Why You Need to Attend This Session:
Most service organizations are struggling with finding and utilizing key skilled resources more effectively and efficiently. Any organization looking to improve their utilization and efficiency of these key skilled resources, and also looking to expand their market presence through a “sell to” or “sell through” model with new or existing partners, will benefit from this look at how to leverage key intellectual property through remote capable offerings.

Presentation Abstract:
To improve standardization and lower cost of delivery, Hitachi Data Systems has analyzed its delivery methodology and approach. The company has identified some very innovative ways to leverage its robust remote services capability to increase effficiency and improve its use of re and we look at work breakdown structure and identify where we can leverage our remote services capabilities to perform a service activity.

Presentation Abstract:
First Contact Resolution (FCR) is not a new paradigm. However, in today’s fiercely competitive market it plays a significant role in driving not only customer satisfaction and retention, but cost reduction. How important is FCR? How can you improve FCR? What do you need to know about FCR to ensure success? The discussions about the value of first contact resolution (FCR) in tech support has been many and varied and rightly so, as this is the single most important key challenge to improving customer satisfaction.

Join three industry experts as they provide unique perspectives on FCR through independent presentations based on their research and life experiences. Will this panel of experts align in their thinking? How close will their recommendations be and what can you learn from each of them?

Hear from Bill Rose, VP Services Research TSIA, Malcolm Carlaw, CEO Impact Learning, and Dave Brown, CEO Support Center University as they share their perspectives and discoveries of this critical service metric.

Why You Need to Attend This Session:
This session will provide service leaders with an understanding of how improving the soft skills of their consultants will: (a) help improve overall project performance due to the consultants’ ability to better deal with project scope creep and issues, and (b) enable the consultants to participate more effectively in contributing to revenue growth through more effective identification of opportunities and enhancing their up-selling skills.

Presentation Abstract:
Today’s PSOs spend lots of time and money developing the technical, application, and business skills of their consultants, yet often do not address the most important skills of all for the consultant: soft skills! Effective communications, issue management, scope management, influence selling, meeting facilitation, and more, all comprise the many soft skills consultants need to do their jobs well. During this highly informative session you will learn how one leading-edge professional services organization teamed up with a TSIA partner to provide soft skills training and experiential learning for their consultants, and the resulting benefits that organization now enjoys.

Why You Need to Attend This Session:
What is a “hybrid-offshore professional services delivery model,” and why should you learn more about it? Come hear Tallabs’ success story, and learn how you can take away best practices and learnings for developing, implementing, and sustaining a hybrid offshore professional services delivery model. Improve your professional services delivery scalability, velocity, quality, and costs while enhancing and protecting the value of your local in-region professional services workforce in a highly collaborative and mutually beneficial ecosystem.

Presentation Abstract:
In any growing professional services business, challenges include managing and improving scalability, velocity, quality, and costs, while simultaneously delivering innovation, developing human capital skills, and driving new services business development. Facing such challenges, the Tellabs Professional Services organization recognized their current delivery model would not continue to scale competitively. Tim Ayers and his team developed and implemented a “hybrid” onshore/offshore professional services delivery model, by establishing a highly effective and well-managed partnership with an offshore delivery partner to support their domestic workforce. With a year of measurable results, Tellabs has benefited with high double-digit growth, improved gross margins, greater velocity, scalability and a consistently high level of quality. Customers are expressing their satisfaction and confidence by awarding Tellabs more business. The new model has provided Tellabs more personnel to cover their growing professional services business, and those personnel have an improved quality of life and morale. Participants in this presentation will walk away with a checklist and outline of key considerations, processes, formulas, learnings, and best practices to incorporate into their own service business, including the decision/review and partner selection process, start-up and implementation, and life cycle management of the hybrid onshore/offshore delivery model.

Why You Need to Attend This Session:
Service leaders will come away from this session with new ideas to provide industry-leading service-level performance and service differentiation at reduced costs. With advanced scheduling technologies, it is possible to simultaneously improve service, increase technician productivity, and provide for a more satisfying workday for technicians and managers. This session will tell you how Xerox is doing it.

