Connecting global customers

An international organiser of trade fairs and exhibitions asked us to work with them to improve the customer experience on one of their global events. The trade fair in question was the key show for its industry and spanned three key markets (Europe, N.America and APAC).

The organiser wanted our help to understand why one of the most recent shows had not been as successful as expected and how to work with their international client base to rectify this.

We put in place a structured plan to address this. First of all we set out to understand the issue. To do this we conducted over 40 one-to-one interviews with company employees, partners, suppliers and over 20 customers. This sort of deep-dive analysis very rapidly helps establish both what the prevalent issues are and their level of impact.

With the customer, supplier and team feedback in place we shared our analysis with the client and proposed an ongoing plan of action to address this. The plan included:

• sharing the customer feedback with all key stakeholders
• mapping the existing customer journey
• setting out the desired customer experience
• proposing changes to the technology stack, the existing processes and communication with customers

With sign off for our plan, we put together a joint team (our consultants, our chosen technology partners and key members from the client team) and embarked on the implementation of the project.

The outcomes were that we were able to present a new platform to the exhibitors at the very next event. This met the needs they had articulated in their conversations with us and addressed a number of the process failures that they had complained of. The platform was eventually rolled out to all our client’s customers and was successfully adopted by all of them.