Unique Contributions

Customer-centric technology in the events industry: a discussion with RX leaders

• RELX • Season 4 • Episode 3

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In this episode, YS Chi speaks with Brian Brittain, Chief Operations Officer, and Gaby Appleton, Chief Product Officer at RX, the global events business. 

The events industry is all about connecting buyers and sellers and bringing people together to enable them to grow their business.  Far from being a threat to in-person events, as many feared, the pandemic triggered an acceleration in the development of technology which is transforming the customer experience, making participation easier and more productive. What does that look like in practice and how is technology changing the customer experience?  Brian and Gabby discuss technology, data, AI and more. They even share some ‘spectacular’ failures.  

Listen to the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-fcgETVd04. 

We've also curated a 10mnm version for those in a rush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwFKCZKRdlQ&t=8s

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Music.

YS Chi:

Brian, Gaby, welcome. Before we get going, can I ask you to please make a few introductory remarks about yourselves?

Gaby Appleton:

Sure. Thankyou, YS. My name is Gaby Appleton and I'm the Chief Product Officer at RX. I've been with RELX about 15 years, which YS will know, because he interviewed me way back when, when I joined the Elsevier division, the science publishing division. I have been at RX about four years and I joined in the middle of that pandemic that you referred to, to see if I could help, together with Brian, build the digital offering. I've got two children who grew up their early years in Amsterdam, when we worked for Elsevier, and now we're based in London.

YS Chi:

Thank you, and Brian.

Brian Brittain:

Hello. I'm Brian Brittain, Chief Operating Officer for RX global. As with Gaby, my family and I are also international. We've been here in the UK now for 17 years, and I'm lucky enough to be with my wife and my son, who's at university here in the UK. My career has taken me through multiple industries, including RX here for the last seven years.

YS Chi:

Like all of our businesses, RX is made up of leaders of extraordinary diversity of every category we can think of. You two come from very different backgrounds, yet you are joined at the hip now in this digital effort, what has it been like?

Gaby Appleton:

Oh, that's a great question. I always say I was very fortunate to join RX at the time that I did for two reasons. One, because of the pandemic, it was becoming really obvious that digital tools were going to be important ways to help our customers connect. So my timing... it felt like a good time to do this job. But also because when I joined RX, the technology platform itself was already in really good shape. So as a product person who wants to build great stuff for customers, Brian and his team had already sorted out a lot of the global plumbing and roll out that we needed to do that successfully.

YS Chi:

Brian, you built the plumbing, then you brought in the chef.

Brian Brittain:

Yes, that is a great way to describe it actually, YS. We've gotten to a stage where most of the back office was well understood what we were doing, and we were well down that path. We had fairly good understanding of where we wanted to go on the digital side, and we had a team in place already, but we were able, with Gaby's help and guidance, to expand that team and really take on a global challenge, and move it from ideation and multiple of our events into much broader scale.

YS Chi:

I know Gaby's background better, so I do have to ask this question. Before you joined, you were seconded to the government...

Gaby Appleton:

Yes, I was.

YS Chi:

...during Covid to help NHS. How did that kind of shape your mind about building something as a digital product?

Gaby Appleton:

The thing that I learned working for the government during the pandemic was governments can do amazing things when they put their mind to it, and they can really do it at scale. I learned that, as well as learning this at Elsevier, also at the government, I love doing stuff that scales to big numbers and has big impact on people. And RX is the same. We serve thousands of customers in 20 plus countries across the world in 43 sectors. So that opportunity to have impact at scale is something I really treasured and took away. The other thing I learned is the way we do Product Management at RELX is really of high quality and can be reapplied in so many other areas of product management of different industries. We should be proud of the way we listen to customers, we use data to make decisions, those kinds of things, and those are applicable anywhere in a product management career.

YS Chi:

Good. Let's jump into it then. Exhibition business, face to face, person to person. Now you're putting this enormous effort into digital tools and aids, obviously, to make the experience even better. How better? Why, tell us what's behind it all?

