There’s a really good piece by Sarah Beauchamp in the latest issue of Convene magazine featuring IAVM member Peggy Daidakis, who is the executive director of the Baltimore Convention Center. Daidakis, who was awarded the 2013 IAVM Lifetime Achievement Award, speaks about how she became the first U.S. woman to manage a national convention center.
One of my favorite parts of the story concerns customer experience, something that venue managers are constantly striving to make better.
“Because I came from the customer-service side, and not the nuts-and-bolts side, my focus was on a customer’s experience,” Daidakis said. “I was trained by Mayor [Donald] Schaefer to say, ‘Don’t give me the problem, give me the solution,’ and that’s what I kept telling my staff. You can complain all you want, but that’s not going to get us to a successful event service or help us become a premier destination. We want people to have a good experience when they get here, so that was what I was focusing on, and apparently that was something that was a little different. My focus was building a team that had a can-do attitude.”
Please visit Convene‘s site to read the rest of the story and to learn more about one of our members.
