ROLL-E: ROI BOOSTER FOR INTERNATIONAL TRADE EXHIBITIONS
Strategy and service design, UX/UI design 2019
Company: RAI Amsterdam Convention Center (RAI)
RAI is one of the biggest international trade exhibition organizers in Europe. The project introduces a digital service and strategy to enable closer collaboration between RAI and their customers, and to increase their ROI by delivering actionable data and insights to the exhibitors before, during, and after an event.
Group Project of 3: Chen Chou, Chenjing Liu, Ruiqi Yang (Team StrikingPurple)
Role: researcher, interviewer, strategy and service design, UX design, co-creation workshop assistant, report editor
PROJECT CONTEXT
The trade exhibitions organized by RAI play a major role in international businesses. It is RAI’s vision to not only be a venue provider, but to become an industry leader that gathers people. The Roll-E project aims to improve RAI’s collaboration with their clients -- the exhibitors -- by helping them increase their return of investment (ROI), including the number of leads. This means that RAI needs to understand how the exhibitors and the visitors interact and exchange information, in order to gain insights on how they can help improve the exhibitors' performance.
PROCESS
The team started the project by researching the company’s business strategy, core values, culture, and vision. Then, a series of research activities were carried out to gain insights from different stakeholders, including interviews with different RAI employees, observation study at trade exhibitions, analysis of RAI’s user research experiment results, and competitor analysis. In the early design stage, the team integrates RAI employees’ points of view into the design by facilitating a creative co-creation session. The final design was evaluated with RAI’s clients and presented to the company, and received positive feedback from both stakeholders.
CURRENT SITUATION & PROBLEMS
RAI (organizer):
The information currently collected by RAI mainly comes from the registration data, event app usage data, and satisfaction surveys. These data are mostly fragmented and serve mainly for report purposes. More actionable data are needed for RAI to know how they can better help their clients increase their ROI.
Focusing on the event itself does not show RAI’s potential. RAI wants to be in closer collaboration with their clients year-round to maximize the benefits of both parties. However, at the present, the exhibitors do not share their plans and goals with RAI before the event, the data exchange between exhibitors and visitors is private, and RAI leaves the measuring of ROI to the companies themselves.
Exhibitor:
The main goal of the exhibitors is to create more leads, by reaching out to the right people and talking to real decision-makers.
Younger companies are more interested in data and insights to attract new clients, while older companies focus on optimizing their connection with existing clients.
Bigger exhibitors mostly have more complete plans while small exhibitors look toward the organizer.
Visitor:
The visitors visit the events in a relatively traditional way. For example, few people download the event apps, and the information exchange methods between exhibitors and visitors remain mostly physical, including taking pictures, grabbing booklets, business card exchanging, and writing on contact sheets.
RAI’S POTENTIAL ROLE AND VALUE IN SUPPORTING EXHIBITORS
Long-term collaboration with exhibitors is an existing tradition of RAI, and can be further developed. In comparison to the other event data collection systems, RAI’s strength lies in its ability to support the exhibitors with the actual planning and implementation of the next event. Therefore, the team developed a business strategy for RAI to help the exhibitors to continuously improve their performance in future events, supported by a new data collection tool that tracks meaningful behaviors of event-goers.
CREATIVE CO-CREATION SESSION
A co-creation session was hosted with RAI employees to inspire the design. Following the results of research and competitor analysis, the topic of the session was: “How to provide customized service for exhibitors?” Participants first explored the needs of different exhibitors, then dived deeper into one of the needs to explore how RAI can provide a customized service. The session was facilitated by the team using the following methods: role-playing, brainstorming, guided fantasy, and brainwriting. The outcomes include:
Experienced exhibitors and new exhibitors have common and individual needs. Therefore, the service should cater to the most common needs, such as “to find out who is interested in me” and “to be found by potential customers”, while being flexible for individual needs.
Different needs emerge throughout a circular timeline from one event to the next, and the service should include various actions and data collection methods to keep up with them.
