Many months ago we registered for this week’s PrintEx expo in Sydney.

From a customer point of view, the reason to pre-register is to avoid hassles at the expo — you get your badge in advance, and can avoid the queues and paperwork of having to register at the door. The conference organiser promises to mail you out your badge early, and in return they also save on the manpower needed at the door, and also know in advance there are people planning to come along!

We even got a phone call (one each), two weeks before the event to remind us that we’re registered, and to check we’re still coming.

So, by the time we leave Melbourne for Sydney (only 3 business days before the expo starts) — the badges have NOT arrived!

That means we’ll still have to queue up to get our badge at the event (although we do have a barcoded registration page to save re-filling out paperwork) — but the conference organiser has to pay extra in 4 ways:

• Extra staff costs are required to process visitors who didn’t get their name badges in advance
• That also means extra costs for registration equipment (badge machines, computer terminals, booth setups)
• The badges they send out in advance are also wasted — staff, badge, processing time and equipment, postage — as they hadn’t arrived in time before travelling
• And finally, the customer experience is not as good because of the frustration in not receiving a promised badge early, and having to take extra time once arriving at the venue

Perhaps there is a trade-off between sending badges out too early — and visitors losing/misplacing them — and sending them out too late — and visitors, especially from interstate and overseas (this expo receives plenty in that category), not receiving them in time before their travel commences.

Would it then be worth having two mailout periods, one for local pre-registered visitors and one for interstate/overseas pre-registered visitors?

Lesson: keep the customer’s point-of-view in mind! Think about the steps they take to get to your event, and how to fit in to suit the majority of them.

Here’s a fantastic example of exemplary customer service, and really exemplifies the quote we have on our front page from Richard Branson:

“Mistakes are inevitable. Dissatisfied customers are not.”

One of the Google Labs projects in the US is Google Transit. However, as this post describes, the directions were rather unhelpful in getting blogger Adam Darowski to his hotel: 90 minutes spent trying to get to a building that was visible, but on the wrong side of 8 lanes of freeway.

Google, seeing the blog, not only sent a hand-written humorous note of apology, but also a Superman cape — which fit perfectly with the humourous side of their letter.

This is in stark contrast to my recent experience with the Route Planner available on the Tourism Victoria website: directions starting from our place send us the wrong way down a one-way street, offer a u-turn into a non-existent section of road and then suggest driving down a private road (through Moonee Valley Racecourse) with gates at each end that are locked most of the time!

I contacted Tourism Victoria… no reply 9 weeks later. Yet here, Google read the blog and pro-actively made contact with the blogger to say sorry, offer a wonderful “gift” AND also explain how Google Transit would be fixed to avoid the problem.

Spot on, Google… a customer experience you’d never even dream about.

Mel and I were out shopping today for a new picnic table, and were at Rays in Maribyrnong.

Once we’d selected our table and made our way back to the register to pay, the assistant asked if I had a Rays membership card.

I said that I did, but I’d left it at home. We normally get mail associated with a different store location, but, the assistant was able to quickly ask me my name, locate me in their customer database and apply the member’s discount anyway on my purchase — all without me having my card!

At the same time, she was able to confirm our mailing address to make sure our details were up to date.

Nice to know that my forgetfulness in not having my card with me didn’t stop Rays from rewarding me anyway… they were able to verify that I was a member and give me a discount, reinforcing the relationship they have with me as a customer.

As much as it sounds like “well, this should happen everywhere” — it definitely doesn’t, and scores a good impression on my visit.

Last night I was at one of Melbourne’s 5-star hotels for an evening seminar. Mel had dropped me in to save on parking woes (we’re only 6km away), so after we finished I called her and waited outside (undercover, watching the lovely much needed rain!) until she arrived.

One of the sales techniques I’ve learned, both through specific sales courses and also through crewing Tony Robbins events, is about rapport, and how effective it can be in communicating with other people.

Like most people, much of the time I’m unaware of specific rapport triggers working — although I did consciously notice someone was in rapport with me a few weeks ago during a casual conversation, as I watched them match/mirror some body movements and expressions during our conversation (even some deliberate movements I did, and watched them follow!).

Anyway, back to the hotel. As I was waiting out the front of this 5-star venue, I sat unobtrusively to the side of the main doorway.

During the time I waited, 3 women emerged from the hotel, along with the concierge, to grab a taxi out to the airport.

There were no taxis nearby, although from my 10 minutes of waiting, there would undoubtedly be one coming along soon, as I had already noticed. However, there happened to be a brief lull in the taxi-passing-by department whilst the group waited.

The female concierge took the time to make “small talk” with the 3 women until a taxi showed up. It was interesting to watch this conversation!

Firstly, the 3 hotel guests. They were all very conservatively dressed in business clothes for their night flight to their next destination. All 3 were quiet, and, if I was to make a judgement, I’d guess they were in Melbourne for business or pampering/shopping (business trip, based on their luggage). And, they had been staying at a hotel with a rack rate of around $600 per night.

Regardless, the first question the concierge asked the 3 was about going home, and assuming they didn’t enjoy their time away from home. I don’t remember it verbatim, but it was something like, “I bet you’re glad to be going home.”

The guests, all still very quiet and polite, actually shook their heads to say no, that they enjoyed Melbourne, and yes, they like home, but they did like it here too.

The concierge seemed to miss picking up on the quiet/polite/business-like manner of the guests. “Oh yes, she said, Melbourne’s such a great party town!”

It probably is for the concierge, but the conversation — from an outside observer’s perspective — seemed to be fairly mismatched: firstly, the concierge wrongly assumed the guests didn’t like it here all that much, and then presumed they did in fact like Melbourne because it’s a party town.

Not getting much of a response from the guests, she pressed on, asking where the group were heading. After finding out the international destination (Singapore), she exclaimed “wicked!” and asked if they had some room in their luggage for her to tag along.

Despite my guess that “wicked” would probably not be part of the regular vocabulary of the guests, they did seem to perk up a little when the concierge wished she was travelling to Singapore with them.

However, along came a taxi and it was time for farewell.

Watching all this, the one thing I noticed is that the concierge’s questions were based on her own view of the world — which is quite normal. But her view of “glad to be getting home” and “party town” didn’t get much reaction from her 5-star guests, and didn’t seem to resonate at all. In this case, I think she’d have been better placed asking more open-ended questions to have a nice conversation, letting the guests talk about their own views and their time in Melbourne.

This certainly worked at the end when she subconsciously appealed to her guests’ sense of pride in living in Singapore (flattery), they perked up a bit hearing that someone else was envious of their home town and also wanted to go there tonight.

She fell into rapport when she talked about what interested her guests.

An interesting observation watching someone out of rapport, and then, just briefly, finding a little rapport as the conversation ended.