Marie-Claire
We often talk about the cost effectiveness of voice conferencing over face-to-face meetings and I recently had cause to remember a personal experience. Nine years ago, I was working for a software reseller dealing with enterprise solutions. Most of the software was American and Bill the CEO of our main partner company was coming over to the UK. Keen to impress him and to take advantage of his presence, we set about arranging meetings for him with both existing Clients and potential prospects. Key amongst all these appointments were two in Manchester, one with a rather large Cereal producer and the other with a rather large public body, the only problem we faced was that the meetings were arranged for the day he arrived in the UK from Dallas.
Timing was critical and not helped by the fact that Bill was flying in to Gatwick and the only flights we could get to Manchester were departing from Heathrow. On the fateful morning I picked a colleague up from her house and drove to Gatwick to wait for Bill to land (in theory at 7:30 am). The plan was a quick dash round the M25 (asking for problems) to get us to Heathrow with plenty of time to catch the flight to Manchester. Now there’s a reason for the expression “sods law”, Bills flight was delayed and eventually landed one hour and fifteen minutes late. We still had a chance to make the connecting flight, so the CEO of a major USA software company changed into fresh cloths behind my car in a multi-storey car park and off we shot.
The M25 was built to frustrate people and duly obliged, however we reached the Check-In desk just as the flight was closing, just in time in fact to discover that Check-In Staff can also frustrate and with a smile on their face, politely told us we were too late to board the plane.
Now I was faced with a predicament, I had two meetings to attend in Manchester and the CEO of our major USA partner standing next to me. I took the decision to see if we could get a connecting flight with another airline, fortunately this was possible, although three last minute flights cost the equivalent of one weeks all-inclusive holiday in Spain.
After an uneventful flight, during which Bill demonstrated his party trick of falling asleep the moment he sat in an airline seat and snoring loudly, right through take-off and remaining that way until landing, (maybe it was the company he had). Now as you are aware — mobile phones must be turned off when on a flight, so as I turned mine on, I discovered I had a message — our meeting with a rather large public body had been cancelled, judging by the time of the message was left just as we flew over Birmingham.
To be fair the meeting with the very large cereal producer went very well, but the cost of that one meeting ran to several thousand pounds — could we have achieved the same result with a our company web and voice conference? Probably, it would certainly have been a lot cheaper, less stressful and easier.
Shaz Manelli
