Monday 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM — Breakthrough KM with Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS)
Monday 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM — Global Resource Management Workshop
Location: Trinidad A
- How to increase case-handling and self-service effectiveness with knowledge
- How to maintain knowledge without time-consuming review queues
- How to use the right metrics to drive performance and shape the culture
Why You Need to Attend This Session:
There are very few things that support organizations can do to vastly improve their performance and efficiency: they can make sure they never solve the same problem more than once, they can help customers solve their own problems, and they can improve products so customer problems disappear. This workshop will present proven and practical techniques for using knowledge to do all of these things, giving attendees the tools they need to create a truly knowledge-driven organization.
Course Abstract:
Knowledge management remains one of the hottest topics in the SSPA heat map. But KM has proven hard to implement well:
- Everyone is too busy
- It’s hard to maintain quality
- Review queues are a black hole
- Customers struggle to find and make sense of content
- Managers aren’t sure what to measure
Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) provides proven, practical guidance for overcoming all of these obstacles.With KCS, support organizations improve the bottom line by reusing what’s learned from each case, eliminating the need to re-solve a problem that’s already been solved. Customers benefit with faster, more consistent resolutions and more useful self-service content. Support staff are empowered and recognized for their contributions. As self-service and efficiency increase, support organizations can implement SSPA’s vision of value-added services.
KCS does this by integrating knowledge management into support delivery—not making it a separate task. Knowledge is captured, reused, and improved as support staff solve customer problems, while enlightened leadership practices use new customer-focused measures to change the culture and drive the right behaviors.
This workshop gives managers, executives, and knowledge management professionals the specific information they need to kick-start their knowledge program with KCS best practices.
About David Kay:
David Kay is the founder and principal of DB Kay & Associates, a firm that offers support organizations strategic consulting on knowledge management, self-service, feedback management, and collaboration. Customers include IBM, Intel, Research In Motion, Tektronix, and Cisco. David is co-author of Collective Wisdom: Transforming Support with Knowledge, the first book on knowledge management for technical support. He is an award-winning contributor to best practices in customer support, holds five patents on support technology, and speaks frequently at industry events.
Location: Jamaica A
- What customer experience management is and how and why is it important to your business
- How CEM fits into your strategic planning process
- The 12 basic building blocks of a CEM strategy and how to get started
Why You Need to Attend This Session:
In a down economy, retention is key. Learn the 12 key components of a customer experience management (CEM) strategy that can improve your retention, profits, and sales by dramatically increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. This strategy includes building a key account strategy to protect and grow your customer base and implementing account segmentation, a 360-degree employee alignment survey, and a partnering strategy. Learn a proven CEM strategy that will assist in acquiring, retaining, and growing customer accounts.
Course Abstract:
This workshop will define CEM in detail. It will look at the identification, design, management, and measurement of all the interactions a business has with its customers and how to ensure they continue to buy and recommend the business. It then will demonstrate how CEM focuses on the outcome of customer interactions and what this means to the company and what actions to take next.
Knowing that the purpose of business is to get and keep customers and to grow revenue profitably, the presenter will cover: what challenges businesses today, why CEM is important to these areas, how a CEM strategy is part of the enterprise strategic plan, how implementing a CEM strategy yields major benefits, the 12 building blocks of a CEM complete and successful strategy, and developing the road map.
A template for developing a CEM playbook will be provided. For example, in “How to Get Started,” setting the vision and driving it into the organization, establishing the baselines, segmentation rules, communication techniques and plans, survey tools and plans, and trending and calibration tools will be covered.
At the conclusion, attendees will understand: the CEM value proposition—satisfied, loyal customers become the best customers and bring in many more customers. They will learn how to: determine strengths and weaknesses at customer touchpoints, leverage the strengths and address areas of weaknesses, reduce customer churn, discover the “voice of the customer,” maximize lifetime customer value, establish a customer-centric culture throughout the company, and motivate employees to go the extra mile for customers.
Bottom line: Your organization can become synonymous with customer service excellence, and you can learn how to become a best-in -class industry leader and a business people like to do business with.
About Bill Moore:
Bill Moore is the director of CEM Training at DG Associates. He is also the director of the CRMI, where his duties include designing and delivering customer and employee loyalty training and retention. In addition to loyalty seminars, Moore has delivered numerous onsite training seminars to front-line personnel and other employees on the topics of improving customer relationship management skills, problem solving, decision making, dealing with difficult people, and time management. Bill has a successful background as a service professional with over 30 years experience working with Honeywell, Data General, Wang Laboratories, EMC, and Kronos Incorporated. He has held senior management positions that include worldwide director of technical operations, director of customer service programs, manager of new product support and strategic alliances, and president of Moore Merit Consulting Group. His expertise in creating, developing, and implementing customer satisfaction programs has led to increased customer satisfaction and profitability at Wang Labs, EMC, and most recently at Kronos, achieving a customer satisfaction level of 97 percent, which resulted in being awarded the Omega NorthFace ScoreBoard Award. At Wang Laboratories, he led the strategic relationship with IBM with the responsibility of developing support methodology, integration of support processes, and implementation of support plans worldwide. Bill graduated from the Executive Management Program of Louisiana State University, the DeVry Technical Institute, and the United States Coast Guard Advance Electronics Center. He has served as an instructor at the U.S.C.G. Electronics Center, a quality leadership instructor at Wang Labs, taught at the New Hampshire College of Management on Service Management, and presented at the Northern Essex College Business Conference on customer satisfaction processes and techniques.
