contacts, track budgets, send post-event surveys, and much more. It centralizes all of these functions in one location with the flexibility to customize our program relatively efficiently according to our needs.
Pros
- Reporting: While a bit cumbersome to learn, the reporting functions are incredibly helpful. You can create custom reports with virtually every piece of information that is or can be gathered through the system. Not only can you vary the fields, filtering, and sorting of your information. You can also provide links to non-cvent-users in your firm or elsewhere for access to real-time information on any report. These are password protected for security purposes.
- Support: By and large the support team for Cvent is incredibly helpful and there is always a tech available to speak to you. They worked extensively with us to build a detailed registration template and to format all standard event emails according to our branding. They continue to provide expert support when we have issues or when we have a particularly complicated registration process, working with us to create the most efficient process.
- Broad user base: When you have an organization that is continually seeking to improve and that has a large user base with a variety of events and issues encountered, the feedback and improvements will cover more ground. Since there are so many users in from so many industries, it is rare to encounter a unique issue, and therefore rare to have an unsolvable problem. It's a well-rounded platform and that instills confidence as a user.
Cons
- Our firm actually used a different event management platform prior to moving to Cvent. We made the switch for the reasons listed as Cvent's strengths, as well as more capabilities and flexibility to customize. It was the right decision. However, that being said, there are some areas where our previous platform outperformed Cvent.
- The first is organization within the platform. Our previous supplier had the capability to create folders and sub-folders, similar to how you can create these on your computer, and it made the process intuitive and clean. We were able to do this both with the events themselves (e.g. create a "Client Entertainment" folder and within that folder "Award shows" "Dinners" etc), and with our image and document libraries. In Cvent, you can create various views for your events and filter out some, but there is not currently a way to group and organize in the above manner, especially while still being able to see all events.
- Similarly, the image and document libraries (images that are in your invitations or documents that are linked in your event emails) only have one layer of folders. This forces you to either sort through a large number of folders to find your item, or sort through a large number of documents in your folder.
- The second "weakness" in my mind is a lack of consistency throughout the platform in terms of process. In any given area of the platform, the process and visualization to perform functions (edit, save, etc) differ from each other. For example, the process may look and function one way in the email portion and look and function entirely differently in the website section. You eventually learn the nuances but it does make the various process difficult to remember and is much less intuitive than it could be, I believe.
- In addition to the above, some sections have multiple layers to the function. For example: when working in the hotel and travel section, if you would like to turn off the ability to continue to make changes to one's hotel reservations you must make edits within the hotel section AND in the registration settings in order for it to be active.
- Lastly, I miss the testing and preview method of our previous platform. In Cvent, when you fill out a test invitation/registration it does log you as having registered. So instead of being able to click through over and over, you have to go in and unregister yourself before you complete an additional test. The preview also requires you to physically fill out all of the fields, instead of being able to choose each page from a drop down to just see the layout.
- Admittedly, this is more a preference in functionality than an actual weakness to the platform.
- More dynamic reporting capabilities and types of metrics.
- Efficient event management and tracking. Reduced the amount of time required to create an event invitation and registration process while ensuring compliance with brand standards.
- Centralized system allows our whole team to access any event as needed, from anywhere in the world, and on a multitude of devices.
I touched on these points previously in the review, but will recap here. Our team previously used etouches Event Management. We made the switch to Cvent because of the following elements where they excelled over etouches:
Knowledge of support staff’s
No unexpected site closures
Ability to use platform in various browsers (while not 100% in every browser, the functionality was still an improvement)
Reliable and helpful metrics in email marketing
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