Plug The Leaks In Your Cash Flow

Tradeshow SNAFU

We recently exhibited at a tradeshow. We had to send our materials in advance and pay several hundred dollars to have them delivered to our booth. I got confirmations that all boxes had been received.

When I got to booth to set up...no boxes.
I spoke to the tradeshow organizers. They made a note and said that the advance delivery truck had been delayed.
I set up the booth and went to my hotel.

The next morning...still no boxes.
They asked who I talked to the day before.
Silly: It doesn't matter who I talked to; their system lost my boxes.

Three or four people later, one guy showed up and said they'd been delivered to the registration booth because they weren't in their system.

Here's the really silly part. We had to print labels and put them on our boxes with the booth number on it. When they arrived, the system had a glitch so they marked our boxes as UNKNOWN, even though our booth number was on the label they had us put on each box.
The UNK was written in marker. The label was on the side of all boxes. See below.



Here's my point: If you're going to make customers jump through hoops, make sure you use your own hoop.

posted by Jay Arthur @ 1:47 PM