Top Attended Sessions from TSW Day 2

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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!

 

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Interview with Cisco’s Doug Pluta: Social Media Pacesetter Practices

TSIA’s Technology Services World is just around the corner, May 5-7 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. On the opening day of the conference, we are doing a flight of Pacesetter sessions, with presenters from some of our most progressive members giving insight into successful programs. Topics include customer experience, analytics and automating service delivery. I’m hosting a session on Social Media for Support, with two Pacesetting members, Doug Pluta, Project Manager, Cisco; and Tim Lopez, Social Support Manager, Symantec.

I became familiar with Doug when he published a white paper on social media monitoring, “How Cisco Services Uses Social Media Listening to Improve Internal Efficiencies and Customer Support.” As supporting customers via social channels enters the maintstream, I’ve started receiving more inquiries on how to include social media and communities in voice of the customer programs. At most companies, this is still in the marketing domain, but service is increasingly including social in survey and voice/text analysis work. Here’s a link to Doug’s paper:

cisco_socialsentiment_whitepaper

Last week Doug and I had a chance to talk, and I wanted to share our conversation with you. Here’s how it went:

John: Thanks so much for agreeing to participate in our Pacesetter Session on Social Media in Service!

Doug: Thanks for asking me John. We’re doing some exciting social media projects within Cisco’s Technical Services unit, and we’re happy to share our experiences with the Eye on Services blog.

John: I’ve been reading your whitepaper, “How Cisco Services Uses Social Media Listening to Improve Internal Efficiencies and Customer Support.” Most B2B companies think that monitoring social media conversations is a marketing job, but you make a good case for why service executives should care about this too. Can you talk about that?

Doug: This effort has been in the works for over two years now. During that time we’ve focused on developing a working process that includes stakeholder buy-in and executive support. Our outage and disaster monitoring initiative has been recognized by our executive team as a strategic resource that is vital to our ability to service our customers in a proactive way. The work we do with other internal stakeholders is consistently recognized as an important contributor to our ongoing conversations about improved service to our customers and Ease of Doing Business initiatives.

John: I’m very pleased to see you’ve actually developed a process for social listening, the “Social Sentiment Internal Engagement Process.” How did this process come about, and can you describe some of the key process steps?

Cisco Social Sentiment Process

 

Doug: Cisco Technical Services has been keenly focused on enhancing internal stakeholder engagements and this includes using Social Media listening as an important data point. Initially, we did not need to seek out stakeholders. The first groups we engaged were asking for this data and the Customer and Business insight (CBI) group recognized the opportunity to provide this type of data along with traditional survey data. Social Sentiment is one of several “Listening Channels” that provides solicited and unsolicited customer sentiment data to several key internal stakeholders. Our expectation is that we will increase our stakeholder base and continue to evolve our data sets.

John: In the whitepaper, you document both internal and external impacts of the program. Great to see you measuring results! Can you highlight some of the impacts for our readers?

Doug: Over the last year, Social Sentiment has moved from being a data provider to also providing robust analysis. This includes more detailed information that follows the history of cases and how they were ultimately closed. For instance, we did a detailed analysis on one of our internal content developers. Their audience is significantly large and they have a direct impact on Cisco’s Technical Services unit. With the level of analysis that we provide, we can tell them the top areas of the business that are seeing more negative social sentiment and even which products are being impacted. This allows them to focus their efforts on content that is generating readership and is important enough for people to mention in Social Media.

John: One of the questions I receive from TSIA members is how do you know which social channels to monitor. Do you have any guidance on deciding where to focus your attention?

Doug: The Social Sentiment team gets the best data from Forums and Twitter. Forums provide us with the detailed history that we need to develop metrics that can drive action through a business unit. Twitter gives us the emotion that we need to gauge acceptance (or not) of new or existing tools and processes and of course to find out about any Twitter-based outage or disaster mentions that we can leverage to the benefit of our customers.

John: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, and I look forward to seeing you in Santa Clara!

Doug: Thanks again for asking me John. I’d like to recognize my teammates Michele Budden and Angela Wilson for the cutting-edge work they’re doing within the Social Sentiment team.

Thanks to the whole Cisco team, and thank to you for reading! Hope to see you in Santa Clara!

TSW Top Attended Sessions: Day 3

Our intrepid events manager, Christi Holzer, is so ahead of the curve she already sent me the session counts for today, the final day of Technology Services World.  I started Day 3 with the Social Breakfast of Champions, and really enjoyed the discussion. I appreciate the brave folks who overcame Las Vegas inertia to make our 7am meeting! We then had the final keynote of the event, from my boss Thomas Lah, as well as a couple of rounds of breakout sessions, prior to the closing awards ceremony.

Here’s a look at the 5 top attended sessions from today:

1. Value-Driven Support: Shifting from Output to Outcomes. Pitney Bowes has been on a five-year journey to transform its support organization into an award-winning business service for its customers. By focusing on customer adoption and realized value, the Pitney Bowes support organization has seen a dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this session, attendees learned how to retool their organizations to deliver on the only thing that really matters: creating successful customer outcomes. Presenters were Jesse Hoobler, Director, Worldwide Software Support, Pitney Bowes Software; Michael McLasky, Manager, Pitney Bowes Software; and Joanne Weigel, Sr. Director, TSIA.
2. Customer Success: Lifecycle Account Management. In this session, Tony Brucha, director of Customer Success for Cisco WebEx, described the evolution of the Customer Success organization since the acquisition and integration of WebEx in 2007. Brucha  described the Customer Success model, discussed the Strategic Customer Care framework supported by the Consumption Economics model used to deliver business results and outcomes, and defined the Customer Success Lifecycle Account Management Process executed by the organization’s Customer Success Manager (CSM) teams globally.
3. Transforming Customer Experience by Interlocking Support Services and Product Development. The IT industry is undergoing a historical transition. Cloud, BYOD, IPv6, video, mobility, and social networking are reshaping what traditional support looks like, moving it from boxes to solutions. It’s imperative for support services to serve as the voice of the customer—and to drive the right engagement model with product development. This session, led by Danny Montejano, Senior Director, Technical Services, Cisco Systems; and Ken O’Reilly, VP, Research, Support and Field Services, TSIA; educated the audience about how Cisco has orchestrated a tight partnership between its global support organization and its largest product development group.
4. Support and Engineering: Forming New Partnerships to Drive Customer Success. Presented by Marylon McGinnis, SVP Global Support, Infor Global Solutions, this session described how Infor Xtreme Support and Engineering are joining forces to change the way support is provided in the industry today. Infor is delivering innovation in its products to ensure its customers are successful in running their businesses. Working with Infor Development, Infor Support is delivering innovation in its support toolset to help resolve customer issues faster, provide more proactive support, and facilitate stronger collaboration between customers and our support analysts.
5. Upsell and Cross-Sell: Leveraging Your Consultants to Capture Untapped Revenue Potential. Companies like Corptax are increasingly leveraging consulting and service delivery resources in a dual role that includes sales. This can increase customer touch points, add clarity to customer business problem understanding, create a stronger services sales arm, and drive increased revenue—but it’s not without challenges. This session detailed important steps for achieving success in this dual-role environment, such as selection, skill development, competitive differentiation, and value selling. Stuart Dodd, vice president and general manager of professional services for Corptax, and Kyle Andrews, Principal, Pretium Partners presented a case study on this process and the measurable results.

Thanks to all our presenters for your hard work in creating and delivering such excellent content for our members. And as always, thanks for reading!