RAI employees mainly focused on looking at the preparation stage and the event itself, and the team saw it as an opportunity to bring out the value of the post-event stage.
CORE VALUES OF THE DESIGN
The final design "Roll-E" targets the exhibitors, but is used by - and benefits - all three main stakeholders: RAI, the exhibitors, and the visitors. The design aims to achieve easier and richer data collection, better event experience, and long-term performance improvement and ROI increase. The core values are:
Data transparency and Digitalization: Behaviors and interactions of visitors and exhibitors will be digitized, turning into transparent data for RAI, and RAI will provide more data to exhibitors in return.
Lead increase and Performance improvement: The exhibitors’ number of leads will increase through match-making and systematic lead management, and the collected data will help improve the exhibitors’ performance in current and future events.
Speed and efficiency: The visitors will receive personalized recommendations on exhibitors and routes, making match-making faster and more accurate. Exchanging contacts and collecting information also become easier.
ROLL-E MAIN FEATURES
Roll-E consists of a service and an app. The service covers all the stages before, during, and after the event throughout the year, and the app is a tool that is used to facilitate the service. The main features include:
Data labeling (tags): Exhibitors and visitors are labeled with tags about their identities and interests (automatically and/or by hand), which facilitates match-making, data transparency, and data analysis.
Lead management system: Exhibitors can use the system to set goals for target clients, monitor interaction process, keep track of leads in a systematic way, and evaluate their performance.
Visitor flow: During the event, real-time visitor flow can help exhibitors to get prepared. Then, after the event, RAI and the exhibitors can analyze the visitor flow to evaluate their performance and improve on future event planning.
ROLL-E SERVICE DESIGN
The service covers the whole timeline from planning to evaluation to improvement for the next event. The main collected data are tags, visitor flow, and lead generation (by profile exchange).
At the planning stage, the exhibitors will collaborate with RAI to determine their target visitors, who represent potential leads. Then, at the preparation stage, the exhibitors and visitors will set up their company and personal profiles with tags. Before and during the event, these profiles can be exchanged like digital business cards equipped with information that benefits match-making.
During the event, the leads are collected in the lead management system, and the visitor’s location data will both serve for route recommendation (based on tags) and contribute to the visitors flow.
After the event, all the data will be gathered for leads evaluation, trend analysis, performance analysis, benchmarking, visitor flow analysis, etc. The insights from the analyses will benefit both RAI and the exhibitors as they will be used for improvement planning for the next event, such as target client adjustment, booth design/exhibit/personnel adjustment, session topics, route design and booth location sales strategy, etc.
ROLL-E APP DESIGN: DATA LABELING/TAGS
Tags are labels with keywords that describe expertise, domain or interests. They are added as the user sets up or edits their profile. Personal profiles include tags that describe themselves and their interests, and company profiles include tags that best present the company and its exhibits. Users can explore companies based on selected tags, which would increase the exposure of the exhibitors to their potential clients, and would save a lot of time for visitors in huge events.
“I expect my company to increase its exposure as it would appear directly in the search results of relevant visitors.” - evaluation participant
ROLL-E APP DESIGN: LEAD MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Exhibitors can track the progress they have with their leads, target clients, and existing clients in the lead management system. During the event, exhibitors and visitors can use the app to exchange digital profiles like business cards by scanning personal QR codes, which would be updated in the system automatically. The messaging feature helps exhibitors to not miss out on potential leads when the booth personnels are busy.
“Any helpful way that makes data collection easier would definitely be interesting.” - evaluation participant
ROLL-E APP DESIGN: VISITOR FLOW
There are two modes of map: a personal map that recommends a route for visitors, and a heatmap that shows the real-time number of people moving in the venue. Exhibitors can use the heatmap to follow their target visitors (with certain tags) for better preparation, and visitors can use the map to navigate in the venue, following a recommended route based on their interested tags if needed, so that they will not waste time wandering in the huge venue or miss out on companies they want to visit.
