We talk a lot about ‘valued’ and ‘valuable’ meetings here at Make Venues. It helps us to focus on providing a high-quality product and service for effective client outcomes.
We want planners, trainers and clients to value the time they spend at Woodland Grange in Leamington Spa, Engineers’ House in Bristol or Broadway House in London, allowing them to drive more valuable business outcomes for delegates and attendees.
It’s a simplistic formula but in an increasingly complex world, it’s more important than ever to refocus around straightforward concepts.
And for us, it’s reaping rewards, year after year. Most recently, feedback from customers and clients has won us both the BVA BDRC’s VenueVerdict Award 2019 for Small and Mid-sized Group for a seventh consecutive year, and Best Value for Money Venue Group 2019. Similarly, Engineers’ House received the VenueVerdict Award for Number One Conference Centre 2019 too.
VenueVerdict is the only accreditation programme determined entirely by the voice of the customer and based on the meeting experience. It provides an independent measurement and improvement tool for venues to understand the end-to-end journey of event planners, identify service gaps and benchmark against the competition.
Bookers, planners and hosts provide real-time feedback and only those venues who consistently provide an excellent customer experience are awarded this accolade.
It’s therefore a true testament to the value our customers feel over an extended period when booking, staging or hosting conferences, meetings, training and events in each of our three venues.
To achieve the highest score in our category for a seventh consecutive year really demonstrates that our long-term focus on ‘valued’ and ‘valuable’ is consistently translating into quality, a theme we will explore more in the months ahead.
So, how do we evoke that feeling of being valued among customers?
We’ve all heard the automated telephone response, ‘your call is important to us, please wait for the next available operator’. But how many of us actually feel valued at this point in the customer journey, as we sit on hold, being subjected to the monotony of the music?
Feeling valued requires a business to demonstrate it has seen worth in you and your contribution, and consistently makes you aware of this.
We do it with our team members - investing in their training, development and mental health whilst always striving to listen, discuss ideas and improve on their working environment.
Instilling in our clients an authentic sense of feeling valued is something that is built over time. It’s therefore different from being appreciated, which can be a one-off.
For our customers, it must be reflected not just in what other people say, but also in what they do and what they think. This is why recognition such as the BVA BDRC VenueVerdict Awards means so much to us and why we appreciate every single client who provides them with feedback on our product and service.
It makes us feel valued and it drives us forward with valuable business outcomes of our own, that will benefit everyone.