We are living in the era where the customer experience is the most important factor. I believe that when you enter this post you want to find some answers to the challenges or to improve the events that you are organizing, but I want to propose something different this time before talking directly.
Let’s say you’ve taken a few days off, getting ready to travel to a nearby city in need of some time to rest and relax. Everything is ready:
- Your bag is ready;
- You are taking some books;
- The mobile phone charger and headset are in the backpack;
- The weather forecast is incredible.
I had everything to be a wonderful moment, right? Except for the fact that you had to stay in a room with a broken air conditioner, a renovation that the hotel management forgot to notify, a room very far away and difficult to access, the reception that never answered the phone, not to mention breakfast… What a nightmare!
Events are completely related to delivering value and experience to participants. The moment we don’t design the real needs and desires of these people, we leave a large percentage of customer satisfaction in the trash.
We are in the era of experience: everything that is made available to the end customer is focused on something satisfactory and memorable. Everything that the customer hears, touches, uses and has contact needs to be carefully cared for and validated.
We know that each customer responds in a different way, based on the circumstances in which they find themselves, and we need to serve them and offer them the best experience. And this can be your differential in relation to your competitor 😉
Challenges when it comes to holding your events
Understand the public and their needs
The target audience of your event is what will help you dictate the actions that will be taken before, during and after the event. But how do you organize the activities if you don’t know your audience?
Strategic planning, where the organization can draw a persona together with an assertive registration form, and bring relevant information, is the recipe for success.
A very important point: the storage and analysis of the data generated through the registration form makes all the difference to adopt new strategies before the day of the event arrives and improve the experience of these participants.
Designing experiences and ways to connect coherent with the intention of the event
Several times I participated in meetings, lectures and events that promised a super rich content and in the end were more concerned about how to provide a better happy hour, as well as events that brought an importance to connections and the environment and the moments were not designed for this proposal. Have you also been through this situation? Unfortunately it is more common than we can imagine.
We must have very aligned the purposes of the event among several areas – scenography, communication, coordinator of the speakers and sponsors, general production, among others – in order to reach the final goal: to deliver the best possible event to the participants.
Think of ways to facilitate logistics and accessibility for participants
No matter how much we think of different ways of facilitating and impressing participants, we must always take into account that the first impression is the one that remains.
For this reason, the organizational team needs to be careful to avoid points such as:
- A huge line at check-in because of the response time of the totems;
- Spaces that do not offer accessibility to the physically and visually impaired;
- Lack of people who translate and interpret into pounds and other languages;
- Unprepared staffs.
The thought of it gives you the creeps, doesn’t it?! These are just some of the challenges that are strongly linked to the experience of the participants.
Establish a direct communication channel
We know that the participants arrive with several demands since the registration period and it is essential that the role of customer service is well defined before this moment and know how to answer or direct to the person in charge the doubts they have.
The big question is that this channel needs to be effective, efficient, with no noise and be the place of support for any person who may be interested or actually participate in your event. It’s very frustrating for you to get in touch with someone to clear up your doubts and not have any answers, isn’t it?
There are events that use a chat, phone, instant messaging application, social networks or the official event application to communicate directly with people at any stage of the event. Just choose the one that best matches the big day’s value proposition.
Trace the participant’s journey in a clear and fluid way
A good event is one that has a clear objective of what it wants to pass on to the participant and gets them to experience it throughout the proposed moments.
This fluidity and clarity already begins at the launch of the site, through a friendly URL, a form of registration that facilitates the acquisition of tickets and is consumed in the activities proposed and always updated in real time so that nothing is lost during the event.
