TSW Day 2: Top Attended Sessions

I always think you can learn a lot from seeing what the top attended sessions are for our conferences.  They show you what business problems people are trying to solve, and what topics they are most interested in in general.  Here were some of the top attended breakout sessions yesterday:

It was standing room only for “Service Operations – Easy Money: Support Communities and ROI,” presented by long time SSPA partner Francoise Tourniaire, Owner, FT Works; and top rated member speaker Tarik Mahmoud, E-Support and Service Technology Senior Manager, Cisco-Linksys. If you don’t know Tarik, he is brilliant, knows this industry cold, and has a really wonderful sense of humor to boot. I suspect any session with Francoise and Tarik would be popular, but add the sexy and elusive topic of community ROI (see Bill Odell’s comment on a previous post) and the session was a huge draw.

Many of our top attended sessions are usually in the “Innovative Service Technology” track, and this event is no exception.  Add to that a panel discussion–always a big draw–and a KM topic, and you have a very hot session:  “Measuring the Self Service Experience,” with the following panelists: Christopher Hall, Vice President, Marketing, InQuira; Bradford T. Smith, Senior Director/Architect of Online Support Strategy, Symantec Corporation; Judy Quinn, Processes and Tools Program Manager, Verisign; Chuck Flood, Senior Manager, Customer Service & Support Infrastructure, Blue Coat Systems; Nav Chakravarti, Vice President Solutions, InQuira.

Customer satisfaction is another topic that always draws a crowd, and another top attended session was “Consumer Services – High Customer Satisfaction with Outsourced Support Vendors – Impossible?” with Manish Sinha, General Manager, Microsoft Corporation. With several hundred analysts looking out how to outsource both cost effectively and with high quality, Microsoft speaks about this topic with a great deal of gravitas.

The last top attended session I will highlight from yesterday is another panel discussion, “Software as a Service – The Consume Stage In The SaaS Cycle – Realizing The Value,” with Luca Sartori, Manager, PRTM; Stephen Smith, Executive Director, SSPA; Krista Anderson, Senior Vice President, Global Support and Customer Success, salesforce.com; Paul Lake, Director of Siebel CRM OnDemand Global Customer Support, Oracle; John Blakeman, Vice President of Customer Support, Taleo; Patrick Saeger, Vice President, Customer Care, SuccessFactors.  SaaS continues to prove a disruptive innovation in the enterprise software market, but it does bring some unique challenges to the support organization.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a recap of today’s events and top attended sessions. Thanks for reading!

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