Posted by

Barry Siskind

Community Manager

 

Your customers include people and organizations on many levels: exhibitors, attendees and sponsors. Each group has its unique set of demands yet each is an integral part of your overall success. Keeping each group happy is tantamount to a juggler balancing three balls at once knowing if one falls the others will quickly follow. Your success therefore is directly tied to each groups loyalty to you and your events.

Looking to best practices in other industries is a great way to find methods of building loyalty that can be applied to ours. One good case in point is an interesting blog posting I read called “Tips for Creating Customer Loyalty, by Guy Nirpaz, CEO of Totango, a firm that provides a customer engagement platform for software companies.

http://www.guynirpaz.com/category/customer-loyalty/

Albeit Pirpaz is selling a software solution but his five tips can easily be adapted to the challenges faced in our industry.

1. Make Customers Love Your Product (your event)

Pirpaz defines love when the following three attributes are met: Value, Enjoyment and Support.

2. A Customer Success Team

Pirpaz suggests dedicating one person on your team to be responsible for the success of a specific customer. This can include training, handholding and guiding them through the steps they need to take to ensure they have met the three criteria in step one.

3. Create a Customer Health Score

Invest in systems and technologies that allow you to take your customer’s temperature from time to time to make sure their relationship with your organization is healthy. Then set up a scoring system which acts as a motivator for change.

4. Nurture Your Paying Customers

Two important messages include: don’t stop selling once the customer has signed up or registered and don’t treat all customers equally – they are individuals.

5. Learn From Churn

Churn is a result of customers who do not re-register or re-attend. Rather than losing these names on your data base, mine them for useful information that you can use to either motivate them to come back or fix problems that you may be unaware of that may affect other customers.

Lessons learned from a software developer are applicable to ours and other industries. Let us know what other lessons are out there for all of us to learn from.