Brian Brittain:

Yeah, YS that's a spectacular question, why would we go do this after going through the pandemic and understanding the face to face is so important? In our view, we always start actually with the customer challenge. What is the customer need? What's the customer wants? In our world, it's both exhibitors and visitors. And through lots of research and lots of conversations and knowing our customers very well, we understand that for exhibitors, leads and product launches are the two big things to do for the attendees. They want to be inspired, they want to find new products, and both of them are trying to grow their businesses. That's really what we're here for. We were able to determine very, very quickly that there were some gaps and some gaps where digital products could actually turn around and make it a wee bit better for everyone, and that's really what we focused on. We always start off with understanding the problem area, and then turn around and ask our technology and Gaby, you've got a great example of what we've done recently at ATM, that's made such a big difference.

Gaby Appleton:

Yeah, I think our focus is always on, how can digital enhance the outcomes from the event overall.

YS Chi:

Right, so it's an add on, as opposed to the first driver.

Gaby Appleton:

Yes, absolutely. What our customers tell us they want is more leads and to meet more customers. Our goal with digital is, not only do customers take the space, the booth at the event, but we use the digital tools to help them get more return on their investment in that space. And so for our example, at Arabian Travel Market in Dubai, we had one customer who used to spend about 40,000 pounds on a booth, and after a conversation with one of our sales reps, they were convinced to use some of our digital tools that promote their presence at the event. And after seeing that, by using these tools, they got more leads out of the event the year over year. Then they started to think, wow, this is the really the event for us. We can see and we can benchmark with data that we're doing better than before and better than our competitors.Then they grew their overall spend on the event, including the space spend. So that's the kind of outcome we want.

YS Chi:

Did you start out with a blueprint, or did these things just kind of accumulate one by one, by going to the shows and listening to the customers pre and post show?

Brian Brittain:

Interestingly enough, we actually had an idea of what the blueprint could look like. But to your point, it was only when we got things into customer hands and really understood that a networking event is dramatically different than a B2C, like a comic con event is very different, and the needs. Although it still comes down to leads for exhibitors and new business and being inspired, the 'how' is different. So as you go through different geographies, you get slight variances on how products work, and some products work incredibly well in some types of events, and they don't work quite as well. So I'd say we had a blueprint, but not necessarily a rock solid foundation, that we knew exactly where we're building this and this and this and this.

YS Chi:

Did you feel like you had to start somewhere geographically first because you felt that the digital knowledge was better embedded? Or was it a across the world, one at a time?

Gaby Appleton:

I think we started with two ideas. One is the global platform that we use for promoting our events and providing information about events. The website that's pretty fundamental. So we knew we could be uniform with that platform. We knew we had a few big geographies that have a lot of our events, so we could reach a lot of customers more quickly by focusing on those areas. So we started there, and then as time goes by, you have the success stories. You prove the case, you prove it with data, and then you go to the events that maybe look a bit different or are in smaller markets, or whatever. So that's how we've thought about roll out generally.

YS Chi:

Since you mentioned the word data, we cannot avoid talking about it, right? Because none of these digital products would be very meaningful without good data, depth of data, breadth of data. Tell us how you are collecting data and, how are you surprised by some of the data points that you are collecting?

Gaby Appleton:

Yeah, maybe I'll talk about it from the product side and then Brian can talk about the tech. One good example, we last year, started to launch a product called'Colleqt' which allows visitors to use their mobile phones to scan exhibitor stand QR codes and collect information about that. In 2023 we piloted with seven shows, and because we could see the data in that product about what was working and what was not, where most leads were being generated, we were able to see that shows that are very heavily product led, where exhibitors want to meet. A lot of exhibitors collect a lot of product information and detailed specifications. That type of show was real winner for this particular product. So then, because we can see across all of our 280 odd events across the whole portfolio, we're able to say, okay, where have we got more shows that look like that one, and prioritise those for the roll out? It's helped us find product market fit more quickly, I would say.

Brian Brittain:

As far the, from my perspective, the extremely interesting nature of Colleqt, using that as an example. A number of things had to line up quite nicely YS. The first one is, before the pandemic, not all of our folks actually understood what QR codes were. They had seen them, but they hadn't necessarily experienced them, and that's kind of the roots of your question of in some countries, they were extremely well understood. In other countries, it wasn't, still barcodes. It wasn't the same thing.

YS Chi:

Bar codes, yeah.

