Unspoken Kudos That Made Our Day

A large virtual job fair that we helped launch last week brought home some interesting lessons to our tech support -

• when a job candidate is anxiously searching for a job, you want the technical support to be not just technically sharp, but also demonstrate empathy
• it is wrong to assume that everyone is comfortable with their computers.
• virtual users often crave a reassuring human voice
• when someone contacts Tech Support with a question "How do I" or "where is" it means we have not factored in the lowest common denominator, in a manner of speaking, for deciding the usability of the virtual fair.

At iTradeFair.com we take pride in the kind of technical support we offer to users of our clients. Compliments are very common.

• "All looks ok now; kudos on the excellent response time and efforts.
• "Today's event went very well. My compliments and thanks to you."
• "I too want to thank you and your team for your hard work. The event appeared to go very well and I like the new look of the virtual trade show.
• "We are receiving very positive feedback on your support from the participants. We thank you for that!"

Often, they are unspoken.

When requests for support come in, especially if it is a usability issue, participants typically tend to blame themselves for not having noticed a certain link or button. However, we accept responsibility for not having taken their needs into account in our design. We treat their problem as a signal to improve the user interface and make it more intuitive. We engage the participant in the process through a phone call or with an email exchange. We have learned that when a support request is met with a phoned response, participants are not only more patient and appreciative of the benefits of the virtual fair, but they are also very forthcoming with tips on how to improve the usability. The learning never ends.

Coming back to the support request of last week, our tech support crew member had to walk the job candidate through to help in finding specific keys on the candidate's own computer keyboard. The case was handled with utmost patience and empathy, until the job candidate was able to enter the virtual job fair and start on the job search. At one point the tech support crew also opened a screen-sharing session to see the user's screen and make sure that nothing was being mis-typed. When it was all resolved, the job candidate expressed relief and gratitude. Our support crew was patient and extremely helpful, and also very understanding of the candidate's discomfort with the computer including the keyboard. I do not know if our clients are aware of this specific ticket or how well our crew handled it, but it does not really matter. Simply knowing that someone breathed easier and hopefully got a job opportunity, made our day!

Face-to-Face Meetings Are Good for Health

Since the first white paper that we published 9 years ago, we have been advocating virtual fairs to be run alternatingly with face-to-face events. It may be an organized face-to-face event, or simply a face-to-face meeting by the virtual participants specially arranged amongst themselves. The goal is to be able to take the trade show to the statistical 67% of the invitees who never make it in person to the face-to-face event. This message has not been an easy sell because trade show organizers worry about cannibalizing their trade shows. It is a baseless concern. The virtual and the face-to-face have no meeting ground. They merely complement each other making up for the inefficiencies of one another.

Face-to-face events are inefficient because

• exhibitors expect attendees to carry specially created marketing literature back with them
• participants are expected to remember everyone and everything they saw in the short time on the show floor
• attendees are expected to cover an entire show floor of 600 exhibitors in a matter of 4 hours.

Virtual exhibit halls that complement a face-t0-face exhibit hall plug those inefficiences by

• allowing attendees to obtain all marketing collateral online either before or after the face-to-face encounter on the show floor, allowing for the meeting to be more fruitful, easier for memory-retention, and easier to get more people involved than were actually there on the show floor.
• allowing attendees to research the entire show floor before or after the face-to-face event, leaving no exhibitor unmet.
• allowing the producers to entice the 67% absentees to get a peek into what they missed to the extent possible, knowing that the rapport built with a face-to-face meeting is tough to replicate through a virtual encounter.

Let us see where Virtual Fairs fall short.

• Virtual exhibit halls on the other hand, while great for pre-screening and post-meeting follow-up by the participants, may still need a warm handshake, the look in the eye and a face-to-face meeting to start moving towards a level of trust.
• It is a fallacy to assume that people will spend hours on the internet in one virtual trade show after another. It can get tiring after the first hour. That is why a really good search engine is important in a virtual trade show.

Picking up on that last point, a recent story on a research paper by Dr. Arig Sigman caught my attention on BBC. Dr. Sigman's paper, titled 'Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’ says that face-to-face meetings are healthy for humans. It is an interesting paper.

Face-to-face meetings will spring back even if there seems to be a rush towards virtual meetings at present. What I hope is happening, is that this new surge in virtual meetings is a reflection of (a) event brands attracting newer participants who never made it to face-to-face events, (b) the creation of new meeting brands that were not there in the face-to-face world, and (c) traditional media companies embracing new technologies to make their face-to-face events a multi-dimensional experience rather than an escape from the cubicle.

Free eBook: How to Design a Virtual Job Fair program

Here's a free ebook on virtual job fairs. Please feel free to pass it on to anyone that might find it useful.

The URL for the ebook is http://www.itradefair.com/ebooks/vjf1.pdf

This ebook was prompted by how well an earlier white paper on the 'three C's for a successful virtual job fair' was received on the web. See one post by Lisa Orrell.

The format-choice of an ebook was inspired by Seth Godin's blog post titled 'You should write an ebook'.

Enjoy!