It is hard to find something that offers the level of customization
As a user of Cvent for over 12+ years, I have seen the system grown by leaps and bounds. I won't sugar coat it and say there are no faults of the system, but what I can tell you that if you are willing to think outside the box of the "normal" way of doing something, you can do way more than you thought you could. Event Management: While there is a significant improvement with the new FLEX platform, there are still many features that allow for more customization that are coming soon. The overall product is better than Classic, however, we are still waiting patiently for some of the coming features to have 100% adoption. In the meantime, we are finding ways to work around these creatively. Abstract Management: Tool is growing constantly. Works effectively for the need of education and scientific associations. I like the new Speaker Management tool integration that once you have awarded the submissions, that you can then track the collection of the necessary information from the speakers and their resources for the session that your attendees can access during the event. Talk about a huge time savings! Sourcing Management: Tool truly offers a huge time savings for our team by allowing us to provide a full picture of the event and specifications to each hotel/location vendor. Additionally, it allows us to receive consistent responses from each vendor to provide a true apples to apples comparison. The biggest time saving feature outside of contacting the vendors is the ability to report in a cohesive report that we can provide to our business/association clients. Membership Management: This is the worst feature as it truly is not meant for our associations. It is great from business loyalty programs, however, it is still very dated as the platform is still connected to the Classic platform and we are unsure if the platform will be upgraded to the FLEX platform. Strategic Meetings Management: This is a great tool for managing your internal and external meetings program. It allows to program a workflow for your company and makes sure that your authorization protocols are followed prior to a meeting moving forward. I know that this is moving from the Classic Platform to the FLEX platform. Budget Management: While this tool is helpful, it is limited and is geared more toward internal meetings programs. It only allows for budgeting expenses and seeing the awarded cost or revised cost verses the actual billed cost. If you are doing an external program, your budget is more than your expenses, it includes the overall income you are would like to make verses the actual income you made not only by registrations, but other income sources as well. Definitely needs improving and these are coming soon with the FLEX platform integrations. Reporting: Personally the Classic Standard and Custom reports were my go to and did have their quarks. The biggest complaint with both the standard and custom reports was that there were additional settings that were built into the report that sometimes skewed the data because you didn't know about these additional settings or you could not modify those settings. The new FLEX platform reports are still very clunky and still do not offer the necessary customization that planners need to adequately explain trends or ROI to stakeholders. There is still a lot of customization to the reports outside of the system using Excel or your preferred spreadsheet tool. Finally, the biggest thing that I absolutely hate about the report regardless of the platform is the inability to report on a session group. I know there are other products that can, but they still don't get the reason behind this request. If you have over 25 sessions or sessions that a presented more than once, you need the report that gives you what each registrant registered for in each session group. To have to comb through column after column of each session and move them around to pair them up and combine columns to adequately report this out is not a time saver, but a time sucker!
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