Brian Brittain:

If you start thinking about what has to line up to make a product like Colleqt work, you have to have a QR code in place. You have to have a mobile app that actually folks will utilise, that doesn't require something out of the App Store, which has very low download rates. There are a number of things that get to line up, when you're able to connect that data, which is in real time, with the exhibitor data and the attendee data and everything else that we have underlying. Now, you can create different data products. It gives you deeper insight into specifically who the attendee is and why they're interested in this product, which enables us to give more recommendations and make that event to be even more successful for that attendee. That's why we always start with, forget the tech for a second, let's talk about what the challenges that the attendee is trying to solve for the exhibitor.

YS Chi:

We can think of all these digital experience as being the experience on site. But I'm sure you planned for before and well after as well. Tell us a little bit about the breadth of the digital solutions that you have to design to get the so called ROI.

Gaby Appleton:

Yep, well before the show, we know that many of our visitors plan their experience at the show. They've taken two days out of the office. Maybe they want to get maximum return for their time spent, and they really want to meet the right people. We can see in our exhibitor directories who's looking at which exhibitor, and we use that information to do two things. One is help exhibitors prepare their show and make sure that they are promoting their stand and their presence appropriately to the right visitors. We have some products that can target the right subset of visitors for them, but we also know that we have some visitors who are really uber planners. I mean, they really go through every single exhibitor and work out who they should meet and plan. So we have different shows that help people plan their time in different ways. I've also met people who, their plan for the show was written on the back of the airline boarding pass on the way that they get there. They're a bit more like me, and we know that those people we need to help them at the show. In the moment of the show and provide them the tools on the day that help them navigate, find people, et cetera.

YS Chi:

How about post show?

Brian Brittain:

Yeah, post show is both reminding the attendees about who they saw, what their next steps could be, and the exhibitor, it's all about the leads. It's actually figuring out. It actually then moves directly into the conversation of next year or the next event. Some of our events that are actually multiple times a year. Because now we have the data to say this is what happened. This is what who you saw. These are the leads that you got out of it. This is the exposure that you got. What would you like to do for next year? Do you have product launches? Therefore do we take a different product set to you, or are you going to do the same type that you did last year? So it helps us to have a much more data led conversation in the sales relationship.

YS Chi:

For this community, who put up booth and also come to visit the booth, has it been surprisingly digital savvy or have there been more friction with them to really appreciate the tools you are providing for them?

Gaby Appleton:

This is actually one of my favorite topics with our teams around the world. I'll tell you a story about when I first joined RX, I went to meet the event directors of one of our German manufacturing shows. They said to me, Gaby, this digital stuff, it's all great, but my customers are not really that digital. He said to me, I have a client who puts a plate of sausages out on the front of the booth at the event, and he judges whether or not he's had a good show by how quickly the sausages get eaten and how good people he's met. I said, ah okay, does that guy also have a smartphone in his pocket? Does he use that kind of technology? And if he does, maybe we can have a conversation. So we started to realise that we really had to educate our customers in what these tools can do, and also our sales people, so that they felt confident in explaining the value of digital tools to that customer. Now in 2024 that show generated over 42,000 digital leads for the customers of that show. That journey can take you a year or two years, maybe. But...

YS Chi:

Hey, two years is not that slow, huh?

Gaby Appleton:

Yeah.

Brian Brittain:

Yeah, I completely agree with Gaby on that one. One of the... where you brought up data earlier YS, the way we actually measure what's actually happening on the products themselves, who's using them, how using them. That's used to actually convince our own teams as well that the products work. Because if you think about the way we're geographically dispersed, you don't necessarily hear in France what's working well in the US, or what's working well at a specific event in China, or how Japan has rolled out a specific registration that everyone else could benefit. Being able to show that data that says this is was what they have versus this is what you have. Do you think we need to talk? That data drives those conversations.

YS Chi:

You jump to my next question already, but I'm going to expand a little bit, and that is, we talked about external friction with our exhibitors and visitors, but I'm sure there were enormous amount of internal friction as well. You talk about the fact that we're a global company, therefore different parts of our organisation probably reacted differently as well. You've just given me a good example. Were there are other surprise frictions in implementing this digital strategy out over the last three, four years?

Gaby Appleton:

I do think you have to take different geographies that represent different customers on their own merit. For example, we have done a lot of work with our Chinese teams recently to understand what the value of digital is there, and our default mindset has been where possible, we want to use global solutions that scale, that we can invest the most money in, that we can measure the results. But sometimes things are just different, and in China, it's just a little bit different because most of our customers, whether they're visitors or exhibitors, are using local apps like WeChat to connect. They're already scanning each other using WeChat. So you have to think about how to operate in that local technology and sometimes government regulation environment as well. That can need a lot of discussion sometimes, but I think the way to unlock that conversation is always to start with the customer. If you go deep on, what is the customer doing? What do they value? What do they need? I think you can always come to alignment in the end.

