Why do I have to learn how to use a company’s business model?

Sometimes dealing with a company who are selling a fairly simple commodity isn’t as straight forward as it should be which tends to annoy me. This has happened to me personally a few times now, then a colleague mentioned it to me again a couple of days ago and I thought it’d make a good topic for an article.

To explain what I mean I’ll use a couple of examples. The first example is that a number of years ago I was in the process of upgrading our company mobile phones. It turned out that if you upgraded the “leader” phone (the main phone on the account) without upgrading all of the rest at the same time meant that the level of phones you could get for the other users on the account was suddenly reduced. This seems ridiculous to me. If we are entitled to upgrades then we should continue to be entitled to those upgrades regardless of which phone gets upgraded first.

Basically this meant I had to learn enough about their business model to use it in order to not get screwed by them! In this example I ended up writing to the head of customer retention complaining about their stupid practices and got what I wanted. It shouldn’t have taken so much time and effort for me to continue to be a customer for them. 

Another example is internet service providers (ISPs). I’ve heard plenty of stories about the ISPs improving the packages that they offer to their customers over time. That’s perfectly normal, the market is very competitive and they have to move things forwards to keep up with their competitors. 

What isn’t right is when they don’t pass on those lower prices or better features on to long standing, loyal customers. We had an ISP who dramatically lowered the prices they charged for the exact same service that we were on. We were not in any long term contract with them as the charges ran from month to month yet they didn’t give us the savings until we spotted it and asked for them.

On the one hand, you might think that’s good business practice because they are keeping the money in their accounts until the customer is observant enough to notice. I say it’s terrible business practice because pretty much without exception – the customer will feel cheated and aggrieved by their suppliers behaviour – put simply, it’s not fair. I think that will lead to customers looking for alternate suppliers. 

We had a similar situation a few years ago but with us as the supplier. We had a client who was renting a piece of software from us and had been doing so for a couple of years and were making a reasonable profit from the deal. 

We started off renting the software because it meant we had more control over things and the software wasn’t really at the stage where it was ready to be sold. After a couple of years, we decided we were ready to start selling the software. 

At the time we took the decision to sell the software, I felt very strongly that the only course of action was to inform our existing customer that they could now buy the software for much less than they had been renting it for. There weren’t any downsides to the customer and they are a large corporate with far more money than us but I still felt it was the right thing to do. 

I guess the point for me is that it’s important to treat people as you would want to be treated. If you know that if you were in the same situation you would feel upset or annoyed by the actions of a supplier then don’t do those things to other people. 

I’ve always said that it would be really easy to be rich if you have no morals but having a clear conscience is probably more important to me. You can still be rich but it might take a little longer! 

Simon on: Smartphones

There is an assumption, frequently repeated, that ‘everybody these days has a smartphone’. It’s a claim that’s used to support the idea assertion that organisers need to provide services for attendees to use on their smartphones. The trouble is that the claim is wrong.

Recent analysis by research company ComScore shows that 51.3 per cent of mobile phones in Britain were smartphones in Q4 2011. Obviously the proportion will vary from one age group to another and between market sectors but ComScore shows that almost half of phones in this country are not smartphones. That said, it is true that smartphone sales are increasing but it will be a while before they become the standard.

That is a serious issue for any organiser but even that overstates the case for smartphones. It ignores the fact that some smartphone owners won’t use technology developed for the phones. They may have a smartphone only because their company provides it and they may not be allowed to use software not provided by the company.

Clearly this means that systems that rely on smartphones will be immensely useful for reaching around half of any market but organisers need to remember the other half.

 Originally published in Conference News

Coming up next….IMEX America 2012

Well it’s that time of year again and I find myself sitting at the airport waiting to fly to Las Vegas for IMEX America 2012 next week.

I'm privileged to have been there at the beginning of both IMEX Frankfurt and IMEX America and while I've sort of got used to IMEX Frankfurt being a normal part of my May schedule, IMEX America still feels new and a little more unknown. 

There are certainly cultural differences between doing business in the US versus Europe but that’s to be expected and should be celebrated. Who wants to live in a world where everyone is the same - that would be very dull! 

Although I don’t directly communicate with the users of the IMEX America website, it’s definitely been an interesting learning experience to understand how we've had to change terms and functionality from the Frankfurt website to suit the US market. 

I'm very proud of the fact that we've made some amazing progress on the website this time around. We've completely redesigned the Exhibitor Directory to improve usability and the Hosted Buyer’s Diary system has had a huge amount of work on it too which I believe has improved the end user’s experience massively and I think the results speak for themselves. 

When I look back at all of the changes that have happened to IMEX Frankfurt over the years it makes me wonder what changes and evolutions we can look forward to with IMEX America as it progresses as I'm absolutely certain that it will be around for a long time to come and I hope to continue to be a part of it all.

Simon on: Event apps

Every meeting planner needs apps – right? Well, not necessarily. It depends on how useful the app is to the attendees, how painful it is to set up and how reliable it is at the event.

This is the balancing act that a planner needs to understand. For example, if you’ve got a significant number of breakout sessions at your event, an app might be useful to remind attendees that a session is starting.  That said, the app is still not going to be popular if it is too fiddly to set up. This is the pain threshold: some attendees will be happy to grapple with a tricky set up operation but the majority will probably give up before getting to the end of it.

Even if it’s useful to users and easy to install, if it doesn’t deliver consistently onsite, it will still fail. How many event apps rely on having an Internet connection? The best download and store their information on the phone itself so the app will work even if the wi-fi or the mobile network is groaning under the load from other attendees.

So before diving in and having an app developed think: is it useful to the attendees, pain-free, reliable? If the answer is no to any of these, then think again.

Originally published in Conference News