Blackberry and conference productivity

With yesterday’s close of The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit, we had an initial chance to review the internal operations of the event. From our perspective, logistics went much smoother than ever before. Perhaps part of it was thanks to familiarity with our team and the facility: we have been using the same venue for 6 years now and almost all the people from The Toronto Congress Centre, from AVW TELAV (our audio visual supplier) and on our team are the same.

It helps that we all work well together and enjoy working together to present the event. But we also have to give bredit to Blackberry Messenger. Communications about little details, like getting water refreshed at Table 12, dealing with last minute special meal requests, an extra easel sent to a board room used to involve walkie talkies and chasing people down.

This year, it was a simple BBM text instruction that provided a confirmation that the message was sent, received and read. The satisfaction when the simple reply of “K” was received provided comfort and allowed us to move onto the next issue. On the fly conferencing within BBM kept the co-chairs informed when speakers needed an extra moment before coming on stage; or a little prompting with a well crafted question.

Each year, we hope that the operational issues are invisible to our delegates. In this case, the simple application of relatively basic communications technology provided better customer service with less effort.