Perfecting the Conference Experience
Auditing the service experience of Europe's most storied conference
Client
European Forum Alpbach
Company Size
50-100 employees
Project Structure
Project
Decision Maker
Managing Director
Function
Customer Experience
Challenge
One of Europe's oldest conferences, European Forum Alpbach made radical changes to its structure, formats, design, and brand identity for the first time in decades. How would these changes be received by participants, and how would they affect the conference experience?
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Outcome
A thorough audit of the end-to-end conference experience in all aspects, the first full journey map and typologies for participants, and a wide range of changes in response.
Background
Founded in 1945, European Forum Alpbach (EFA) is one of Europe's most respected conferences, dealing with geopolitical matters such as democracy, security, finance, and climate. Many participants join every year for decades, and as such can be very change-averse. After COVID, EFA made the first radical changes to its overall structure, look, and feel, in many years, and needed to evaluate how those changes would impact the experience.
Approach
After working with the EFA team to understand the legacy of the conference, its structure, and the recent changes, our team joined the 2022 conference as participants in Tirol, Austria, for 9 days. We engaged in participant observation and used both in-depth and spontaneous interviews and conversations to gather hundreds of quotes and dozens of insights about the conference experience in all its aspects.
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One of the major changes was the addition of a new conference app. We audited the features, user interface, and overall user experience of the app and delivered extensive and detailed recommendations for improvement.
Solution
Following the 9-day conference and a thorough synthesis phase in which we evaluated and interpreted our findings and observations, we delivered a 70-page printed report that addressed every aspect of the conference experience, from legacy formats and structures to recent changes and innovations. In response to this report, European Forum Alpbach committed to a number of changes and improvements, and hired us again in 2023 to support the design and implementation of these improvements.