At Glisser, we believe that our humanity stems from our connectivity, and we would like to express our deepest sympathies to those experiencing personal loss during this tragedy.
As the global events and meetings industry has been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus outbreak, therefore I felt it appropriate to provide a view on behalf of the Glisser business. This viewpoint is intended for our employees, our clients and partners, our investors, and the wider industry in which we operate.
Firstly, the safety of our employees is paramount. We tested our Business Continuity Plan procedures (as required annually by our ISO27001 certification) on Thursday 5th March and were pleased to report no issues in running the company virtually, with 100% employees working from home and no impact on our clients. As such we are comfortable with switching to this approach at the point that expert advice suggests it is required.
We do provide on-site support to a handful of our clients, and have events scheduled over the next few months. Having consulted with our customer success teams, we have given employees the option of not taking these on-site roles if they do not feel comfortable doing so. However, as we stand today we have sufficient coverage to deliver on all of our clients’ on-site needs. We have also made it very clear that any employees with any flu-like symptoms should not perform on-site work, and indeed should not work from our offices.
With regard to our clients, we’ve communicated to them directly where appropriate. We’ve highlighted that our virtual/hybrid solution (“Glisser LIVE”) can provide a simple yet effective means of online communication for events, meetings or training sessions. In many cases, customers are able to quickly convert face-to-face meetings into virtual meetings, and avoid cancelling or postponing events.
In fact, we’ve seen a huge surge in interest in this platform from outside of our customer-base, and are focusing our efforts on explaining the benefits of Glisser LIVE so that more organizations can better operate virtually. We believe that enabling companies to continue communicating with their stakeholders (employees, customers, prospects, etc.) remotely, can reduce the need for face-to-face meetings and therefore slow down the spread of coronavirus.
With this in mind, we’ve chosen to include Glisser LIVE as a standard feature for all of our enterprise clients at no additional cost, and to provide the Glisser LIVE functionality for free to all accounts (including ‘entry’) for clients operating in the NHS or not-for-profit sectors.
Finally, we are working with as many industry partners as possible to enable them to offer Glisser LIVE to their clients, as we recognise that businesses relying on face-to-face events may need to quickly find an alternative option to maintain cash flow during this period. We invite agencies, audio visual providers and venues to get in touch and discuss how we can collaborate and deliver results that support both their clients and their businesses.