YS Chi:

Did you create any kind of competition between your people to see if it's an incentive for each other?

Brian Brittain:

Yes, we did. Interestingly enough, having worked in multiple industries, this is not new. This is, quite frankly, the infamous 'Who Moved My Cheese?' If you want to go way, way, way back, one of the books I was given when I was starting out...

YS Chi:

Dr Johnson.

Brian Brittain:

Exactly. You run an event, you run a very successful event, and it works incredibly well. High NPS scores, our renewal rates are high. Attendees are just banging at the door to get in. We rock up and go. We've got these new tools, and there's going to make your life so much better and your attendees and your exhibitors. You already have a long list of things that you're doing for that event, but that are all successful, and we're going to give you more, but I have to get your attention. By the way, it doesn't matter what the product is. It doesn't matter what the new thing is in any industry, it's that same thing. You have to show the proof. You have to get on their radar. You have to understand. You have to help them understand. And then from there, you can have a real conversation. But that's the internal... and you see it in every industry.

Gaby Appleton:

But I would say actually, our ability to measure things in standardised, global ways, has helped foster that spirit of competition, and it's quite a cheerful spirit of competition now. Some of our... I'm really proud of some of our teams in the US and the UK and other geographies, and they do now look around the world and say, well, what are our competitors in other business units doing? Who's winning? How can we be better? I think as a central, global team, the number one request we get from those teams is, how can you help me learn faster? Have you got best practices from other business units that I can learn from, that you can share? How were they thinking about delivering this in this kind of show, on that kind of thing? I think that means the organisation has come a long way in thinking about how to deploy technology at shows.

YS Chi:

On the other side of the coin, to put you on the spot, tell me about one or two disappointments or spectacular failures of something you tried.

Brian Brittain:

Yes, that's the nature of the beast.

YS Chi:

It has to be, no?

Brian Brittain:

It has to be. You can't always succeed? It would be great if you could. But unfortunately, that's not life. We follow the standard practices that everybody in RELX does, where we actually walk through and put guardrails in and make sure that we get to phase gates. If something doesn't look right, then we shut it down, rather than spending a quantity of cash then turn around and just say this doesn't work. That's the mechanics we use. An example of one, we chased a marketplace, which I assume at some point we'll have a conversation about virtual as well, because that's a digital example that has not worked well in the industry. But we had this marketplace that we were absolutely convinced would work. Not only were we convinced it'll work, the event teams were convinced it'll work, the sector was convinced. They were doing articles about how this marketplace we were building would completely revolutionise the value exchange and, more importantly, the content that's produced, even for our televisions. We chased that quite literally for years. Continued to adjust, continued to adjust, continued to adjust. Some of our competitors are doing the exact same thing. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and we found out later, really why it didn't work, because it didn't have the stickiness that you would need for a year round marketplace. That's really one of the challenges behind marketplaces, is you have to have a reason to come back over and over and over again. In that business, it's very cyclical in its nature. You're very interested two or three times a year. You're not necessarily interested on pick your famous, favorite e-commerce site, where you have boxes showing up at your house three or four times a week. It didn't have that level of stickiness. We have had some interesting failures where we learned a lot, we're able to take all of that and reapply it to other places. But didn't work out quite like we thought it would.

Gaby Appleton:

We've had a few experiments where we tested virtual reality headsets at shows, and I think that is a combination of the technology is still not quite there from a usability perspective yet. So people keep trying at events, and it keeps not quite getting there - that's one. In the pandemic, we had an at show product called 'exhibitor not present,' where, for example, if we were running a live show in China that would normally have japan, Japanese exhibitors who couldn't travel to China, we would literally put the exhibitor on an iPad and show it to, the visitor at the show. We thought that would be a great solution to the problem. Didn't work at all. Turns out that people really want the face to face interaction, and would prioritise that. Also, if you connect someone over video, the buyer, the visitor really expects to see the product specialist and not just the sales persons. There's kind of mismatches of expectations about what those things would bring.

