Partner Article

Added value…

I helped organise a high profile summit meeting for a client in the property industry last week. It’s an event that we have worked on previously and which is well attended by a fairly wide variety of professionals. As ever, the programme this year included a range of political, economic and strategic experts, together with some interesting “hot” topic specialists.

Any organisation likes to be able to provide a good product or service. Most would aspire to exceed this through excellent service. And increasing numbers are aiming to offer all that and “added value”.

So what is added value? I guess it means giving something extra, not strictly in scope, but extremely useful to the client. It’s a fine line between achieving this ambition, without devaluing any of your wider portfolio, or stepping too far outside of your comfort zone and over committing yourself.

Often you will get good guidance from your customers by carefully listening to everything they tell you. Although the game here will be to manage the client who always pushes for more, you do have the opportunity to offer that added value AND upsell your services!

At last week’s event we provided our usual AV services and event management, AND added a photography service at short notice. Since we were there all day, rather than just take a couple of particular shots, we were able to photograph all presenters and panels; a perfect example of a win-win added value!

Of course, the added value isn’t necessarily always obvious. At this event, delegates paid for to attend. It was great value considering the content, with (less commonly these days) a good lunch included. Yet the real added value for delegates was the networking that the event provided. I am not a fan of deliberate networking events as my experience has never been very positive, but the inherent opportunity that events like this present are immense. I overhead several conversations throughout the day as delegates and presenters alike arranged follow-up conversations and meetings which I am pretty certain weren’t on their agendas at the start of the day. If that isn’t added value, I don’t know what is!

The morale of the story is simply this. Despite all the technology available today, you simply cannot beat face to face communication between human beings and you should never underestimate the value of live events like this – added or not!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by R&B Group .