Any organizer who wants to create unforgettable events needs to take customer satisfaction into account. That’s right — have you stopped to think that your participants are your customers? In the business world, there’s a whole set of techniques focused on this, known as Customer Success: methods developed to improve retention and loyalty through the relationship between a company and its customers. These concepts are just as essential for events. Here’s everything you need to know: what customer satisfaction means at events, 5 tips to improve it, and how to measure it.
What Is Customer Satisfaction at Events?
Both commerce and events care about the customer experience — both aim to offer a quality service that’s well rated, sold, and valued. The market has shown several techniques that can help, like Customer Success: a set of techniques that ensure everyone who buys a product or service actually succeeds with that purchase. It’s always focused on customer satisfaction — that is, whether the participant achieves the result they wanted from the event. Good practices, survey forms, and even a dedicated Customer Success team within the organizing committee can all be applied to events.
5 Tips to Improve Customer Satisfaction at Your Event
1. Everyone Matters
The most basic lesson in customer treatment is to treat everyone well — with empathy and gratitude. This applies to everyone involved in the event, from the organizing committee to renowned speakers. From there, you’ll see your event’s core values come together, making it easier to solve problems. In practice, you can build empathy and gratitude by: listening carefully to problems, putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, and finding complete solutions so they don’t have to come back with the same issue; valuing everyone involved in the event equally; thanking people for their feedback; and thanking and valuing recurring participants.
2. Run Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Speaking of valuing your participants, one way to show they matter is by proving their opinion counts. Sometimes people just want to be heard — sharing an opinion and having it considered makes participants feel truly valued by your event.
3. Listen, Listen, and Learn
It’s through participant feedback that you’ll learn — and that applies even to negative opinions. During conversations with your participants, always keep learning in mind. Paying attention to what they say can give you powerful insights into your event, since they can tell you better than anyone what’s working and what needs improvement. Besides satisfaction surveys, social media and email are also great channels for this kind of feedback. Mapping the lessons learned from your event is very important — you can keep participant insights in one place, look for solutions, and even notify contributors about changes made based on their input, like Even3 does with its Ideas Portal for organizers.
4. Don’t Ignore the Details
Another essential point in event organization is attention to detail. Beyond reducing the chance of errors during the event, paying close attention to people can be a real differentiator. For example, in a real situation, a recurring event always had the same well-known, regular participant. One edition, he wasn’t there, and the organization found out he hadn’t been able to register in time. So the team decided it made sense to send him an email extending the registration deadline — he loved that gesture of attention and even brought more friends to join him at the event. Attention ranges from empathy to anticipating problems: to know how to act and what your participants are feeling, put yourself in their shoes, get as involved in your event as possible, and map out the difficulties they face.
5. Always Go Further
Finally, apply what Customer Success calls the “wow factor” — trust me, it makes a huge difference at your event. In practice, the wow factor happens when you surprise your participant. To do this, you need to know their expectations for your event and go beyond them. But remember: expectations vary from participant to participant, so go back to the previous lesson and pay attention to the details — that’s the only way to know how to surprise them the right way. Once they’re surprised, that’s when your participant will want to come back for every future edition!
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction Levels?
Now it’s time to find out if you’re applying Customer Success techniques well — and you already know how: you’ll need a satisfaction survey. Remember the right timing for collecting feedback we mentioned? Each touchpoint with participants calls for a different approach. Some examples: after the event, you can ask how likely the participant would be to recommend it to a friend; after a specific service, like an online broadcast, you can ask how satisfied they were with that experience. The key is to send the survey right after the participant’s interaction with your event, and keep it as short and objective as possible — too many questions can make participants give up on answering.