YS Chi:

Obviously, we know the value of face to face as a company. So do our customers, especially post pandemic. At the same time, we know that things like webinars and digital meetings work. So where is the gap? Where's the bridge that's not there yet for virtual exhibition?

Brian Brittain:

Yeah, so interestingly enough, I'm not convinced there's actually a gap. I think it's just a miss. To your point, webinars work very, very well. If you think about the mechanics of a webinar, forget the technology. It's literally you have a product pitch, or you're trying to launch into another country and someone like us will figure out how to get key buyers that would help you ease into that new product or that new country. But it's timed, right? You're there for literally 30 minutes or 45 minutes, you know why you're pitching as an exhibitor. The visitors knows exactly why he's on the call. When you talk about a virtual event, the attendee is going to dedicate somewhere in the neighborhood of two days online on their computer. I think we all get a little tired...

YS Chi:

No, I don't think so.

Brian Brittain:

...Zoom and Teams and the rest. We all get a little tired. We get tired.There's problem number one. Problem number two is the face to face peice of it, is literally the important part. You're there to be inspired. You're there to build that connection between two people that says, I want to do business with YS. I want to do business with Gaby, and you want to find out more and to follow up. Again, something that you really can't do virtually. You can have a one on one if I know exactly who I need to talk to in this company. But it isn't necessarily works that well. Gaby brought up earlier the example of, we thought'exhibitor not present' would be a brilliant solution. But interestingly enough, in that world, there is a complete mismatch of... no, no. I want to talk to the product expert. I want to talk to the engineer. Not all companies want their engineers in front of their customers. There's multiple challenges in that space. Will we ever get to a true virtual exhibition? I'm not sure, but I do know that our products can actually enhance the exhibitions that we have, and that does make a big difference.

YS Chi:

Yes.

Gaby Appleton:

I would just add one thing, which is, at RX, we talk a lot about the magic of the event. The buzz, the excitement and particularly for the visitor, there's something really amazing about taking two days out of your office life and all of your...

YS Chi:

I can attest to that.

Gaby Appleton:

...emails and regular meetings and going and learning something new, talking to people you haven't seen for a while, reconnecting, seeing other people's latest products, and it's really hard to recreate that focus and buzz online.

YS Chi:

It is. There are a few shows that I go to every year, or at least every other year, that has to be on my calendar because it's actually a point of energy builder around that. I can see that. It is, in this conversation, it's clear that we are trying to make one plus one equal three. It's not that we have to stick with just the person in person or just the digital. By adding digital to in person, we want to make third leg work. Two questions, so you can both answer them, or you can answer them, you know, one each. How far do you see this digital experience being able to enhance our in person experience? Just how far do you imagine being able to take it. Obviously, Brian, according to you, it's not all the way to replace. That's my first question. The second question is, is there a visible return to us for this investment in technology? Because it's not cheap.

Brian Brittain:

Gaby why don't you take the first, I'll take the second.

Gaby Appleton:

How far does technology go? If you go to a trade show, everybody is walking around with their mobile phone in their hand anyway, all the time. Technology is already infused into every aspect of the show. What I see from our side is on the visitor experience, we can certainly make that a lot better and a lot more productive. I think we've done quite a good job for exhibitors so far at helping them collect leads, and we'll continue to work on that. Exhibitors ask us, okay, I've got these leads. Can you tell me a bit more about them? How big is their company? Is their company doing deals at the moment? Those kinds of questions. We're really interested in taking that one step further beyond collecting leads to help exhibitors understand their leads better. That's one. The second is on the visitor side. If I'm the person on the plane planning my show on the back of my airplane boarding pass, I might need some help being more efficient navigating that show, and we can do, I think, much more using the smartphone that is in everyone's hands to do that and make it an easier experience. That will also give us data about what those people are doing at the show, who, where they're going, who they're interested in, what seminars they attended, and that helps us as an organisation to make sure the show is really targeted appropriately to the people who are there. That's kind of what I get excited about working on in the next couple of years.

YS Chi:

Thank you.

Brian Brittain:

And your second question, how do we measure, basically, return on investment or return on spend? That's one of the massive advantages that we have as RX, because we're on a single set of platforms, because we're rolling out specific digital solutions, but we're doing it globally. It lets us scale. We don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. If you look at the industry as a whole, that's a challenge for most folks in the industry. It is literally solutions for this event or for this cluster of events, which makes it really hard to share data around. You have to use some technology that is hard to reconcile and doesn't necessarily benefit you that much, but you can kind of make it work. We achieve our scale and we can roll out to 253 shows. That's a very different model, a very different style. We can take the best of capabilities of every event as we roll out and modify and every other event automatically gets it. That's how you get return. You don't have to do it over and over and over again. You leverage what you have.

