Andreas Heckmann spent nearly 25 years at enterprise software company SAP, most recently as an executive vice president leading a team of more than 10,000 customer-service and development employees. He brings that experience to a new position at Cvent: chief customer officer, managing the more than 1,500 people in its client-services organization.
As Heckmann begins his tenure with the meetings-management platform provider, MeetingsNet caught up with him to ask about his goals and experience.
MeetingsNet: What’s your top priority for enhancing Cvent’s customer experience?
Andreas Heckmann: I joined Cvent during our annual companywide events, which offered an incredible opportunity for me to travel to our regional offices, meet our client-services team members, and experience our unique culture. It also helped me really understand the way we interact with each other and our customers. What I found across the board is that we have a deeply committed client-services organization that is passionate about customers and enabling their success. Our strong customer satisfaction ratings are a testament to that, and it was great to see that passion firsthand.
As the Cvent platform continues to evolve and expand (along with our customer’s needs), my top priority is personalization, such as offering a choice of channels through which our customers can interact with our various client-services experts. Of course, A.I. is the talk of the town, and there’s a lot of opportunity there. We plan to leverage A.I. across the customer journey to help facilitate seamless client interactions—but we want to do it in the right way. It should complement our support, not detract from it. I have seen plenty of examples of the opposite effect and we want to avoid that. Our guiding principle across the client-services organization is that we only do something if it truly improves the customer experience. That will be our North Star.
MeetingsNet: What do you hope Cvent will be doing in a few years that it’s not doing today?
Heckmann: I believe that Cvent is ready for global prime time. While we already serve thousands of customers across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa, the best is yet to come. We plan to continue building our regional expertise and creating a support structure that truly embraces our growing global customer base. Given my previous global role and international experience, I feel that I joined at the perfect time to support and drive Cvent’s international expansion.
MeetingsNet: What’s your experience with meetings, and what’s the most interesting one you’ve ever attended?
Heckmann: In my previous career, I attended dozens of meetings and events every year. Whether I was an event host, attendee, or speaker, I saw firsthand the power of connecting in person. Events were where I drew a lot of my energy and inspiration from—so much so that I had a place in my old office where I would hang all my event badges as mementos. There were hundreds of them. I was an executive sponsor for and organizer of some of SAP’s most prestigious and high-caliber events, so I guess it’s safe to say I have quite a lot of experience attending and hosting events.
As far as the most interesting event I’ve attended, I’ve always liked events that deliver a highly personalized experience for a select group of attendees, like the SAP MaxAttention Summits. They were hard to plan and execute but were always the most rewarding to the attendees. It was where personalization came to life, and the impact of these types of events is why personalization is such a core priority for me today.
