1803 : Supervising The Event Assessment Answers

• to provide an understanding of the real-world learning and current trends in the Event Industry;
• to give access to excellent presentations and input from Events professionals;
• to Construct a well-attended conference which will impact the student experience.

Our objectives:

• Create opportunities for students to networking and employment
• 80 students (Audience)
• 80% positive feedback
• 5 or more exhibitors

2.1. Target Market 

“Target market is a group of consumers or organizations most likely to buy a company’s products or services” (Heath 2014).

Identifying the target market is very important for each and every organisations. It is a set of individuals who are sharing common needs and characteristic which the companies hope to serve. Selection of the target market helps in crafting the messages which are appealing to a specific group of people. Identifying a target market helps the marketers for focusing on the ones who are most possibly to buy the products. It also makes the process of decision making easier based on the media allocations.

Market segmentation is basically done to match the customer needs in a better way and to enhance the profits for the business. It is a fact that different customers have different needs,. Hence, creating different offers for each and every segments makes complete sense and it provides the customers with a much better solution (Venter, Wright and Dibb 2015). Also, the purchase making of the customers differs with the difference in their income level. Through segmenting, the business could raise the average product prices as well as could subsequently enhance their profits. The target market for this event are all the members of the Events Management programme team and external attendees interested in Events Management industry.

3. Overview of service management 

Service Management is very important in case of event management. Event managing, or planning is generally the direct services provided to the customer (Bon and Mustafa 2018). Therefore service management is the system through which the exact the sales of a company is connected with customers. The service management primarily aims to increasing the supply of services towards the customers. Meanwhile it also intends to reduce the cost of the service without compromising with the quality. According to the theory of service management, service is a product delivered to customers, which is essentially intangible. Service management often associated with the field of communication and information technologies. However, in every field of service industry, service management exist to increase the supply of services while maintain customer relation. In the service industry, the customer is of highest priority and accordingly understanding of customer requirement is important to prevent any disorder in the supply of the services.

3.1. Importance of customer service

“Customer service is the act of taking care of the customers needs by providing and delivering professional, helpful, high quality service and assistance before, during, and after the customers’ requirements are met. Customer service is meeting the needs and desires of any customer” (Lau et al. 2017).

Customer service is an integral part of business operation especially in the service industry (Setia, Venkatesh and Joglekar 2013). It is the set of certain policies that includes every aspect of interaction between the customers, the individual who provides services on behalf of the company. Customer services mainly comes under hospitality where a customer agent needs to greet a customer. Customer services include different other aspects like query solving, complaints handling as well as providing suitable solutions and so on. The primary aim of the customer service is to make the customers feel that they are being valued and of great importance to the company (Osborne, Randnor and Nasi 2013). In other ways quality customer service is important because it prevents customers from changing to other brands in order to get better service assistance. On the other hand, customer service also markets on behalf of the company as it builds a bond between the company and the customer.

3.2. Tools of service management 

“SERVQUAL is designed to measure service quality as perceived by customer” (Ali and Raza 2017)

Quality plays a major role in the service industry (Dhar 2015). To fulfil this requirement most of the services providing companies have been adopting the approach Total Service Management. Total Service management is regarded as the most essential tool of service management. Generally, it is a vast concept and can be interpreted in many ways. However, the most common approach to the concept is that it ensures the actual service in each part of an organization. It is a method through which the services are measured and evaluated. In addition to that, the approach sets certain measures to control the quality of the services. Total Service Management includes other tools or method of analysis like SEVQUAL, DMAIC and so on (Al Muhareb and Graham-Jones 2014). In order to measure the quality of the service, SEVQUAL was used. It measured the quality of the services in terms of responsiveness, tangibles, assurance, empathy and reliability. After the measurement of the service quality is done, DMAIC tool was used to identify the issues and challenges of services so that improvisation of the services can be done.

4. Strategies used in the event 

‘Customer satisfaction is the customer’s overall feeling contentment with a customer interaction. Customer satisfaction recognizes the difference between customer expectations and customer perceptions’ (Agnihotri et al. 2016)

To make the conference event successful, which was held at The Devonshire Dome, some strategies were applied. The main strategy was to satisfy the delegates and make them feel valued was greeting them with welcome drinks and afterwards lunch. The event management team helped the guests in solving their queries also. The other strategies were adopted in view of the customer satisfaction. When delegates arrived at the reception desk, the events team gave them a customer service survey for them to fill out.

5. Evaluation of the event

‘Event evaluation is the process of critically observing, measuring and monitoring the implantation of an event in order to assess its outcomes accurately’ (Van Home et al. 2018).

