The Story on the Ground
The past 48 hours have been fairly intense for the vFairs team. The Coronavirus outbreak has wreaked havoc on commercial activity across the world. The events industry, in particular, is facing a massive hit, due to which our global offices have been inundated with inquiries and urgent projects to move conferences online. Our customer support teams reported a 7x increase in inbound requests in the past week and the trajectory is still on an incline. 
The sudden surge of demand simply reflects the gravity of the situation faced by our customers, partners and stakeholders. These are hard times, no doubt. Apart from the looming health crisis, we are hearing how businesses are scrambling hard to offset the financial losses they are likely to bear as they pull out of trade shows, conferences and exhibitions.
vFairs is Reacting Quickly
vFairs’ mission has been to help firms meet business outcomes in innovative and cost-effective ways. Thus, during these testing times, we commit to undertake whatever measures necessary to deliver necessary support to our network. We are already in talks with educational institutions that are seeing upcoming job fairs and campus drives being called off ahead of the summer break. We’re also working with corporations and government entities who cancelled or pulled out of conferences/summits to see how we can support them in mitigating their economic impact due to the crisis. Some of the steps that we have implemented in the past week to bolster our infrastructure are as follows:
- We have fast-tracked training and addition of extra staff in project teams to service ongoing virtual events and ensure they are executed on schedule.
- Our customer support teams are now working extended shifts to ensure sufficient support is available to customers 24/7 across any timezone.
- We observed that a majority of affected parties are from China and South-east Asia. Thus, we have commissioned development teams to create immediate enhancements to the platform to support languages spoken in the region, specifically Mandarin.
- Our standard event setup and marketing cycles last from anywhere between 4-6 weeks but given how sensitive time is, we re-engineered processes to deliver certain events in half that time frame.
We’re Ready
vFairs has been in the virtual events business for close to a decade now and this situation is truly unprecedented. However, we feel an incredible sense of responsibility in these trying times to come through for all our stakeholders that are counting on us. The trust placed on us extremely precious to us and we will do whatever is possible in our capacity to ensure we help organizations through this crisis. Our thoughts and wishes go out to all those who have been affected.
