Case Study

The Society of Vacuum Coaters(SVC)

Company Info

Client Contacts

About SVC:

Founded in 1957, The Society of Vacuum Coaters is the leading global source for learning, applying and advancing vacuum coating, surface engineering, and related technologies. SVC is a non-profit, international, professional organization consisting of industry, academia and members from national research laboratories. The industry membership includes coating companies, materials suppliers, process designers and equipment manufacturers which apply coatings and treatments to a wide variety of consumer and industrial products in all business sectors.

SVC has been hosting their annual tradeshow with 100+ for over 25 years. They also conduct a number of smaller conferences each year.

ExpoGenie’s customization capabilities have allowed us to harmonize the SVC brand experience & interface across all of our event websites & applications.

Frank Zimone

Executive Director

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Challenge:

SVC had been partnered with a leading exhibitor management platform for 10+ years until that company was acquired in 2018 and began making drastic changes to their pricing model. The software that had been costing SVC $8K per year was set to increase to $18K per year as they would now have to pay for modules they didn’t need or want.

Over the past few years the SVC began to receive a much higher number of exhibitor complaints, in particular the mobile conference app was problematic. Seeing as the SVC events team was already operating with limited bandwidth, exhibitor complaints about the software that was supposed to be saving them time was the last thing they needed!

What really motivated SVC to look for an alternative solution was the rapidly declining level of customer service from their vendor. They were used to receiving fast responses and helpful service however all of that changed and they couldn’t get the support they needed to be successful. They decided it was time to do something new.

Solution:

SVC implemented ExpoGenie in 2020 and quickly realized the platform to be a better, faster, and cheaper alternative to their prior system. They are leveraging ExpoGenie’s online sponsorship sales to streamline the way their partners make purchases resulting in the consolidation of applications (they previously used A2Z + Jotform to accomplish this).

With ExpoGenie’s role-based task list, exhibitors are now empowered to become self-sufficient by seeing due dates and having the ability to upload deliverables directly to the portal. SVC is also thrilled with the high level of customer service provided by their ExpoGenie Account Manager. This service level is very important to SVC as it matches their view on how to create long-lasting partnerships between suppliers and customers.

Through exhibitor surveys and general feedback, SVC exhibitors have relayed tremendous feedback related to ExpoGenie around it’s ease of use and modern interface. The only question that kept arising was “why didn’t you make the change to ExpoGenie sooner?!

Results:

Although the initial challenge related to cost was quickly solved by implementing ExpoGenie (resulting in $15K+ annual savings), it was only discovered post-implementation that cost actually wasn’t the most important thing.

By leaving their previous provider, SVC was now able to use their own event website & domain instead of the one tied to the exhibitor platform. This allowed them to better customize the overall look and feel of their brand interface across the event website and ExpoGenie. The highly branded ExpoGenie project instilled confidence in other SVC event planners to implement new changes and create more brand harmony across SVC’s registration platform and other applications.

In summary, the end result for SVC was savings of over $15K annually, increased user satisfaction for their exhibitors, a customer service level aligned with their core values and a better brand experience across all of SVC’s online websites & applications.