Good day, my name is Russell Wyman, and I am the Co-Founder and CEO of GruupMeet. Like many of you, my commitment, passion, and love throughout my career as a meetings professional has been unwavering. I have always found a great deal of pride and sense of purpose in the magic the hospitality and MICE industry resolutely deliver through partnership and collaboration.
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​It has been through listening and working closely with you that we have retained the knowledge, experience, and insight needed to build a brand. From the start, we have based GruupMeet’s product innovation on client feedback. Our care for customer success has helped shape GruupMeet’s growth and industry recognition for 7 years now, and I appreciate the trust you place in GruupMeet as your super-simplified event management solution.

At GruupMeet, we believe that successful meeting and incentive experiences hinge on simple, effective and smart communications. Today’s event teams and attendees are tired of inefficient mobile app notifications and disruptions. Therefore, they seek convenience and timely, relevant information without having to change the way they already prefer to communicate. We believe that today’s focus on personalization and ease of use for all parties will help shape and lead the way as our industry continues to evolve. Thus, here are some relevant questions you should ask event technology vendors:

1. What business processes and data practices does the event technology provider implement to ensure that customer generated contact information or data does not inadvertently integrate with the event tech provider’s own business data? (This may be particularly important if permission to read and modify contacts is granted when downloading and installing the app). 
2. How many app downloads iTunes and/or Google Play is reporting there have been, AND the percentage of app reviews compared to installs?
3. How might iTunes and/or Google Play app install data relate to the event tech provider’s estimated number of paying customer accounts? 

Evolving Objectives and Participant Expectations
Meeting technologies and automation have improved and advanced in many capacities such as registration, networking, surveys, maps and check-in but this is the tip of the iceberg. Meeting logistics involves many meticulous processes, and most are still being managed and monitored manually with little innovation past an Excel spreadsheet. While more meeting planning processes are being automated today, intricate processes like on-site logistics, such as airport arrivals, are largely executed manually.

There are many factors that make it difficult for meeting planners to manage the meticulous and continually changing logistics. Meeting planners typically invest about 150 hours of time managing each meeting. For fear of significant potential risks and unknowns, meeting technology has generally been slowly adopted. People impact return on objectives (ROO), and bad meeting experiences hurt businesses as valuable time and stakeholder money are wasted. For example, for internal meetings, the sales participants have a direct impact on the organization’s revenue so engagement and return on objectives are important. However, the process of managing constantly changing logistics, like arrivals, inherently deters the focus on people and consumes time. Successful transportation logistics hinge on effective communication with all parties. While each airport presents a different set of challenges and each meeting’s objectives are unique, participants are increasingly expecting convenience and relevance regarding meeting communications.

The Head of Engineering presides over the entire Front-end and Back-end development teams. He helps drive the vision, design, strategy, and implementation of integrated web systems in order to support the business and to ensure customer success.