Aspirin & Sewing kit
The following advice won’t make you earn more money but won’t cost you either… and might improve the experience of someone attending to your conference. Small details matter and when they are easy to take care of it’s diabolic not to do so.
It happens often that someone in your audience has a headache or accidentally loses a button of his shirt and come to you asking for help. It is not that they expect you to directly solve their problem but you might know who can.
The first time it happened to me I was working at the customer service area of business conference in Chicago: a tall guy came to me asking where he could find an aspirin. I happened to carry a box as I often suffer of back pain and headache during conferences, so I offered one of mine. His faced automatically changed to a relieved expression as he took the pill.
From that first time I noticed that this situation presents itself frequently so I now always ask my customer service staff to carry some kind of aspirin just in case (and in major events -2,000+ people- someone always asks for it).
(photo from www.indiamart.com)
I remember an anecdote told by an ex-colleague from the Brazilian office about helping a client that had accidentally lost a couple of buttons of his shirt by finding a sewing kit and sewing them back. Or the fact that they had special seats with flip writing pads for left handed people (in a 3,000 people conference there were quite a few). The other people present in the room laughed about this but I’m sure that those customers were surely more than satisfied that their special need were taken care of. Besides, the cost of doing so is almost ridiculous compared to the positive impact you obtain when you perform those actions. It shows you really care.
So remember for your next conference: keep some aspirin, sewing kit (those found in the hotel are ok) and think of what other kind of special needs you can address.
