There is a pattern congress organisers know well. Registration opens, the announcement goes out, and then somewhere between the landing page and the confirmation email, a portion of the audience simply disappears.
Not because they lost interest in the event, but simply because they abandoned the process.
The distinction matters more than the industry tends to acknowledge. A potential delegate starts filling in a form, hits an institutional billing requirement or a mandatory field they cannot answer on the spot, and decides to come back later. Most never do. The organiser never knows exactly why, and the event budget gets reviewed instead.
The hidden cost of friction
More than 60 per cent of congress website visitors now arrive on mobile. Then they switch to a desktop computer to finish registration. If they don’t forget in the meantime. Because the registration experience most of them encounter was designed for a desktop and a degree of patience that is increasingly hard to come by. Lengthy forms, mandatory account creation, password resets none of it reflects how people actually communicate or make decisions today.
The cost is not only lost registrations. Registration teams absorb the overflow: repetitive email queries, incorrect invoices, incomplete submissions, last-minute badge changes. The administrative burden grows quietly in the background: duplicate queries, invoice corrections, incomplete submissions. All lands on the registration team and stays there, invisible to everyone except the people dealing with it.
Registration as a first impression
For most delegates, registration is not a formality that precedes the congress. It is the congress — the first real interaction they have with the event, the organisation behind it, and the experience they are being invited into. When that interaction is frustrating, it sets a tone.
Croatia-based PCO Penta has been sitting with this problem for years, organising medical and scientific congresses where the complexity is not an exception but a baseline requirement. Institutional billing, pro forma invoices, CME tracking, GDPR compliance — these are not edge cases. They are the norm. And existing tools were not built with them in mind.
The moment that crystallised things, the team recalls, was a physician who sent a short message between consultations: “Please register me for the congress, I don’t have time to fill in everything online.” It was not a complaint. It was a perfectly reasonable description of how people actually live.
Meeting delegates where they already are
The result is Conwayo — congress registration that meets delegates where they already are: on their phones, in WhatsApp, or on a call.
The platform keeps the standard registration form for those who prefer it. But its focus is on two channels that reflect how people actually communicate today.
The first is WhatsApp. Rather than navigating a portal, delegates simply start a chat. An AI guides them through the entire registration process — data collection, category selection, invoice generation, payment confirmation — within a channel they already use every day. No new account. No password. No learning curve. Just a conversation that ends with confirmation.
The second is voice. For delegates who would rather talk than type, a voice AI agent handles registration as a spoken exchange — the same way one might with a human assistant on the other end of the line. The same information gets collected, the same invoice gets generated, but the interaction takes minutes and requires nothing more than a phone call. For a specialist with five minutes between patients, this is not a convenience feature. It is the difference between registering and not registering.
On the organiser side, regardless of which channel the delegate used, the data arrives structured and clean. Invoices are generated automatically. The inbox stays manageable.
What this signals for the industry
Conwayo is a product born from a specific frustration — a PCO that built something because nothing suitable existed. But the problem it addresses is not specific to Croatia, or to medical congresses, or to any particular segment.
The MICE industry has invested significantly in the onsite attendee experience: apps, networking tools, live polling, hybrid infrastructure. The pre-event layer has received comparatively less attention, partly because the problems there are quieter. Nobody announces that they abandoned a registration form. The data just comes in lower than expected.
The next opportunity for congress organisers may be exactly there — before the event begins, when a potential delegate decides whether it is worth their time.
Because the question they are really asking is not whether the congress is worth attending. It is whether the process of getting there is.
And increasingly, that process should feel less like filling in a form — and more like sending a message.
See Conwayo in action here.
