Arinex Uses Zoom’s Video-First Platform to Transform How the Event Company Communicates

As one of Australia’s leading event management companies, Arinex has set itself apart from the competition by offering a unique blend of services. Arinex provides traditional event management services like registration assistance and accommodation management, but it also offers clients digital products that help keep events organized, drive attendee engagement, and maximize efficiency. Arinex’s 85 employees coordinate their event management services from four offices across Australia.

Most of the conferences Arinex manages are held in Australia; however, the company works with clients around the globe in countries like Korea, Singapore, and Germany. Because Arinex provides both physical and digital solutions for conferences around the world, maintaining flexible, reliable, and dynamic communication is critical to its success.

Difficulty communicating across 4 locations

Arinex’s legacy video conferencing solution was effective inside the borders of Australia, but making calls outside of the country had limited reliability and flexibility. Without the ability to dial into locations outside of Australia, Arinex found it very difficult to maintain efficient communications and connect with customers in places like France or the United States.

The teams at Arinex also experienced issues conducting training sessions and making company-wide announcements over video conference. With lackluster audio quality and only a few useful features, it was difficult to make such announcements over video and forced the teams at Arinex to visit different offices in person for training.

“Training is a big part of what we do, and we couldn’t keep flying people in from across the country to deliver or attend training sessions,” said Shaun Daws, Head of Technology for Arinex.

“When we would have open discussions during video training sessions, we would completely lose audio,” said Santi Thawornwiphat, Manager of Technology Operations at Arinex. “People would catch just a few words at a time, and with so many people in the conversation, it was very difficult to communicate.”

In its search for a video conferencing solution that supports international communication and makes internal communications more efficient and organized, Arinex decided to try Skype for Business, but quickly ran into obstacles.

“As we began to look at other products, we decided to trial Skype for Business,” Daws said. “But we faced a lot of issues because we don’t have a hosted Skype for Business server in our environment, and without that, the quality and reliability of the calls just wasn’t good enough.”

As the search for a reliable video conferencing solution continued, Arinex considered implementing other popular video conferencing tools but found those solutions and related hardware to be too expensive.

“We looked into some of the Cisco solutions and other conference room systems, but they were too expensive,” Daws said. “We didn’t want to spend upwards of $5,000 on a camera and audio system for each conference room.”

A cost-effective, reliable solution

The teams at Arinex first came into contact with Zoom’s video-first unified communications platform when a number of their clients began inviting them to Zoom meetings. Employees at Arinex noticed that they never experienced any issues with Zoom, and they were eager to pilot the solution.

“We learned about Zoom because a lot of our clients were using it, and we never had a single complaint about the quality of those calls, it’s just been perfect,” Thawornwiphat said. “We decided to look deeper into the Zoom product, and we found out that it’s a great product, especially in terms of reliability.”

“We found that other solutions required a lot of bandwidth, so we did some internal technology team testing in low-bandwidth environments” Daws said. “We ran Skype for Business, Zoom, and some other video conferencing solutions we were looking at, and we found that Zoom was able to optimize traffic far better than the other solutions.”

The IT team was also impressed by Zoom’s ability to integrate with a wide range of conference room devices, which saved them from spending thousands of dollars on new hardware. Arinex was able to deploy Zoom’s video communications solution using the hardware it already had on hand, which made implementation far easier and less costly.

“The fact that Zoom works with a wide range of hardware was very attractive to us,” Daws said. “It works with Logitech and other providers, so it meant that we didn’t have to spend thousands to set up one conference room.”

Improving sales, training, & operations

After switching over to Zoom, Arinex was able to make video calls to any country of their choosing and also improved the efficacy of its sales team. Using Zoom’s screen-sharing capabilities, Arinex account teams are able to better demonstrate the value and operation of their digital event management tools.

“At the end of the day, we needed a reliable tool to perform demos for prospective clients and allow them to interview us for contracts,” Daws said. “And having something like Zoom is critical to making that happen.”

Arinex was also able to improve the quality of its training sessions by implementing Zoom.

Employees can now attend training sessions virtually and get all the information they need to succeed rather than traveling to an office to attend training in person. Arinex’s Human Resources team has also been leveraging Zoom to make its operations more efficient, using the platform to conduct first-round interviews with potential new hires.

As Arinex expands its reach to new countries and grows its business within Australia, Daws and Thawornwiphat hope to eventually host their entire unified communications infrastructure on Zoom.

“We plan on having all of our future trainings recorded on Zoom and put into the cloud so that all of our employees can access them,” Daws said.

“And we’re really excited about Zoom Phone,” Thawornwiphat said. “We can’t wait to implement it.”