A new TripAdvisor-style website for the events industry, venueexperience.co.uk, has been launched by Liz Carnell and Jo Dadd.
The pair launched The Venue Experience Team earlier this year, offering venues support and consultancy to help improve their facilities and services and says that through this work they found there was no real benchmark standard based on customer feedback. So they decided to launch the Venue Experience website to capture customer comments and introduce venue industry standards.
“Having worked in venues for the majority of my career, one of the biggest drawbacks I used to find was there was no simple way of knowing exactly how customers found the venue experience, as opposed to the event experience,” says Carnell. “Sites such as Trip Advisor are a powerful marketing tool as not only do they provide customers with a platform to feedback their experiences, but they also allow companies to take on that feedback and use it to improve their services, and communicate that back to their customers.
“This is exactly what the Venue Experience website does, but specifically for conference and events venues, where all levels of customers, whether they are organisers, delegates, speakers or trainers, are given the opportunity to feedback to the venue.”
The team says it will then take that feedback after a period of time and release an annual industry report outlining venue best practice and set industry standards based on the customer feedback.
To make the feedback process easier, the Venue Experience Team have developed a questionnaire containing 10 specific questions which in total will give an overall venue rating. The first seven questions cover fixed and operational elements from location, events facilities, staff and catering. The final three questions are more emotive based around recommendations, value for money and expectations.
Yarnfield Park Training & Conference Centre is one of the first venues to sign up to the new website. “We are delighted to be a partner venue for the Venue Experience site and believe this will not only support our continuing customer service and satisfaction programmes by giving us unique customer feedback information but will also provide a very useful tool for our key clients in assessing their events at our venue,” says Head of Sales and Marketing Richard Smith.
The package will be offered to venues as an annual subscription. Each month the venue will receive a summary report of responses, but will also have the option to log-in to their independent portal and review comments at any time. Venues can also respond directly to their customers if requested on any of their feedback comments.
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