TSIA’s Technology Services World Conference kicked off on Monday with a series of keynotes and one round of breakouts. Yesterday was the first full day of the conference, and I wanted to give you a peek at the top attended sessions. With over 1,300 attendees, we had a lot of standing room only sessions (I’m happy to say they had to bring more chairs into my KM session on Monday). Clearly when you get 200 or more people attending a session, you know it is a topic that really resonates with service professionals.
Here’s a look at the five sessions from yesterday with the highest attendance:
- Create Customers for Life with Customer Life Cycle Management. The pressure is on for technology companies as investors are expecting high growth year over year. And while a company can achieve some of this growth through customer acquisition, many companies overlook the fact that the secret to high growth is by maximizing customer lifetime value and increasing customer retention. So how do you grow recurring revenue and keep customers longer? Customer life cycle management is the strategy that will help your customers get more value from your products and solutions resulting in more profitable client relationships. Hear best practices from Cisco and Cisco WebEx on how, with a disciplined approach to customer life cycle management, you can drive greater revenue growth and keep customers for life. Tom Lay – Director of Service Sales, Cisco Software Annuities, Cisco Systems; Tony Brucha – Director, WebEx Customer Success, Cisco Systems; Eric Jeffries – Vice President of Customer Success, ServiceSource, Inc.
- Driving Profitability through Customer Analytics. By gathering feedback at each step of the customer journey, organizations can create a thorough understanding of the client experience and optimally manage it. Learn how to create a holistic customer feedback program and about how a top 25 accounting and business consulting firm uses customer insight to drive its customer relationships, internal innovation, go-to-market strategy, and business development. Rike Harrison – Chief Marketing Officer, Wipfli; Koren Stucki – Marketing Director, Customer Analytics, Verint Systems.
- Transform Your Company to Humanize the New Customer Journey. Customers have been spoiled. Thanks to companies such as Amazon and Apple, they now expect every organization to deliver products and services swiftly, with a seamless digital user experience. Many traditional organizations can’t meet the expectation of the new social contract, where the customer expectation is “you should always be there for me when I need you and you should understand the context of my problem–don’t contact me when I don’t want to be reached.” How will your organization adapt to this demand for intuitive interfaces, around-the-clock availability, real-time fulfillment, personalized treatment, global consistency, and zero errors—the world to which customers have become increasingly accustomed? We will define what this new customer looks like and expects across every step along their digital journey–from awareness, consideration, purchase, and service, to advocacy. Dean Shaw – Chat Program Manager, SAS Institute Inc.; Alon Waks – VP, Product Marketing, LivePerson.
- Performance Support: Driving Your Customers’ Consumption and Success…and Your Revenue. Helping your customers achieve sustained consumption and adoption of your software is a key revenue enabler for you. However, the path to adoption is changing. Customers can no longer afford to rely on classroom training and binders of printed content. They look for agile, on-the-job solutions to go from novice to master and reduce help-desk calls. Customers need solutions integrated with their work to deliver “just enough, just-in-time, just right, just for me” support. Embedded Performance Support is an innovative approach to enabling user performance by providing on-demand access to integrated information, guidance, and learning. In this session, you’ll learn how ANCILE software can make it drop-dead simple for your customers to use and consume your software–and for you to introduce revenue opportunities. The results? Customer success and customer retention. Malcolm Poulin – Senior Director, Product Strategy, ANCILE Solutions
- Challenging the Tiered Paradigm: Case Study in Moving an Organization from Handoff to Swarming. Tiered support is a keystone of standard support operations. It works predictably, but it’s inherently flawed. Service requests are owned and passed from one person to another like products on a conveyor belt. Once the conveyor gets to a person who can solve the issue, it gets solved. But until then, it has to follow its course and time on the belt, which slows down resolution. Customers lose patience being passed from person to person, and inherently, communication is inefficient, people lose context and we make the customer repeat steps and information. And, along the path, everyone can be doing “our job” but the customer doesn’t get what they need. Imagine a support organization without boundaries – where owners drive solutions by taking accountability for the customer experience and bringing resources to collaborate – to swarm on the issue. Then move that model to real-time with live first-engagement models like chat. The customer has continuity, accountability and accesses the best resource for the problem as quickly as possible. Tear down the tiers. In this session, we’ll discuss one company’s journey through that organizational change and discuss the challenges and approaches to the transformation. Linda Hartig – VP of Global Support Services (GSS), Avaya; Dan Pratt – Director, Strategy and Business Transformation, Avaya.
Congratulations to these members and partners for creating such dynamic content that really spoke to the needs of the audience. Thanks for reading!
Ragsdale’s Eye on Service 