Customer Experience is a Journey

The key challenge with delivering a great Customer Experience (CX) is ensuring that the entire journey is at the same level of excellence. Therefore, associations need to step away from measuring post-event CX and focusing on a sub-set of elements of the journey. This means that processes need to be put in place to capture feedback continuously, allowing to adapt and predict the experience and measure the impact.

AUTHOR: SVEN BOSSU, CEO, AIPC

That is why a different type of measurement needs to be put in place. For example, when it comes to registration, it is very interesting to know what the percentage of delegates is that managed the complete registration in one go and the average time it took. Having that information at hand instantly, allows to detect and repair problems, which can ultimately have an impact on registration figures.

Because that is the other problem with satisfaction survey: how do you translate the results into increase of revenues, decrease of costs or any other objective the association might have? We all strive to increase our Net-Promotor- Scores (NPS) and it is a really good indicator of the fact that a member is satisfied with the value offered. Ultimately, however, NPS and other Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) metrics provide useful data, but they do not provide enough context to truly identify a CX problem – or solve it.
 

Resilience and AI-agents

So, how do you start with journey measurement? The first step is to understand the goals of your members – when, for example, they attend your conference – and to link these goals with the objectives you have as an association. By instance, one of the primary goals of the AIPC members when attending the annual conference is to network with their peers, which is linked to a key objective of AIPC – the creation of a global network of convention centre professionals. The second step is to map out the journey the delegate will make to achieve that goal, which will most probably be a multichannel journey. The AIPC delegate will look at the delegate list to identify the persons she/he wants to connect with, use the event-app to connect with that person, use the signage at the event to make it to the networking zone, look for a place to sit and have a coffee while having that meaningful conversation, and exchange contact details via the event-app. The third step is to track the different elements of that journey. If the “connection” functionality of the event-app is not used, but the networking zone is full all the time, it means that we are missing an element in the journey. Which in the case of AIPC could simply mean that, because it is a relatively small event, participants do not use the app to connect, but simply look at the delegate badges to find somebody – in which case, the badges need to be designed to this purpose, in order to facilitate the journey. In an ideal world (we are not there yet) there would be a fourth and final step: to measure the number of new connections made and the stickiness of that connection – have the persons involved stayed in touch after the event – which would be linked to the AIPC’s community objective.

Now, AIPC members have of course several goals when attending the AIPC conference and so, multiple journeys need to be defined and tracked. But doing so is allowing us to better understand the needs of our members and therefore to design our events accordingly – and to adapt on the spot when needed.
 

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