July 25th, 2017 | by Dan Entin, VP Product, Peer Insights
A common reason IT professionals attend a Gartner event is to meet with vendors, and we believe these interactions can be enhanced by attendees learning about their products by reading their reviews on Peer Insights. If there’s any place in the world that the unbiased, first-hand experience of IT end-users is needed, it’s on the show floor of these types of events – to help buyers ask better questions of software vendors.
Gartner’s First Chatbot
At the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit last month, we experimented with providing a chatbot service to attendees at the event. To enhance the event attendee’s experience on the show floor, we thought about an attendee standing in front of a vendor’s booth with the ability to get unbiased information about the vendor. This lead us to the idea of a chatbot. The service allowed attendees to text the vendor’s booth number and get a link to the Peer Insights reviews for that vendor’s products. By texting security to 928-GARTNER attendees of the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit could then text in any booth number to see reviews on Gartner Peer Insights (see picture).
Interactive Floorplan
Before an event attendee steps foot on the exhibitor show floor they often want to know where the vendor(s) they want to meet are situated. For a variety of reasons the typical printed floorplan maps don’t make this especially easy (or fun). So we developed a web-based interactive floorplan and deployed it on a 55” touchscreen monitor right outside the show floor. Attendees could swipe and tap to find the vendor they were looking for and then either read a description of the vendor or locate it on the map (see picture).
The response to both the chatbot and interactive map was very positive from both event attendees as well as vendors. We’ve only just scratched the surface of what’s possible in helping end-users at events get the most out of their vendor interactions – there’s a lot more to do to fulfill our vision of making every conversation on the show floor better because of Gartner Peer Insights.. We plan on unveiling the next iteration of these tools in San Diego at the Gartner Catalyst Conference.
Of course you don’t need to be at a Gartner event to benefit from the value of our free enterprise IT ratings & review service! Be sure to visit Gartner Peer Insights when you need a trusted source for choosing IT solutions with confidence.