e all know that details matter to an attendee’s overall event experience. At Omniture Inc., we’ve discovered that we can influence details that many event marketers may feel are out of their control — and that these small, but important, things can have a tremendous impact on attendees’ perceptions of our event.

Consider this example: One of our top customers arrived at our annual user-group event, Omniture Summit, bracing herself for yet another predictably mediocre hotel stay in her hectic business-travel schedule. This time, however, it felt different. She got prompt service from a diligent bellman who helped her to her room, made sure she had everything she needed, and then called her by name throughout the rest of her stay. Even the housekeeper she met in the hall on the way to her room seemed happy to see her.

Throughout the event, the friendly hotel staff continued to surprise her with their attentiveness, walking her right to the door of the breakout session when she asked for directions, leaving a complimentary bottle of water in her car, giving her detailed restaurant recommendations for an off-site dinner.

In her event evaluation, this customer commented: “Awesome venue, awesome food, amazing staff, great entertainment. It was all top notch!” More important, she indicated that she will “very likely” attend Omniture Summit next year, will “very likely” recommend Omniture’s solutions to her peers at other companies, and will “go back and tell everyone at my company … to switch to Omniture.”

Every year, we host Omniture Summit to build our user community, provide education on existing online-business-optimization products, and introduce new products. For most of the attendees at the event (a total of 2,200 in 2008), this is the only time of the year that they actually interact with our company face to face.

These face-to-face interactions at the event influence the attendees’ opinions of Omniture — and their purchasing decisions. But attendees do not limit their judgments to interactions with those of us wearing green Omniture-branded shirts. Whether we like it or not, the hotel employees become part of the face a company presents to its customers any time it hosts an event. For a few days, the hotel staff is in fact an extension of the company.

This is the risk any company assumes when hosting a corporate event. We can train our company employees about how they should act at the event and prepare them to be helpful and courteous to our customers and top clients. Our employees have a built-in incentive to make the most of the event: If the company succeeds and meets its goals, so do they. But the hotel employees don’t have as much at stake. Sure, they have to do their jobs well enough to get their paychecks, but they see hundreds of events go through their hotels each year. Why should they put forth any extra effort for the few days we’re there?

At Omniture, we have found a way to influence and establish control over this aspect of our events as much as the other carefully laid plans we’ve put in place. Many event managers take steps to inspire great service from hotel staff, offering tips and cash incentives to the managers they work with to plan their events: the account manager, the food and beverage manager, the convention-services manager. But we tend to forget about the people who are actually getting things done: the banquet servers, the housekeepers, the valets, the guy who sets up the chairs. I call them the people behind the curtain. Forgotten souls.

This behind-the-scenes workforce contributes to the overall event experience as much or more than the event activities themselves. For example, you may have the greatest keynote speaker attendees have ever heard, but if they trip over discarded papers and have to push aside empty coffee cups before sitting down because the hotel staff didn’t turn over the room fast enough, what do you think they will remember about the session?

Or, if they walk in 20 minutes late to a session because the business-center attendant went on break and left his or her post unattended, how might that impact their impression of the event?

Our internal tagline for Omniture Summit is “execute for excellence.” And we can’t fully accomplish that without the help of everyone on the hotel staff. To make sure the people behind the curtain meet our high standards of performance, we have developed an incentive program for all hotel staff, not just managers. With this program, we can make sure that everyone who helps Omniture look good is rewarded.

All-Hands Incentives

At the end of the 2007 Omniture Summit, our event team sat in a big room and talked about the hotel staff that helped make the event successful. We had some cash left over in our budget and decided to give it to the top performers. I asked, “Who should we reward?” Team members supplied names without hesitation:
“Jose, don’t forget Jose. He was always there with the coffee and made sure that our office was clean.”

“Barbara, the concierge, did a fabulous job helping our guests get around town during the event.”

We identified 45 of these memorable staff and gave them $50 each. They were so grateful; some of them even had tears in their eyes.

