McKesson ideaShare Annual Conference and Expo

OVERVIEW

McKesson Corporation is the largest American healthcare company distributing pharmaceuticals and providing health information technology, medical supplies and care management tools.

McKesson’s ideaShare annual conference and exhibition is the company’s biggest U.S. pharmaceutical customer event, with more than 5,000 attendees. The event offers four days of general sessions, workshops, continuing pharmacy education (CPE) and interactive exhibits. All designed to help independent pharmacy owners and their staff improve their knowledge, performance and profitability.

CHALLENGE

McKesson needed an event-savvy partner to fill the shoes of their previous vendor who had managed the annual event’s registration and housing process for the prior 15 years. Consider the complexities of a four-day conference and exhibition held in a different U.S. city each year, attended by more than 5,000 customers, family members, employees, exhibitors, event staff and VIPs – all staying in multiple hotels and having unique requirements for their event roles.

The event required experts in registration and hospitality to wrangle the existing processes, simplify the pricing options and automate new ways to make the customer experience as smooth and seamless as possible. Outdated manual processes had to make way for a completely web-based registration system.

SOLUTION

Lightspeed evaluated the event’s previous registration and housing processes and designed a customized web-based solution for McKesson that solved several challenging aspects:

Registration workflows. Our ideaShare solution addresses the unique needs and interests of different audiences by using separate registration workflows for customers, employees, event staff, exhibitors, buying groups and supplemental roles such as media and event talent.

Each registration flow includes unique messaging and URLs specific to the type of event role. Lightspeed also built a registration app specifically to manage exhibitors, which McKesson’s U.S. Pharmaceutical business also used for their national sales conference registration.

Pricing strategy. No one wants an event experience that starts with deciphering confusing pricing options. Lightspeed designed a new approach to simplify packaged pricing for this family-friendly event, while closing any registration loopholes that could result in lost revenue.

Now a simple, straight-forward pricing strategy allows attendees to design their own experience, choosing from a full conference pass, expo-only pass, guest passes for family members, nightly hotel rates, conference meals and a la carte activities.

Call center support. Lightspeed offers a full-service call center, operating daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to support ideaShare’s 5,000+ attendees. Lightspeed’s solution includes online call center software that tags and assigns requests to specific personnel. Guaranteed response time is within 24 hours, with most replies made the same business day.

Registration data and reporting. Lightspeed securely manages registration data for more than 5,000 ideaShare attendees. This includes syncing with other vendors via an application programming interface (API) to enable offerings such as a mobile event app. Built-in logic in the database produces multiple types of reporting for the client.

Housing. A 50% growth year-over-year in the number of attending customers placed extensive demands on the event’s housing, which ballooned to 13 separate hotels. Lightspeed now manages the housing experience using fewer but larger hotels to streamline hotel negotiations, registration and attendee transportation.

Badging. Lightspeed’s extended team keeps things running smoothly onsite, handling all the event’s badging, credentials, and badge scanning for sessions including lunch and learns, general sessions and continuing education sessions.

By building a client-specific solution to improve the ideaShare registration and housing experience, Lightspeed helped McKesson drive their customers’ power to perform.