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.