Explori Blog

At Explori, we are constantly striving to provide the most accurate and relevant insights to our users. This month, we are thrilled to announce an evolution to our benchmarking feature that reflects the evolving landscape of the exhibition industry, as we have introduced a 36-month rolling benchmark to accompany our long-term benchmark, offering an even more comprehensive view of industry performance. 1. The Need for Evolution Historically, Explori has provided a single set of long-term benchmarks, including metrics such as NPS, Value for Time, and Customer Satisfaction. This has positioned us as the home of event insights, and these benchmarks have been essential in helping industry professionals track performance and make informed decisions. However, since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have observed that KPI scores for both visitors and exhibitors have not only rebounded but have consistently remained above pre-pandemic levels. 2. Introducing the Rolling Benchmark To capture these changes even more accurately, we are now offering a 36-month rolling benchmark, that will run alongside our long-term benchmark, providing users with two distinct yet complementary sets of data. The 36-month benchmark is designed to reflect the most recent industry trends, ensuring that our users have access to the most up-to-date insights. 3. What This Means for the Industry For those who rely on our long-term benchmarks, you will continue to see the stable figures you have come to trust. The addition of the 36-month benchmark, however, offers a more dynamic and current perspective. This new feature is particularly valuable for understanding the rapid changes and trends that have emerged in the post-pandemic period. Our commitment to providing credible, transparent, and flexible benchmarks remains unchanged. We believe that these enhancements will provide even greater value to our users, helping them to navigate the complexities of the exhibition industry with confidence. 4. What Next? We invite you to explore the new 36-month rolling benchmark and see how it can benefit your organization. At Explori, we are here to help you get the most out of these new insights and continue to support your success in the exhibition industry. Stay tuned for more updates and innovations from Explori as we continue to evolve with the industry. For more details, please contact Chloe Richardson at c.richardson@explori.com.

In 2003, Bain & Company partner Fred Reichheld introduced a groundbreaking method of assessing how well an organization treats individuals whose lives it affects — its capacity to foster enduring and loyal relationships. This assessment, known as the Net Promoter Score or NPS, has since been shared so anyone could apply it to their business. NPS has since been widely used amongst businesses to measure success and while it is mainly used for gauging customer satisfaction and loyalty, it has also been employed for measuring the effectiveness of corporate events. However, this one form of measurement is not enough when analyzing the success or impact of corporate events. In this article, we will look at the relevance of NPS in corporate events and why it's time to change how we measure success. NPS as a stand-alone measurement is not enough There is a common misconception about Net Promoter Scores in corporate events. Many believe that NPS combines factors such as customer satisfaction, advocacy value, behavior perception, and brand awareness. However, this is not entirely accurate. The truth is that NPS solely measures advocacy and only provides a small part of the overall picture. So while it is an excellent metric to measure to an extent, it is almost worthless when used in isolation for measuring the overall success of your corporate event program. NPS doesn't tell you how you can change the hearts and minds of your attendees to move them all to become promoters of your next event or increase their propensity to buy from your next customer-facing event. It also doesn't tell you which events worked for your business and for what reason. For your event measurement to mean anything, it is critical to understand how those who attended your event felt and how their brand perception has changed from pre-event to post-event. Only by knowing this, can you then understand the event's role in changing brand perceptions and, ultimately, increasing business revenue. "Our clients are already familiar with NPS as a tool to gauge brand advocacy. While it should absolutely be used to measure event success, it shouldn't be the only metric utilized. Incorporating NPS into a blended metric will provide valuable insights into attendee satisfaction and overall customer experience." — Chloe Richardson, VP Senior Corporate Relations, Explori Measurement beyond customer satisfaction To improve the effectiveness of your events program, you should consider analyzing brand perception and impact scores, including sentiment and behavior analysis, which helps you better understand how your attendees and customers feel about your event and how they behave towards your brand, such as, what is their propensity to purchase. By blending these metrics, you can build an overall event score and form a more complete picture of your event's success and effectiveness in strengthening customer relationships, enabling you to measure year-on-year and event-on-event performance better. To ensure that NPS can be utilized to its fullest potential in business events, you should set clear objectives and prioritize achieving strategic outcomes rather than simply collecting data. Evaluating customer sentiment, behavior, satisfaction, and brand perception are all important factors to consider when assessing your event's impact. Additionally, creating feedback mechanisms to encourage attendees to provide input at every stage of your event cycle, is vital for establishing an effective understanding and analysis of how to improve your event or increase your number of event promoters, a result of which you can measure through net promoter scores. The benefits of measuring overall event scores By measuring overall event scores, you gain valuable insights into the health of your entire customer event program. This robust blended analysis helps you pinpoint your top-performing events and identify areas for improvement. You'll begin to build a better picture of how, even small, lower-invested events can deliver exceptional results with proper strategic measures in place, where they previously were considered lower-tier, underinvested events. Measuring your events' performance with an overall event score allows you to track the progress of your entire event program and have a clear line of sight on what works, what doesn’t, and how you can improve. By taking a strategic approach to your events, you can reap maximum benefits from it. How do you measure impact scores? / Where do you start to better measure your corporate events To improve the overall effectiveness of your events, it's essential to align the objectives of your event with those of your business as a whole as this will ensure you capture relevant data and insight to help positively impact your events business unit. To ensure comprehensive analysis, it is advisable to review three distinct categories of data: demographic data, engagement data, and sentiment data. Demographic data provides information on attendees, while engagement data offers insights on their actions such as dwell time, session scans, and clicks. On the other hand, sentiment data provides a deeper understanding of how attendees think and feel. To obtain this information, analyzing customer sentiment and behavior through surveys, interviews, or focus groups is an effective way to gather additional data that can help measure impact scores. With this information collated and analyzed, you can then create strategies to enhance your events program and develop greater opportunities to positively impact not only your events score, but your entire business bottom line. Cheers to 20 great years, NPS! 🎉 Whilst we couldn't be happier to celebrate the year of NPS turning 20, and the positive impact it has had on our industry alongside many others, event planners and managers should focus on a more comprehensive approach to measure and evaluate event performance. This is the problem we set out to solve at Explori! We enable event professionals across the world to better understand their overall event score beyond NPS — bringing together customer satisfaction data with brand perception and impact scores — to provide a better view into how they can drive success in their events program. Take a quick tour of Explori website. 👇 Explori is powering the events industry with the right data and insights. See how Explori works right away!

