Ask anyone at AVT what Client Experience means and you’ll get the same answer: ‘Everything.’ After all, we were founded 30 years ago with a mission to provide the kind of service our leader expected – but never received – from vendors in Audio Visual management at hotels. As we’ve grown and expanded our services to meet client needs over the years, our focus on white glove client experience has never wavered. It’s resulted in 90% of our clients working with us on a repeat, and often long-term, basis.
Here’s what we do to keep clients coming back:
- Build a partnership. Our clients are our partners (ideally our friends too – but that part is up to them). We look at every project and client, no matter how big or small, as the start of a long-term relationship. We draw on our Core Values (see at the bottom of this post) as we work together; they’re posted everywhere in the office and talked about regularly, and two of them are particularly helpful when building our partnerships with clients: Team Work and Do the Right Thing.
- Use a proven process to deliver successfully every time. A strong foundation is the basis for every good relationship, and that’s how we see our proven process. All the warm fuzzies and late-night phone calls in the world won’t do our clients any good if we can’t deliver an experience their attendees will remember! The complexity of event and audiovisual production takes processes, documentation, takes attention to detail and Getting Things Done (another of our Core Values). We use shared Smartsheets for milestones, hold weekly meetings for everyone’s accountability, and more we’ll share next month to help you with your clients.
- Anticipate needs and give more. As we get to know our clients over time, we come to understand them and their preferences. Because we have a process those preferences are documented which allows us to anticipate our clients’ needs and make #eventlife easy for them. Beyond anticipating needs, we often Go Above and Beyond (Core Value alert). We’ve built up a relationship where we care about our clients and want to help them succeed which leads to things like:
- Saving $6K on power and rigging fees by having our experienced production team call the venue and analyze what quoted costs were and determine if they were truly necessary. They were not and the client had more budget for the evening events scheduled for her attendees.
- Saving stress with all hands on deck for an impromptu editing session when presenters were still working on their decks during rehearsals – way past submission deadline (what’s new, right?). Our team pitched in and worked alongside the clients’ presenters to change decks, edit them, and create note decks on the fly. This teamwork let presenters get to the welcome reception on time and deliver flawless sessions the next day.
- Creating peace of mind by working through the entire night to meet the deadline – despite some issues with the equipment that the client sent for construction. We knew how important our clients’ deadline was and despite imperfect circumstances, we buckled down and made it work (when the going gets tough, the tough get going!).
Of course, if you’re a potential client, we hope this makes you think ‘Wow – AVT could be a great partner. We should talk.’ And if you’re not, or not ready now, we hope this was valuable to you for your own work.
Next month, we’ll share parts of our proven process that can help you with your clients!
OUR CORE VALUES
