Mike Hohnen

If not you should maybe consider it. Because the feed back you are getting from you customer surveys is not giving you the info that you need to make serious product developments that will set you apart from the competition.

In today’s world of networked individuals, new behaviors are emerging. Some are creating new rules and systems of behavior, even within face-to-face experiences. Some are defying old patterns of beliefs.

Here are some of the questions you should be asking our house anthropologist to consider:

* What patterns of attendee behavior are you observing?
* Where are attendees congregating?
* Where are they not congregating?
* What venue and environmental pressures are shaping the attendee experience?
* What parts of your venue are attendees avoiding?
* What are attendees carrying with them to sessions?
* How are attendees communicating with each other?
* How are attendees reacting to the flow of the conference experience?
* What are attendees feeling about this experience?
* How are attendees behaving in education sessions?

This idea is further elaborated in a great post from Velvet Chainsaw Consulting here

In creating its corporate university in 1985, Accor was the first service company in Europe to set up an integrated training center.
Twenty-five years later, Accor Academy locally trains 135,000 students a year through a catalogue of 120 different courses delivered in 16 Academies around the world.

However – you don’t need to be a giant like Accor to have your own corporate University!

If you belong to a smaller chain or association of independent hotels you can partner with us. We deliver custom made service management training at university level. This is what the association of Danish Conference Centers has done with result of now having educated more than 150 managers since 2004

Courses can be designed according to student levels on bachelor or masters level and with or without official accreditation. Also students can get certificates at both levels or go for full degrees. Programmes are accredited by the University of Chester(UK).

All GROW programmes are based on action learning. This means that students stay on their job while studying and have as their main focus to add value to their organisation and work towards solutions to real worklife challenges.

For more information drop me a note.

I learned a new word the other day – a word that sent shivers down my spine. Not that i have not suspected that this development was inevitable but still, seeing it in print was a jolt. The word is ” Travel Avoidance”. A conscious policy by large companies to reduced travel and f2f meeting wherever they can.

In a report published by the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University with the title ‘Hospitality Business Models confront the future of meetings‘ Cisco outline how they have chalked up $400 million in direct savings and $150 million in productivity gains by switching as much of their travel/meeting actives as possible to ‘TelePresence‘.

The report also mentions research by Gartner Inc. that video conferencing will replace 2,1 Million airline seats by 2012 representing a revenue decline of $3,5 Billion for the travel and Hospitality industries.

And Meeting review wrote this :

2010 has been the year that everyone suddenly started to take virtual meetings and events seriously, indeed the mainstream industry is even starting to see them no longer as a threat but instead as a way of extending the reach, the audience and, importantly, the revenues for their events.

See the full article here

So what to do?

The article suggest that Hotels should invest in video conference equipment so that they can offer this service to clients. I am not so sure that is the way to go. If we look back some years ago LCD projectors where very expensive and as a consequence only the largest companies had them – in the beginning.
Smaller companies would go to hotels and rent one. But soon the price of LCD’s came tumbling down and suddenly they where not so special anymore. Today we all have our own. And the fact that a hotel can provide one does not exactly constitute a competitive advantage

My prediction is that the same will happen with video conferencing – companies will get their own kits and virtual conference room in hotels will become obsolete.

A better plan might be to leap frog past that and take a look at the structure of the meeting market as it is emerging.

One way to do that could be to map it on a 2×2 matrix with number of participants on the one axis and the degree of interaction from monologue to deep dialog on the other axis .

That could roughly look something like this:

In the bottom half of this matrix there is mainly emphasis on one way info transmission, possibly with a few questions from the floor. This type of meeting is handled brilliantly by various tech solutions and there will be no stopping that trend developing even further. In that sense this type of meeting will slowly disappear from the traditional venues and move to virtual (also because participants are thoroughly tired of attending this type of meeting or conference).

But on the top half of the matrix where the focus is on interaction /participation and deep dialog, high tech solutions do not do the job very well. As Marchall McLuhan said the more complex the message the more complex a medium do you need, and the most complex we have is f2f.

Now if you are providing meeting facilities – go have a look at your breakout room, your standard meeting room set up etc. Are the facilities that you provide conducive to dialog or to monologue?

To me the gray cloud on the drawing represents yesterdays meetings, they will be taken over by high tech solutions and will not require f2f and the yellow cloud represents tomorrows meetings space where we solve the complex and tricky stuff through collaboration and involvement.

The reason i have the number of participant in the matrix is that i see a sweet spot in the 10 to 75 segment ( upper right corner of the matrix) because when you move to very large groups ( upper left of the matrix), and think dialog then tech shows its face aging ( Twiter, FB Etc)

When i presented this to one of my hotelier friends his response was, “but 80% of our meeting business today is Cinema- or U-table set up.” Yes I know i have seen that as well. But if you plot types of meeting on a bell curve then, at the top of the curve (mainstream) you will find the cinema set up and the U-table – fast forward a year or two and where is what was at the top of the top of the bell curve now?
Going down, fast.
At the beginning of the bell curve we now find Dialog, participatory meeting Art of Hosting etc. Where will that be in 2 years time? On its way up, heading for main stream status.

In summary it is going to be increasingly difficult for meeting facility providers to justify that they are providing value when it comes to ‘monologue’ meetings. It can be done better and cheaper with technology – and that type of meeting is a god case for Travel Avoidance”

Where they can make a huge difference and add value is by learning how to provide space and surroundings that are conducive to deep dialog in the broadest sense – and believe me that is not a banqueting room set up cinema style

We kicked of Module 3, on our 3 year 6 module Service Management training this week. Seventeen energetic and ready-to -go ‘students’ worked for the days getting to grips with marketing of services and the role of loyalty and satisfaction.

We wrapped up the 3 days with a ProActionCafe – a great new tool that we learned at our Art of Hosting training in Aarhus in August. The cafe combines the best of World Cafe, Open Space Technology and Action Learning.

Four students hosted 4 workshop on developing the focus for their action learning question – the question they will work on for the next 16 weeks and that will form the basis of their final written assignment in December. The Proaction Cafe was hosted by Kathrine Procter who is the Program Manager on this module and works with structured questioning in three rounds. Each round has 3 new expert help the host develop depth, perspective and action items on the chosen question.

The feed back afterwards was awesome – not only did the 4 hosts declare that for the first time did they have a clear focus on their assignment at a very early stage but the other participants also felt that they had learned a lot about how they could approach their learning question.

An unexpected bonus that we had not thought of was that participants felt that working in the ProAction Cafe format also gave them a great opportunity to recapitulate the learning from the three previous days as they wove these topics into the problem solving discussion at the tables. It does not get much better in my world.

Powerful stuff – that we will develop further.

A coming paper in the Journal of Marketing addresses that very subject. Building on past research on the role of gratitude in human relationships, it argues that a customer who is made to feel grateful most likely becomes enduringly loyal as a result. Gratitude, as the paper bluntly puts it, can “increase purchase intentions, sales growth and share of wallet.” Robert Palmatier, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington and an author of the paper, says that making a customer feel truly grateful toward a business is harder than it might sound. And the hard-wired feelings of reciprocity that can trigger gratitude can just as easily trigger the sense that you’re being treated unfairly.

Read the full article in the NYT