Final Day of TSW: Top Attended Sessions

I am back home after our 3 day Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas, and starting to process all that I heard into some trend ‘buckets.’ For now, I wanted to highlight the top attended sessions from yesterday. Very interesting. The first day of breakout sessions showed that the basic challenges of support (talent management, KM, partner enablement) have not changed greatly over the last decade. But as we will see in yesterday’s highlights, Web 2.0 is an equal, if not even greater, concern.

• Change is the Only Constant: How Social Media is Transforming Customer Service; Shawn Santos, Director of Programs & Community, TSIA

With 124 attendees, this was the #1 attended session at our entire event.  Thank to all of you who responded to our Social Media survey in the last 3 weeks–we had over 400 completed surveys.  In this session, Shawn revealed some survey results, our very first look at company attitudes toward social media, staffing, ROI, and lots of other data.  We’ll be publishing multiple reports based on this data in the months to come.

FTEs Dedicated to Social Media Efforts

• Top 10 Things Online Support Communities Have Taught HP; Lois Townsend, Global Manager, Social Media Strategy, HP Consumer Support Operations, Hewlett Packard

The 2nd most attended session yesterday was also on social media, this time lessons from the real world by HP. To take advantage of this emerging opportunity, HP launched a new, online community – the HP Consumer Support Forum. HP expected the Forums to improve the customer support experience and reduce costs. It didn’t anticipate the power that listening, conversing, and collaborating with customers would have on its customer support operations.

• Extending Your Radar through Social Measurement; Dave Canelis, Vice President, Global Services, Webtrends

I’m not making this up–the third most attended session yesterday was ALSO on social media–clearly companies are hungry for information and best practices on this topic. Webtrends began implementing social media within their service operations early in 2009, and have been on the bleeding edge of adopting web 2.0 solutions to effectively monitor conversations which occur about and around their product offerings and services group. In this presentation, Dave Canelis outlined the benefits to picking up the chatter occurring outside traditional conversations, and showed how this form of monitoring can be adopted within both SMBs and larger enterprises.

• 8 Golden Rules of Consulting; Mahesh Gidwani, Vice President, Professional Services, Datatel

The final 2 top attended sessions were both focused on our professional services discipline. Mahesh presented real-life examples of successful and not successful consultant stories to help guarantee success on each and every PS engagement. Attendees learned about having a Point of View, working from a Fixed Budget, Earning Your Billing Rate and Pulling the Rip Cord Early.

• Comprehensive Update of the TPSA Benchmark Survey and Database; Thomas Lah, Executive Director, TSIA; Bo Di Muccio, PhD, Vice President, Research and Advisory, TSIA

Benchmarking is always a hot topic, so I was pleased Thomas and Bo received a good crowd for their overview of the TSIA professional services benchmark, including the status of the comprehensive refresh, redesign, and update of the benchmark survey, database, and survey tool.

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