Turning customers into ambassadors

Rory Govan, Head of Research and Insight, Informa Connect, London

With more than five million people coming to Informa’s events every year, it’s vital that we understand how we can better meet their expectations and create value for them. We know that what our audience needs changes according to their market, culture, history and simply over time, and we’re increasingly tracking these consistently through our Explori customer feedback platform.

In 2017, Informa’s sustainability team asked us if audience expectations were changing around the sustainability and impact of our shows. Together, we wanted to test whether this affected the satisfaction scores and, perhaps, even our customers’ likelihood of recommending our show to others (the NetPromoter Score). We also set out to capture data more consistently across our shows to allow us to measure the impact on the host cities (see page 26).

We know from the results that 80% of our audience tell us that it matters to them if we’re running the event responsibly and sustainably. More than 30% strongly agreed with this statement and it’s clearly becoming a hygiene factor at events – a minimum expectation we must meet but perhaps also a chance to differentiate ourselves. In 2019, we’ll begin measuring how well we’re meeting those expectations, as well as expanding measurement further into our other events.

But, most importantly, we also tested how well we’re supporting our customers to be better at their jobs. This is a proxy for how well we’re helping them solve industry challenges and making a difference throughout content and customers. More than two-thirds of people agreed that our events make them more able to do this and high scores in this correlate extremely highly with a higher overall experience and Net Promoter Score.

Put simply, if we help our customers to be better in their roles, and help them solve the big challenges that the industry faces, they are more likely to become an ambassador for our brands and sell on our behalf. It’s a win-win-win for everyone.