Originally created for M&IT There is an undercurrent of fear in the meetings and events world – rarely verbalised, even behind closed doors - of robustly measuring the performance of our events. A fear of collecting data that might put a spotlight on the flaws we didn’t even know existed. We’re scared that these insights might make our function more vulnerable to business criticism - or that knowing what’s not working is worse than knowing nothing at all. But in a world where corporate events teams are being cut and senior event leaders are facing redundancy, now is the time to combat those fears to leverage event performance data properly. How can we turn our insights from being the monster under the bed to a tool that secures the future of corporate event programmes? Turbulence We are living in a time of corporate event turbulence. And the instability comes from not having the right insights to truly evidence our business impact and value. The fear of measurement is holding us back. Absolutely, measuring performance effectively may show us that certain events are falling short. But it’s far from scary – it’s incredibly useful and empowering. As event leaders, data is the only tool that puts us firmly in the strategic driving seat. Understanding where individual events aren’t hitting business KPIs is the first step to doing something about it and, by contrast, allows us to leverage those highly performing events that change attendee perception and behaviours. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and running from the data is much more dangerous than using it to strategically to make the right decisions. So the question is – what should every corporate event leader apply to rid themselves of dataphobia forever? Collect the right data Gone are the days of using attendee numbers or revenue generated as rational event performance metrics. Not only are these purely reactive metrics (by the time attendee numbers have started to drop or we’re losing revenue, it’s too late to make strategic changes to our event design), they don’t tell us the most important longer term insights that really count – how attendees perceive us/our events, how their behaviour is changing because of them and what the longer term impact will be to the business. As we move away from measuring these more reactive metrics, we can start to be proactive in strategising and evolving our event programmes accordingly. There is no fear of the unknown if you know exactly what data you should be collecting. Communicate findings effectively You could have collected the best data in the world, but if this is poorly relayed to the event’s stakeholder group, then the effort risks being wasted. Communicating findings effectively to the business will not only arm you with control and confidence to alleviate your fear, but enables you to demonstrate your strategic position to your non-event peers. Like with many things, you have to consider what that end presentation might look like from the very beginning. It’s critical to understand before you even start collecting your event data what success looks like for a given event or portfolio, and what data points are central to measuring performance against this success criteria. Deliberately consider who are the different stakeholders, how should the findings be communicated back to them, and what you want them to do about it? Use your insights as a strategic planning asset Once you’ve collected the right data and communicated findings effectively, it’s then imperative that you actually use your insights strategically – closing the loop. If, during steps one and two, you’ve established that an event isn’t performing as the business would like, rather than being fearful of how this reflects on the events function, use this knowledge to strategically review the future of that particular event or portfolio. Closing this loop allows you to redistribute budgets, consolidate assets, make justified decisions and strategically redesign the future of your events programme. For a long time, there has been a fear of robustly measuring the performance of our events. Yet if we let dataphobia reign supreme, we will never have the right tools to defend our functions, our roles and our teams. The real scary thing is not being able to demonstrate crucial event value in a period of corporate event instability. Explori is powering the events industry with the right data and insights.