vFairs

From the beginning of our Learning at Work Week platform, [sensitive content hidden]
provided amazing customer service and was always focussed on our goals. The Platform enabled us to host a wide range of learning activities, from within Booths, to Webinars, with a global reach and no platform accessibility issues.

Hard to find something to dislike, but perhaps more an area for improvement over time is the chat function from Teams if embedded in platform, but minor for the whole experience our users received.

We have been extremely impressed with the customer support from vFairs. [sensitive content hidden]
, our Project Manager, has been an outstanding support. She frequently astonishes us with the speed with which she responds to our requests.We previously used Pathable as our mobile app, prior to its being sunsetted by Community Brands. We loved it, and it was heartbreaking when they shut it down. But our heartbreak has been tempered because while vFairs isn't perfect, it's an outstanding app that has a very user-friendly back-end that makes updating the app a breeze. On top of that, [sensitive content hidden]
helps take care of a lot of the data entry work that we would otherwise have done ourselves with any other app, which has been a real boon, freeing up time in our schedules for other work around our events.The fact that vFairs can link up with Cvent (which we have used as our registration platform for ages) is also a HUGE plus. I frequently say that Cvent has the best customer service of any organization I have ever worked with. But vFairs definitely gives them a run for their money - they are neck and neck for the top spot!

The app itself is a little clunky on the user side. Also, pairing up the QR codes from the attendees we imported to vFairs from Cvent, with the name badges that we generated directly out of Cvent.While to some extent this was an issue we didn't adequately communicate to our attendees, they also expressed confusion and frustration with the QR code scanning, as they didn't understand that for them to connect the information in their vFairs app profiles with sponsors, exhibitors, and other attendees, they had to scan WITHIN the app, rather than simply using their phone/device cameras to scan the codes. It makes sense to us, having worked in the back end of the app and understanding what information is connected to what, but it took a fair amount of explaining to get that across to our attendees.

The sales and service promises made before the event sounded very convincing. The team acted as if they knew how to support a live event.

The parts of the platform that we could access ourselves worked, but only a small portion of the platform was available to us.

It took 6 weeks to sign a contract with vFairs.

Every part of the platform out of our direct control broke on the day of the event. Sessions did not start on time, wrong versions of session videos were played, users were unable to access chat rooms, exhibitor booths weren't working.

We had complaints about the day-of-event help desk support from attendees in email, on social media, and within the event chat itself.

Project management was poor: multiple contracted features were only set up after the end of the live event or not at all.

Training is poor; the vendor used other events currently in production to show us functionality and did not have materials that we could share with exhibitors and attendees.

Response time is poor: we've spent almost two weeks waiting for a response to our current issues with no answers to missing features and functions.

Vfairs offers an account manager to step you through the entire event planning process on their platform. They help support you as much as you need. When we were new to virtual event planning, vFairs coached us and guided us to help us make the best possible plan for our event.

Our event planning sometimes is a little complex and there were some hiccups that we would have liked to avoid but all in all - it was not anything that would dissuade us from continuing to use vfairs for all of our virtual or hybrid events in the future.