Jeffrey Brown of TradeShowBlues fame has come up with an interesting idea for a new service for the hospitality/planners world called Book4Today. Here’s how he describes it on his blog, after a small rant about the American Academy of Family Physicians announcing that it just booked the Phoenix Convention Center for its 2017 convention:

To show our commitment to living in the
here and now, we’re launching the Book4Today campaign.
This ongoing program may** include public service-like announcements for radio,
TV, print and eM… music festivals (Blues included) to promote the campaign and
encourage all in attendance (as well as those watching the DVD… to be
produced) to hurry-up and Book4Today. And then there’s the
PR, blogs and podcasts… and everything will have an RSS feed (everything). The
goal for the Book4Today campaign will be to raise $1
billion in immediate bookings for struggling (or other) venues across the
country. Watch for a major announcement on Tradeshow Blues… (but get all
the advance warnings and indicators right here the Tradeshow
BluesBlog).

Watch for the launch of the Book4Today.com
website soon… but not quite yet.

Sounds pretty interesting–I’m keeping an eye out for it. But my question for Jeff is, don’t you ever sleep?

When I read about on this eGain study on the TSMI blog, I could feel the steam starting to come out of my ears:

First of its kind benchmarking study uncovers major shortfalls in email customer
service among small and medium-sized businesses

A stunning 51% of businesses failed to respond to emails with high-value
purchase intent in study conducted by BenchmarkPortal

Why? If a customer e-mails you wanting to buy your product, why on earth would the acceptable response be to ignore them? Please, please, please, don’t be a part of this trend, whatever the size of your company, association, or meeting. Non-responsiveness is one of the biggest gripes both hotels and planners have against each other, and it’s so easy to just pick up the phone or drop an e-mail. Even if you don’t have the answers, isn’t it just common courtesy to acknowledge the question and give an idea of when you’ll get back to them? Can you even imagine not responding to an attendee trying to register for your program?

From this study, it sounds like the common practice isn’t common courtesy among mid-sized companies (and we all have had that eternal hold experience with larger companies–this study says small and mid-sized companies are even worse!). What is it that makes people think this is OK? I don’t get it. If someone calls or e-mails me with a request, I bust my hump trying to find the answer, or at least point toward someone else who might be able to figure out what I can’t. Yes, it takes time. But it is one of the most important things you can do. People need to know they’re being heard, and responded to, that you care about their business. I’m getting a little tired of writing about the basics of customer service, but it sounds like there’s a big need to keep this in the forefront.

Whatever your specific industry/position/whatever is, I’m sure it’s a lot more competitive than it used to be–everything seems to be, these days. Those who survive, much less thrive, will find that caring about customers is what pulls them to the top of the heap.

Sermon over (for now).

This must be idiot’s day (see above for more idiocy): From USA Today, Airport security confiscates flier’s car key as ‘prohibited item’.

The trouble seems to have started because of passenger Nathan Rau’s standard-issue car key for his Audi, writes Joe Sharkey, business travel
columnist for The New York Times (free registration). The new Audi keys actually hold the ignition key inside a fashionable holder that’s designed to minimize damage to the carrier’s pockets. When ready to start the car, the driver pushes a button on the 2-inch holder and the key slides out. Of course, to the screeners at DFW, Rau’s key seemed awfully similar to a switchblade. They ran it through the x-ray machine three times, before Rau says he was told: ""Well, sir, that’s a switchblade style, and that’s a prohibited item. We’re going to have to confiscate that." In addition to the $300 Rau says he had to spend to get a duplicate key from his car dealership, the incident raises a key complaint of
frequent travelers: security procedures that seem to vary widely from airport to airport. Rau says he hadn’t previously had problems with the key at other airports.

I wonder if my husband’s Saab key will be next–it doesn’t really look like a car key at all, just a plastic jobbie that you plug in (I tried to find a photo of one but didn’t have any luck). But really, couldn’t they just have clicked itopen and found that it actually housed a key, not a switchblade? Sheesh, redux.