Nippun's experience with event registration

Not many of us can claim we hold 200 events a year. But Nippun Dhiman of the International Council of Shopping Centers can.

ICSC is an organization that has fine-tuned event management. Their events are where the deals are made for their industry. It’s a handshake business, so things have to go right and things have to go smoothly. And it starts with the registration experience. Nippun, ICSC’s vice president of technology, is the guy responsible for making sure that the technology systems in place prior to and on site at the meetings are working flawlessly.

Nippun's experience with event registration

After several years of using a third party registration company, Nippun was looking for a new solution. With the third party option, too much time was being spent after the meetings reconciling and re-entering data into iMIS. In fact, according to Nippun, after a lot of research, they found no easy registration integrations for iMIS.  “The salespeople will tell you they’re easy, but in reality there is a lot of work that typically needs to be done after the fact,” he said.

Two years ago Nippun came upon enSYNC’s KioskXpress. So what most attracted him was the fact that KioskXpress offers real time integration with iMIS. ICSC staff attended another association meeting where KioskXpress was in use and decided to work with the enSYNC team to develop what they needed when they saw how smoothly it worked.

And that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful relationship -- a relationship where technology has helped provide excellent customer service, streamlined internal operations, and saved a lot of money. They have deployed KioskXpress at 15 of their 200 meetings now and he estimates a savings of $20-$30,000 on each of those meetings. “And that does not count the savings from the direct integration to iMIS, allowing staff to be relieved of their reconciliation duties after the meetings and most of the pre-meeting prep time.”

Another great feature of the product is having real time registration reports.  “We know exactly who’s checked in and can immediately adjust our banquet numbers accordingly.” They also rely on an hourly print report. With that they have adjusted their temp staff needs and have generated costs savings from that as well.

And that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful relationship -- a relationship where technology has helped provide excellent customer service, streamlined internal operations, and saved a lot of money.

Nippun added some other advantages. “There’s no way for a temp to mess it up. There’s no way for an attendee to mess it up. An attendee walks up, scans or types in their name, finds their record and prints their badge in under 10 seconds.”

Nippun said there are often onsite dues reinstatements and it can be done easily from the kiosk system, as well. “In one transaction a member can pay their dues and register for the meeting and the money goes right in the bank.”

There’s one more thing you need to know about Nippun:  he doesn’t give testimonials easily. While they’ve been using KioskXpress for awhile now, he reserved his kind words until today, giving it the test of time. “In our opinion it’s a great product and it’s helped ICSC elevate our registration process.  In fact, we’re getting ready to implement an enhancement to the product, which will allow us to expand our usage to probably 175 of our 200 annual meetings.”

As for working with enSYNC he said, “From our experience, enSYNC has been really great. They have great talented people, people with vision who understand the event industry and were willing to work with us to get us what we needed.”

And, Nippun, the respect is mutual. Great partners like ICSC help enSYNC stay on our game and build the best tools for the association and nonprofit industry.