By Noelia Herranz, Vice President, Meetings & Events, Global Strategy and Business Enablement

Analyzing and interpreting data effectively can bring huge benefits to organizations and enable leaders to make smarter business decisions, generate efficiencies, and drive profitability.

While leaders do focus on the meaningful strategic questions that drive business optimization and growth in an organization, they also count on detailed and singular data points to drive the important decisions. For meetings and events, it is the same: the big-picture vision of what is driving companies’ meetings and events goals forward begins with every data point we can gather and analyze.

As reported in our 2023 Meetings and Events Forecast, the digitalization of meetings management has exploded over the past few years, causing a mini revolution in how meetings and events are planned. The best way to plan for the future is by analyzing past, current, and forward-looking data.

So, if you asked me what are the most important features and parameters to look for in a comprehensive business intelligence solution for meetings and events, I would say:

• Visibility into actionable insights.
• Granularity with drill-down and filtering capabilities.
• Benchmarking against industry peers and companies with similar volume sizes.
• Data integration with multiple data sources.
• True flexibility and customization – not only in how to view and extract data but in the depth and type of features included in a custom solution because the nature of each client’s need is different.

With these in mind, we at American Express Meetings & Events took it upon ourselves to build and enhance our proprietary business analytics solution. Meetings Insights delivers full visibility into our clients’ meetings and events data and tells them the story of their meetings, events, and entire program from beginning to end. Reports are organized in themes such as spend and savings, program, supplier, travel and meetings, and benchmarking.

Meetings Insights also integrates different data sources, gives flexibility for slicing and dicing, and it is becoming more and more user-friendly, with intuitive and easy-to-understand dashboards. Not to mention, all clients get started with a complimentary suite of reports with the ability to upgrade to enhanced reporting packages that offer more sophisticated data slicing and additional efficiency with a dedicated Meetings & Events business intelligence analyst.

Our Meetings Insights is more than technology. It’s about actionable solutions and empowerment through analytics and insights that help our clients become truly data-driven and maximize their strategic meetings program ROI.

Professionally and personally, I couldn’t be prouder of what we do and how we think about data experiences.

If you are interested in learning more, talk to your Meetings & Events account manager, or if you do not have one appointed, you may contact us here.