When we started making site visits in preparation for the 2008 event, these hotel staff members remembered us and were happy to see us, looking forward to working with us again. I had several people stop me and say, “Mr. Gold, so great to see you. We can’t wait for Omniture Summit to come here again.”

For Omniture Summit 2008, we decided to formalize our incentive program. Our event team sat down and said, “What can we do to reward these people?” We decided that instead of giving them $50, we would give prizes that were worth $100, but that only cost us $50 to buy, because of our volume-purchasing power. We settled on iPod Nanos (Omniture green, with our logo on them) and Tumi handbags.

Before the program even started, we put a list together of the people who had been helpful to us in the planning stages, and even those who we expected to be helpful to us during the event. We wanted to reward them at the beginning of the event rather than at the end; to say, in essence, “We know that you’re about to bust your you-know-what for us over the next few days and want you to know up front how appreciative we are.”

We gave out 75 percent of our prizes before the event began, and then saved the rest to give away throughout the event when other staff members went out of their way to be helpful. For the very top performers, we divided $2,000 of additional cash incentives at the end of the event.

As we distributed our prizes, the hotel staff members were shocked that we would do this for them. I was shocked that we didn’t think of it earlier. One guy said, “Thank you so much. I gave the Nano to my kids because I couldn’t afford to buy them one.” The next day I gave him another one for himself. It was fun to make people feel good.

Above and Beyond

Throughout the event, the hotel staff went out of their way to help the summit run smoothly, often working extra hours and helping us with tasks beyond their job descriptions. In just one example, a bellman went — on his lunch break — to a local drugstore to help a conference attendee who had forgotten his contact-lens solution.

Most important, the attendees were the greatest benefactors of our incentive program. Their experience was phenomenal as a result. There’s nothing worse than putting together a spot-on program — content-rich, entertaining, motivational — and then hearing attendees complaining that the person at the front desk was aloof and unresponsive or that room service was an hour late.

At our event, the hotel staff attended to even the minor needs of our customers. When an attendee asked where the restroom was, staff didn’t just say, “It’s down the hall.” They walked them there. They went out of their way to make sure every part of the event was a signature experience for our attendees.

And that extra effort did not go unnoticed. Several attendees specifically mentioned the “amazing staff” in their event evaluations. Others said, “The event seemed flawless,” and “I have never seen a better-run event.” Attendees rated the venue a 4.6 out of 5 in the evaluations. I guarantee that we would not have received such praise without such a motivated, helpful hotel staff.

Another benefit of the program is that word gets out quickly at the hotel property. Now that we’ve done this for multiple years at the same venue, the staff start talking. “A really good customer is coming; one who appreciates all our hard work.” It becomes like the Academy Awards. They truly look forward to our arrival each year. I pull up to the front of the hotel for a site visit and the valet is genuinely happy to see me.

I reward the hotel with my business again, and the cycle continues. They get to keep our business, and we get to keep holding our event at a hotel that gives us great service.

The best benefit of our hotel-staff incentive program is that the logistics of the event are consistently seamless. Ultimately logistics is not the “dirty word” that most people think. Logistics is the key to an event’s success — like the engine of a car or the pilot of a plane.

Because the hotel staff made sure the logistics were flawless, from checking attendees into the hotel to preparing rooms for breakout sessions, it was much easier to achieve our strategic and tactical objectives for the event. Why? Because we didn’t have to waste our time and energy worrying about the logistical details.

Our employees were able to focus on developing customer relationships and directing our attendees to the products that could best meet their needs. I was able to do my job, making sure the content was spot on. The sponsors achieved a return on their investment, and the attendees were educated and entertained (as we promised them). Ultimately, Omniture was able to achieve an 8:1 return on its event investment.

When it comes to showing appreciation, it’s the little things that count. That’s why we plan to use the same pre- and at-event incentive program next year, but with one addition: This time, we will go back to the hotel a month after the event and have Omniture Day: an ice-cream social for the hotel staff with T-shirts, gift cards, and other small prizes. It’s the least we can do to make sure our attendees have an unforgettable experience at our event and with our company.e