SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Calif. — Emerald Expositions, a public company that produces B2B trade shows in the U.S., has signed a deal with Explori to benchmark and monitor the customer experience for its entire event portfolio through research and analytics. The deal, which includes more than 55 annual trade shows as well as numerous other face-to-face events, will provide survey support and benchmarking for both the attendee and exhibitor side.
“We are excited because it will give us a whole new depth of intelligence around how our shows are performing,” said Emerald COO Brian Field (left photo), who joined the company in June. “We will be able to not only compare the data internally but also against industry benchmarks.”
While serving as COO of UBM from 2013 to 2018, Field worked with Explori, a UK-based company that provides full-service, self-service, custom research services. “Show teams at Emerald have been availing themselves of the individual solutions they had at their disposal, like Survey Monkey and other similar tools — as is typical across much of the trade show world,” Field told TSE.
“Explori will allow us to have the information consolidated in one place and to have a uniformity in survey design so that we are asking the same questions across shows and portfolios,” Field said. “We will be able to build real year-over-year comparisons; this kind of continuity is critical in the world of research.”
Founded in 2011, Explori works with more than 2,700 trade, consumer and corporate events, said Explori’s Commercial Director Richard Kensett (right photo). Aggregate data from those events has been used to create a dataset of global event performance benchmarks that measures four key performance indicators: overall satisfaction, importance of the event, likelihood to return and net promoter score (NPS).
“Our mission is to establish a global common language for the measurement of event experience,” Kensett said. “We’re delighted to be partnering with Emerald and are looking forward to helping the team achieve their goals by generating deeper insights and supporting the strategic development of their assets.”
Explori clients also include ITE, Clarion Events, Messe Frankfurt, Informa Markets, dmg, Reed Exhibitions and EasyFairs.
“In the coming months, we will be launching APIs (application programming interface) that will allow the survey data to be integrated with Salesforce and other CRM systems,” Kensett said. “That will allow show management to improve personalization and customer experience for exhibitor and attendees.”
The ability to match individual records with data to measure sentiment is key for Emerald. “We are very keen on having this data so that our sales teams can have deeper, more meaningful conversations with our customers,” Field said.
Reach Brian Field at (646) 668-3787 or brian.field@emeraldexpo.com; Richard Kensett at +44 (0) 203 657 9921 or r.kensett@explori.com.
