Bringing Virtual Events to life: Malcolm Stewart, Big Media

How does tawk.to help you deliver value to your clients? We recently spoke with Malcolm Stewart, Design and Technical Director at Big Media and Virtual Expo, to learn how partnership with tawk.to has impacted recent Virtual Events.

So Big Media started out back in 2011 as a Web solution business. And looking at our activities today, they center really around two main activities. One is the online training activities and the other, which is most relevant in terms of our connection with tawk.to, is the Virtual Expo platform. Virtual Expo as a platform allows us to work with event organizers to deliver both virtual and combined virtual plus face-to-face hybrid events.

We did have another platform to start with which was built into our solution. And it had a few drawbacks ... probably its major one was it was incredibly resource-hungry. So even with a comparatively small event with 35 stands, we were getting temporary server outages where it couldn't connect to the database because of the amount of traffic that was trying to flow through to manage the live chats.

And the other thing about it was that it didn't have the familiar interface that tawk.to provides, because it became increasingly clear to us that people are familiar, at least, with the idea of web chat from one platform or another. The familiar icon of the speech bubble in the bottom corner facilitating exactly that connection has proved really useful to us.

The last event we did where we did use tawk.to was 170 stands. And it all ran smoothly as opposed to 35 stands, which started along doing the best that it could. 

We use tawk.to as the way of enabling the live chat for each individual stand. And the way we do it now is to invite each exhibitor to sign up for their own account, because then they're assured the privacy of their customer communications. They can configure the widget to match in with and suit their standard design, their colorways and all the rest of it. They can deal with the triggers and other forms of interaction to suit them and the messages they want to give out. 

But the other thing, which to be perfectly honest, is a complete lifesaver for us, was to be able to use the tawk.to ticketing system for our own ends.

Previously, it was an absolute nightmare, really, of trying to do things through email where the correspondence was coming in along with everything else. Once we successfully got the support ticket system in place, it gave us A, a chronological order of when support tickets were submitted so we could deal with them in order, B, and mercifully, it grouped all of the conversations with that particular individual and that particular ticket in one place. So we weren't missing emails. We didn't miss chats. We've been getting testimonials through about the level of support we've been able to offer.

Yes. I mean, in our case, it's very specific, really. Because what we're saying is that in order to have the live chat facility on your stand, then you need to have a tawk.to account. That's the way that we run it. Of course, we have the agenda and the opportunity to say to them, "You can use this in other aspects of your business.”

Yeah, I think the key thing really is, as a partner, you will have some reason in your business as to why you're introducing tawk.to to clients. From our point of view, it's a very specific requirement in terms of being able to facilitate live chat on the stand. But that doesn't mean that that is the single example of how that client may use it in their business. They may not decide to use it in the environment that we've introduced them to, but they could well use it in other aspects of their business. So don't limit the thinking about what your client might be able to do with tawk.to to the reason that you introduce them to it in the first place.

Learn more about Big Media and get in touch here: Big Media/Virtual Expo Partner Profile