Annie Smith, senior event manager, Hanson Wade Engage, explains how to engage with customers in a post-pandemic world.
Improving customer experience on a regular basis is essential in today’s conference world.
How do you make the experience even better than last year? How do we encourage people to jump on a plane and book accommodation away from their families after two years of digital conferences that can be accessed from anywhere? These are all questions that we asked prior to Covid-19 anyway. However, now, they have become even harder for us to answer.
While it may seem as though we are taking a lot of time to answer these questions, the answers provide a lot more value than you may think. A positive customer experience helps you to retain your customers, encourages brand advocacy as well as promotes loyalty from those customers that you’ve been working with.
Based on all these things, the customers hold the power, and that power is stronger than it’s ever been before.
Meeting demands
Over the last year, I have found that previous ways of communicating with customers aren’t fit for purpose, as we are now in an industry that is backed up by two years and therefore, we are playing catch up.
My focus has been around how I can ensure I’m serving my customers in the most efficient way, while understanding that they are receiving requests from other corporate conference organisations, our competitors. Communicating the right way has never been as important as it is today. I have created a customer portal website for my event portfolio which allows my customers to access all the relevant information in a visual and central place.
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Sending multiple email communications is not something that is going to catch the customers eyes when they simply don’t have the time to acknowledge the communication.
Working in life-science conferences and bespoke networking events, there is a high demand to have key voices at these events to create value and in turn increase customer sales and retention for the years that follow.
I work closely with our conference production and customer experience team to understand what more we can do to create value at our events. What do our customers want to see? How do we find this information considering there has been a gap in physical event feedback? Keeping up with modern industry trends and having these conversations with our customers is what I have found to be most valuable. There is nothing wrong with asking your customers those specific questions of ‘what do you want to see from us?’ over calls and at the events rather than in a feedback survey post event.
Customers remain at the heart of what we do and having those conversations make them feel as important as they are to us.