To evaluate the Exhibition conference customers surveys were given to delegates and Mystery shopper form were given as well. The number of people attending was 40 (our objective was 80 students attending to the conference) and the feedback received from the guests, were very positive.

 For example, one of questions was to indicate the overall satisfaction with the conference: 10 delegates replied - very satisfied, 11-Somewhat satisfied and 2- Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.

• What was most valuable about the conference?

They answered opportunities

• Another question was how would they rate the relevance of conference contents?

On a scale between 1 and 5, were 1 is the lowest and 5 the highest:

11 delegates replied 4.

• Quality of presentations?

 6 delegates replied 5.

• Registration process?

7 delegates replied 5

• Quality of material circulated for and during the event

8 delegates replied 3

• Another question asked was how would they describe the atmosphere or mood of the conference?

Delegates replied engaged, inspiring, well organised, good, inspiring speakers, friendly, relaxed and not too long.

The food was not good, needed more marketing and promotion, and the registration process needed to be more organised.

• The last question asked was on a scale of 1-10, how likely they would come back next year?

5 delegates replied 10 and 4 delegates replied 8.

Overall delegates were highly satisfied with the service of the events management team.                      

6. Conclusion and recommendation 

In this report, effectiveness of service management has been discussed and to analyse the concept of service management, the report exemplifies an event. The event was an Exhibition conference which was supervised with the purpose of analysing the measures taken during the event in terms of service management. The report gave a general overview about the conference while it also discusses the target customer of the event and other aspects related to conferences. The study in the second part, discusses the theories and frameworks of a successful service management. During the discussion, an introduction was given. The important point that the report highlighted in this part of the discussion is the importance of customer service to make an event successful. Additionally, the reports discuss the strategies implement during the event. The event management team received appreciations from the guests, however, some of the areas still need to be improved, for example marketing and promotion could have been done earlier, unfortunately we did not met our objective of 80 students who would attend to the event and we should have had work more as team.

References: 

Agnihotri, R., Dingus, R., Hu, M.Y. and Krush, M.T., 2016. Social media: Influencing customer satisfaction in B2B sales. Industrial Marketing Management, 53, pp.172-180.

Al Muhareb, T.M. and Graham-Jones, J., 2014. Using lean six-sigma in the improvement of service quality at aviation industry: Case study at the departure area in KKIA. International Journal of Social, Behavioral, Educational, Economic, Business and Industrial Engineering, 8(1), pp.145-151.

Ali, M. and Raza, S.A., 2017. Service quality perception and customer satisfaction in Islamic banks of Pakistan: the modified SERVQUAL model. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 28(5-6), pp.559-577.

Bon, A.T. and Mustafa, E.M., 2013.Impact of total quality management on innovation in service organizations: Literature review and new conceptual framework.53, pp.516-529

Dhar, R.L., 2015. Service quality and the training of employees: The mediating role of organizational commitment. Tourism Management, 46, pp.419-430.

Heath, S., 2014. System and method for using global location information, 2D and 3D mapping, social media, and user behavior and information for a consumer feedback social media analytics platform for providing analytic measurements data of online consumer feedback for global brand products or services of past, present or future customers, users, and/or target markets. U.S. Patent 8,909,771.

Lau, P.Y.Y., Tong, J.L.T., Lien, B.Y.H., Hsu, Y.C. and Chong, C.L., 2017. Ethical work climate, employee commitment and proactive customer service performance: Test of the mediating effects of organizational politics. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 35, pp.20-26.

Osborne, S.P., Randnor, Z. And Nasi, G., 2013.A new theory for public service management? Toward a (public) service-dominant approach.43 (2), pp.135-158

Setia, P., Venkatesh, V. and Joglekar, S., 2013. Leveraging digital technologies: How information quality leads to localized capabilities and customer service performance. Mis Quarterly, 37(2).

van Horne, C.G., Quintero, J.E., Slevin, J.T., Anderson-Mooney, A., Gurwell, J.A., Welleford, A.S., Lamm, J.R., Wagner, R.P. and Gerhardt, G.A., 2018. Peripheral nerve grafts implanted into the substantia nigra in patients with Parkinson’s disease during deep brain stimulation surgery: 1-year follow-up study of safety, feasibility, and clinical outcome. Journal of neurosurgery, pp.1-12.

Venter, P., Wright, A. and Dibb, S., 2015. Performing market segmentation: a performative perspective. Journal of Marketing Management, 31(1-2), pp.62-83.