Location: Jamaica B
- Service value definition: how service solutions create business value
- How to improve the value proposition of your services by implementing and emphasizing service offer attributes that drive value
- How to create meaningful offer messaging and content to help marketing and sales align their efforts
Why You Need to Attend This Session:
In the current economic climate, customer spending receives more scrutiny than ever. The anxiety of spending money must be offset with the comfort of a consultative sales approach that addresses the customer’s sense of risk about achieving value. The ability of Marketing and Sales to align their efforts and explain how services create business value will differentiate you from the providers who still rely on run-of-the-mill value propositions.
Course Abstract:
Never has it been more imperative to create real business value for customers and to help them recognize it. Services’ role in the application of technology is vital, thanks to the increasingly complex application of technology across the enterprise, business’ dependency on technology to survive and compete, and increased competition among suppliers and the subsequent decline in technology differentiation. This workshop examines the value of service and how to leverage it to change customer perceptions and win more business. A hands-on workshop with team exercises, participants will work together to create content that is directly usable in operations, marketing, and sales.
About Bill Hall:
Bill Hall is a partner of Pretium Partners, Inc., a firm dedicated to helping technology and service companies improve sales effectiveness through sales training and coaching, marketing training, and sales force assessments. Hall has spent 26 years in sales and marketing. His expertise was developed in technology sales, worldwide services marketing, and services management. For the past 16 years he focused on developing methodologies for improved sales performance. Bill’s speaking engagements include TPSA Summits, The Ohio State University’s Building Professional Services Executive Education Program, the Outsourcing World Summit, The Outsourcing Institute’s Vendor Summit, the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, the Information Technology Council, AFSMI World Conferences, Information Systems Security Association, and other events.
Location: Trinidad B
- How centralization of resource management processes can help you speed the time to project initiation which drives improvements in both customer responsiveness and billable utilization
- How to gain an understanding of how Just-in-Time Resourcing℠ can alleviate many of the pressures PS organizations face each day–from billable utilization to project overruns to employee development
- The steps to establishing your resource management office (RMO) or function
Course Abstract:
Billable utilization is the lifeblood of any professional services organization. The standard forces complicating the resource management picture include: increasing globalization, shortage of SMEs within PS organizations, CFO pressure to optimize margin from PSOs/speed time to revenue, employee retention and development, and moving to a functional (vs. product) orientation. The current macro-economic situation is driving further complications: PSOs need to do more with the same or less number of resources, hiring freezes, little or no room for error relative to financial forecasts, and ensuring alignment of costs (headcount) to forecast demand (revenue). RTM Consulting, with its focus on global resource management (GRM) and Just-in-Time Resourcing℠, provides PS organizations with a comprehensive methodology to optimize the movement of resources, as well as to effectively balance the supply of resources with generated demand. This workshop will provide users with a comprehensive review of GRM principles, explain how GRM can address many of the pressures faced by PS organizations, and provide a foundation on which participants can develop a GRM/JITR adoption/execution plan.
About Mark Sloan:
Mark Sloan is COO of RTM Consulting. He is an industry pioneer with respect to defining and deploying global resource management processes. Prior to RTM, Sloan was vice president and general manager of consulting and professional services for Convergys, where he was responsible for overseeing the sale and successful delivery of Convergys' global consulting and implementation services. A leading provider of customer care, employee care, and information management solutions for the communications, finance, healthcare, government, and retail industries, Convergys is a $2.8-billion firm publicly traded on the NYSE and is a member of both the S&P 500 and Fortune 1000. Prior to joining Convergys, Mark was an executive with Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting). He spent over a decade with Accenture working across the systems integration, business process reengineering, and strategy practices. Mark held a number of entrepreneurial roles at Accenture that include defining and launching the firm's wireless zone for mobile application development, expanding the firm's MVNO practice, including the creation and management of Accenture's MVNO joint venture with WorldCom Wireless and the Sporting News, and holding interim general management responsibilities for a client's services business that he turned around and successfully divested. Mark earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in civil engineering from the University of Notre Dame, where he was designated a Notre Dame Scholar. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and has served as an Advisory Board Member for the Technology Professional Services Association (TPSA).