YS Chi:

We cannot have a talk about digital solution without talking about the buzz word of the past two years. AI, my goodness. How do you embed AI, particularly Gen AI, into what RX is trying to develop for the customer experience?

Brian Brittain:

Any of the AI techniques, including Gen AI is something that we always look at. Again, we look at from the what problem are we trying to solve first, before we actually look at the technology to apply. We do have a small R&D team that looks at just the technology to see how we could apply that specific piece of tech, but it's almost always starts with customer first. AI has been interesting because we can see the the areas that it works quite well, and we can see the areas where it doesn't quite get there, and we've all experienced it. My always dead indicator that I use is, why do we still have keyboards on our laptops?

YS Chi:

Yeah.

Brian Brittain:

Speech, voice recognition should be just an automatic and yet we still all have keyboards. It's not a panacea. I think the flip side, though, is it will change, and continues to change how our lives work, and it will. There's no doubt about that. New technologies will always do that. The iPhone, sorry, the iPhone, Android, pick your favorite. That has made dramatic differences in our daily lives. When mobile phones came out, that wasn't the first thought. It wasn't really thought of that way. New technology, whatever it happens to be, AI or otherwise, will always make a difference, and it's up to us to figure out how to leverage it to solve our customer problems. Since you asked specifically about Gen AI, which has been two years, and everyone has been talking about it. We have been doing R&D and it has unlocked some rather interesting customer behaviour that we did not expect. Even being in the industry for literally decades, where your next set of recommendations that could come down. People assumed that they knew how to do recommendations. Interestingly enough, when you look at a massive data set and you apply some of the AI techniques on it, you actually end up with a different way to do recommendations, which is kind of core to what we do and what we're building into our new suite of products that are coming out this year. That's one example of. But again, it comes back down to what's the problem? The problem is we need better recommendations, more of them, so you have a better outcome. Brilliant. What techniques do we want to use? That one happens to be one that works along with some coaching in other areas.

Gaby Appleton:

Yeah, and we're starting to experiment with things like, one of the things that exhibitors find difficult is to write good descriptions of their companies, and what they do. Starting from a blank sheet of paper is just quite hard. We've been testing, can the AI write starting point descriptions that the exhibitors then can modify and add to. We found that leads to slightly longer company descriptions being produced, which tend to get more viewer and visitor engagement, which then might lead to a few more conversations and a few more leads for the exhibitor. So sometimes it's like the one and two steps on from from AI as a prompt, where the value can be.

YS Chi:

Interesting. I think there's going to be a lot more to come in this area. Clearly, we are learning today in this conversation that the tools are indeed important, but so is data itself. Whether it's a single data platform or collecting more data to be able to do even deeper support of both the exhibitors and the visitors. Data is critical and RELX is a data company. It's a company that has deep experience and an incredible depth and breadth of data collection, curation, organisation and even certification method. I hope you're learning a lot of these from your sister companies.

Gaby Appleton:

I feel so blessed to have worked for a different division in Elsevier, and therefore you're able to see not only the parallels in terms of business models and technology sometimes. But you have a network of people that you can call and ask for advice. My team is thinking about how we do tracking and analytics within our products and what software we might use, and also what good practices we need to have inside our own product teams to do that. Two weeks ago, I was on the phone to some folks at Elsevier, saying, remind me, how do you do this at Elsevier? I think you might be one step ahead of us. Can you give us some tips and tell us how you've got where you are. I think that's an enormous advantage of being part of RELX and my team really enjoy those interactions.

Brian Brittain:

Yeah, completely agree with Gaby. We're incredibly fortunate that we share across the four major divisions, both product and technology, meaning there are constant conversations on the product side about what's best practice into the customer. There's also constant conversations on the technology side about how to leverage and how to learn from so if a...

YS Chi:

...this is through the CTO form.