Presentation Abstract:
Xerox is investing in a suite of new systems and technologies for managing field service delivery. This investment will enable consistent achievement of SLA targets and enable the right levels of service based on each customer’s unique requirements. To create these capabilities, Xerox is pooling its internal IT staff with strategic partners that include software suppliers and integrators and field service managers to create an integrated set of capabilities. This presentation will focus on Xerox’s implementation of advanced scheduling technology for field service delivery. Topics will include SLA management, real-time automation, technician productivity, integrating internal and commercial software applications, and leading change. The discussion will conclude with an update on the project status and results achieved.

Why You Need to Attend This Session:
In a human capital intensive business such as technology professional services, the difference between success and failure boils down to your ability to get the right resources in the right place at the right time. An emerging sourcing practice of PS organizations is the use of “solution centers,” where delivery staff can work on client projects exclusively offsite, typically in lower cost locations. Because it is an emerging practice, however, there are lots of unknowns about existing and common practices, let alone best practices. If you want to fill in those unknowns, there is no better place to do that than in our breakout session, where first of a kind benchmarks will be shared from a recently completed TSIA member survey.

Presentation Abstract:
During the first quarter of 2010, TSIA will be executing a member survey on the topic of solution center policies and practices. For many TPS organizations “global delivery” means the use of solution centers, to streamline and reduce the cost of PS delivery. What are the typical tasks performed by these centers? What sorts of resources tend to be in them? What is the typical financial model for PS solution centers? Where are these centers typically located and how is the utilization of solution center resources determined? Vice President of PS Research for TSIA, Bo Di Muccio, Ph.D., will address these questions and many more in this session.

Why You Need to Attend This Session:
Investigating end-to-end customer scenarios has impacted the products we build and the way we service the customer. The breakout will be a candid walkthrough of examples of how Microsoft used this approach across various functions—from product development to support readiness—and how it influenced key metrics in their support business.

Presentation Abstract:
Customer support centers deal with a multitude of customer issues. Analyzing and prioritizing these issues can be cumbersome. At Microsoft Consumer Support, scenario-based solutions and planning has helped with prioritization and has provided a common framework to communicate issues and problems across the company. From this scenario-based solutions approach, Microsoft has been able to improve the customer support experience within its products and support operations.

This session has been canceled.

Why You Need to Attend This Session:
If you are a product company that is selling product through SMB and consumer channels, then you know what a challenge new product introductions, upgrade releases, and back-to-school, holiday, and tax season are. If you struggle to hire, train, and improve skills and knowledge, but then lose those skill sets because of volume drop, then you need to attend this session.

Presentation Abstract:
Creating and sustaining customer loyalty has always been a major component for companies and their success strategies. Maintaining customer experience requires a model that doesn’t drain resources—both human and financial. It also becomes relevant to understand choices that can be provided to manage staff while maintaining service levels and customer experience in a support environment. This presentation covers, in a detailed case study, how we added value to the client’s requirements through immense peaks and valleys in volume, while keeping customer satisfaction levels high. It also will showcase how providing choices through multiple modes of contact helped capture the voice of the customer effectively, and how that allowed the client’s product development and support teams to listen to and enhance the customer experience and add to their top line.

Why You Need to Attend This Session:

This session is a little different than many of the other TSIA break-outs. This is a “Work out” session where you can bring your questions, ideas, and proposals about PS delivery to obtain ideas, feedback, and constructive criticism. The session will be hosted by Xerox. Do you have questions about using solution centers? Tactics to improve project performance? How to improve billable utilization this year? The pros and cons of having a dedicated PMO? This is the place to bring them!

Why You Need to Attend This Session:
Come to this session to learn about intelligent usage of technology, such as cloud computing, to drive down costs, why establishing academic alliances to gain market-share and mind-share is important, and how to leverage the “self-service” model to accelerate partner readiness.

Presentation Abstract:
As technology becomes more complex, it gets harder and harder to use, resulting in under utilization of most technology purchases. How can Education Services help customers to realize the value of their purchase more quickly? How can Education Services return value to the company, by driving product adoption and usage? Come learn more about "accelerating the time to value," as our panel of education leaders discuss how Education Services bridges the gap between product purchase and usage, resulting in greater value and sustained success for all.