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![]() Five Tips to Improve Your On-Site CommunicationsWhen you are on-site during your event, being able to reach your various hotel partners quickly is critical to the success of your meeting. During the Pre-con of a recent conference, my convention service manager proudly told me about the new system the hotel had implemented. All requests, for any department, would be texted to one number. A hotel staff person would monitor this and forward the request to the appropriate person or department. I thought, that sounds efficient. I could text in the back of the ballroom if I needed something, I wouldn’t need to step out of the room to place a phone call. I sent a sample text to ensure that it was correctly entered into my phone and which identified me as the meeting planner for the event. All systems go. As we proceeded to set up our office and registration desk we needed some extension cords. No problem. I texted our request, indicated the room they should be brought to, and waited for the necessary items to appear. 20 minutes passed with by with no acknowledgement of my text or the extension cords. I sent the request again and this time added “please acknowledge that you received this”. Again, no response. So I picked up the house phone and made my request. Ahâ¦success! This got me thinking because of this newfangled technology I had not followed my standard procedure for on-site communication. Here are five tried and true tips to help make your on-site communications more efficient: 1. Test the System 2. Get Hotel Contact Names and
Numbers 3. Create an All Vendor Contact
List Give a copy of this to every staff person working on the event and to your CSM. Keep an extra copy in your staff office, speaker ready room and registration desk. 4. Keep a Digital Copy Too 5. Check out “Dead
Zones” Recently we had an issue only in one isolated part of the hotel. Unfortunately that is where we had set up our staff office. We missed several important calls we were waiting for. As we walked down the hall we would receive the Missed Calls notice. If we had checked this out earlier we would have used another room for our office. As for the hotel I mentioned at the beginning of this
article, the system never really worked for our event. I provided some
feedback to them and they are fine tuning their internal process. Shelley E. Griffin, CMM, is the founder and president of Griffin Conference Group, which provides comprehensive meeting planning services. She is a respected industry leader who has over twenty years of experience. For more helpful tips see her web site at www.griffinconferencegroup.com
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