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around 500 accounts.
“We have an operations manager,
marketing manager, sales and an event
director but I’m that one-stop-shop for
exhibitors,” she explains. “It works really
well and the feedback from exhibitors has
been really positive.”
Chander describes an event she
previously worked on where the show was
split into zones and each zone had its own
manager as a point of contact.
“We do that on bigger shows,” comments
CEVA’s Dean Wale. “We have different
teams in different halls and exhibitors don’t
have to walk to the other side of the venue
to ask a simple question.”
Verity Chynoweth, who works on tech
event FinTech Connect, says: “We have
a text service, so all our exhibitors will
get a text containing points of contact on
the morning of the show. Quite often the
problem is that they might text the wrong
contact, but we trialled it last year and it
worked so we’ll be implementing it again
this year.”
“I don’t think you can beat the old school
service desk,” argues Wale. “Where you
“We have an interesting problem, we’re having to work
backwards and try to make people take smaller stands”
– Emily Challis
have electrics, logistics etc. all next to
each other. There’s nothing better than
just speaking to people. We brief our staff
who man our service desk so they can help
everyone. We’re a defensive line for the
organiser.
“Always push back to the suppliers
and get them to be more visible. There’s
nothing worse than exhibitors needing to
cross a hall to ask a really menial question.
Have two or four service points and lots of
signage and branding.
“For that customer experience it’s
important to have service points but it’s
hard to get that balance of saying to a
supplier, ‘I want five service points, but I
only want to pay for four’,” adds Chander.
Working with first-time exhibitors
“We have up to 100 star-ups at our
show, and they get either a kiosk or small
shell scheme,” says Chynoweth. “We do
hold their hand quite a lot. Freeman also
do a webinar with our start-up exhibitors
because we find people don’t tend to attend
our exhibitor days.
“We also have people who have never
done space-only before and that’s where
we have to do a bit of education, explaining
that they need to purchase electrics and
how much gets you what.”
“We know that there’s a problem, not
just with first time exhibitors but when
a company has exhibited before but the
person responsible hasn’t,” says Jones.
“There are a few different ways we try and
help: we have webinars, we make sure all
new exhibitors get a phone call and are
talked through it.
“It is daunting and they don’t have a
consumer experience; a lot of people expect
to be able to go to the website and be
presented with everything.”
Chapple says: “We have around 350
exhibitors and 100 attendees representing
around 70 exhibitors at our exhibitor
days. They’re a lot of work. We’re actually
thinking of doing a series of webinars so
that the exhibitors can pick and choose
what’s relevant to them. We’re doing one
on PR, for example, and one on marketing.
You don’t want to listen to a webinar for an
hour, so we’re doing around 10-15
September — 39