Brian Brittain:

Through the CTO form. And there's also a product form as well. If you think about some of the new techniques that are coming down, using AI as an example, some of the new AI techniques. One of our sister companies can actually take a lead on that and we can leverage from it. We don't have to learn from scratch. That's incredibly handy to have, but it also enables data to be shared across, and you can basically establish business relationship between. If LN, LexisNexis has data that we need, we can actually establish a proper business connection between the two and start sharing data back and forth. That's the power of leveraging RELX. You get to understand how the technology works. You understand the best way to approach customers and products, and you're able to leverage data across the companies themselves. Absolutely brilliant.

Gaby Appleton:

I would just add to that. One of the components of being a successful product and tech organisation is the people, and we also have the opportunity to move talent around between the divisions.

YS Chi:

Yes.

Gaby Appleton:

In my team, we have one person who used to work at LexisNexis, two that used to work at Elsevier. I don't have anyone from Risk yet, but there's still time, and that really brings fresh perspective as well.

YS Chi:

Gaby, if you have any message to people at RX and within RELX even, of what you aspire to see in the journey for the next couple years. What would that wisdom be that you want to share as a Chief Product Officer.

Gaby Appleton:

We always say the mission of our team is to enhance the value of our events by using digital tools and technology so that we can digitise all the behaviour at the events and create more value for our customers. So really, that's our mission and our rallying cry, and we're trying to spread that far and wide across the organisation. My other message is always, I don't think we have to invent all of this ourselves. Our value is in how we understand our customers and how we apply technology that's been proven in a lot of cases to make our events better and meet our customer needs, and we can learn a lot of that from our sisters and brothers in RELX.

YS Chi:

So, Brian. What is the indication that says, this has been all worth it. What is that, which you will look at and say,'see, we did it right?'

Brian Brittain:

As always, there's a number of answers to it.

YS Chi:

Go ahead.

Brian Brittain:

First one, you can see it in the NPS. You see the net promoter scores, we can measure the difference between those customers that use our products and those that do not use our products. There's no doubt whether or not the products work. We can also see how the customers themselves are using the products, so we can enhance. We actually had a change that we made this year on something we call the 'customer hub' that encouraged usage of another product, and we saw that product usage jump by 30%. I mean, it was a fairly straightforward change but it just wasn't to the top of the list. You can see it in the numbers, whether or not the customers are using it. You can see whether the customers are happy that they're using it. Now, that's the customer side. Now, let's talk about from the company side, we can see one of the things that we do as part of RELX is we are constantly asking our employees what they think. We have opinion scores from our employees, and we can see how engaged they are and we can see our engagement growing. Another indicator that what we do, which is help companies build their business, works and that folks are engaged. They're empowered, they feel. We can see that measure as well. Another thing that my role looks at, and last but not least is, can we see it in the revenue.

YS Chi:

The revenue side, right?

Brian Brittain:

You asked a question earlier about, how do we handle the cost, because these things are not cheap. We handle it by scale, being able to roll out to 250 events, but we can also see the revenue coming in from it. As you can see in our annual reports, percentage of digital continues to grow. We have happy customers that are using the tools, employees that feel like they are truly empowered and engaged, and you can see our growth in our revenue stream. Those are some pretty good metrics of what I use to see... They are good indicators.

Gaby Appleton:

It was brought home to me recently where me and one of my team were invited by our international sales leader to go to China and to help train not only our own Chinese sales force, but also the agents who sell on behalf of RX in China to our international events. I would have thought in the past it was a touch and go thing as to whether these agents, sitting in quite far flung corners of China would be at all interested in the digital tools. But they sat and listened to us for two hours about the value that they could bring to their customers by putting digital tools in their hands, and therefore the revenue that they can generate and the livelihoods they can build for their own families. That was a remarkably rewarding moment for me.

YS Chi:

I bet it was. Well, thank you very much today for sharing your insights and experience. It sounds like you're in a very exciting journey, and we're just at the very beginning part of it. Would you say chapter two over now?

Gaby Appleton:

I think so. Yes, yes.

Brian Brittain:

We're looking forward to three and four.

YS Chi:

There's going be a lot more than that Brian. I have a feeling that this is gonna be a 10 chapter book.

Brian Brittain:

Sounds good.

Gaby Appleton:

Have you help write it, sorry.

YS Chi:

Thank you again for participating today in this podcast and look forward to hearing more about it as to how it develops in a year or two time.

Gaby Appleton:

Thank you, YS.

Brian Brittain:

Thank you.