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!

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Countdown to TSW: Partner Advisory Board Meeting

Tomorrow TSIA’s Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas at the Mirage kicks off with my Innovation Tour of the Recognized Innovator Finalists at 12:45.  Today we are heads down in final preparation, and we also held our very first in-person meeting of the newly formed Partner Advisory Board (PAB). Lydia Zaffini, our senior director of partner programs, and I chair the PAB, which consists of senior executives from Astea International, Compuware Corporation, Pretium Partners, Consona CRM, RTM Consulting, Convergys, ServiceMax, Coveo, ServiceSource, DG Associates, Sykes Enterprises, IGLOO Software Inc., Verint Systems Inc., and ISOdx Solutions LLC.

I opened the meeting with a discussion of major trends for 2012, including the impacts of Consumption Economics on technology buyers, pending 2012 budget cuts and of course, my favorite topic of the moment, mobile and video (more on that in my blog tomorrow!). We also had a presentation from Julia Stegman, our new research vice president for the brand new discipline being launched at this conference, Service Revenue Generation (SRG), on service revenue trends.  Diane Brundage, our senior vice president of sales, and the executive sponsor of the PAB, led the group in a very interaction session on building better relationships between TSIA members and partners.

Cindy McCombe, TSIA’s director of marketing, gave a very informative session on marketing plans, including the new world of marketing via social media. It was great to hear input from the partners on which social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) each of them is using, some with great success, some not so much. Webcasts and white papers continue to be effective ways to reach people, but both are changing. Some partners are having good results with shorter webcasts (bite size chunks packed with content as opposed to a one hour presentation) and ebooks (electronic content perfect for smartphone and table consumption as opposed to traditional PDFs of reports).

I’d like to give a personal Thank You to all the partner advisory board members for giving up part of their weekend to attend the meeting, as well as a big Thank You to the TSIA team members who made time to attend the meeting and make presentations.

I’ll be back tomorrow with updates from Day 1 of TSW! Hope to see you there!