Workshops
Add even more education to your SSPA Conference experience with one of our extremely popular SSPA Workshops on Sunday, May 4th from 10:00am to 4:00pm.
Dave Brown,
President, Support Center University
Attend this workshop and learn how to:
- Improve operations while maintaining current business and customer satisfaction standards
- Understand which staffing formulas are needed to reengineer support operations
- Use a phased approach to evolve out of existing support processes and implement dramatic improvements in customer support
Most companies out-grow their existing processes at some point in their evolution. Change is a natural part of maturing and is required to maintain a leadership position. Evolving your organization while maintaining the current business standards is the monumental challenge that will be addressed in this workshop.
This full-day workshop will provide attendees with the knowledge and tools necessary to overhaul their support operations. The instructor will share proven techniques that have helped many companies through their growth pains and have transformed mediocre organizations into world-class, award-winning industry stars. The workshop is filled with real-life examples and will include hands-on exercises. Attendees will receive sample project plans and worksheets, learn methods, and practice the staffing formulas needed to reengineer complex operations and implement dramatic improvement in customer support.
About Dave Brown
Dave Brown is a management consultant, teacher, and author. He has 20 years of technology management experience and over 12 years experience as a management consultant & trainer. Dave is President of Support Center University, a training organization that specializes in management development and process improvement for service organizations. He has published one book and more than 40 articles and papers related to improving support operations.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA
Jay Friedman, Co-founder, SonicSwap
Chris Kollas, Vice President, Business Development, WetPaint
Neil Beam, Senior Manager - Customer Loyalty, Sage Software
In addition to SSPA member and partner presentations, the workshop will feature an overview of best practices for launching online communities by Jay Friedman, co-founder and COO of SonicSwap, a music social network. Prior to SonicSwap Jay was COO of LiveWorld/Talk City, a leading provider of networking and online community websites, with customers including eBay, AOL, MTV, and MiniCooper.
Attend this workshop and learn how to:
- Optimize for Web self-service, leveraging Web 2.0 to cut costs, increase customer satisfaction, and improve customer loyalty.
- Fully understand the technology layer enabling Web 2.0, including Web Services/SOAP, Web Services APIs, Open Source, and OnDemand/SaaS.
- Successfully apply the functional elements of Web 2.0, including online communities, forums, blogs, Wikis, and mashups.
Web 2.0 is the single most disruptive change to support people, processes, and technology since the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s. As Generation Y, the tech-savvy segment of the population, ages into the target demographic for most companies, customer profiles are radically changing, and meeting and exceeding expectations for these new customers continually proves elusive. With customers creating support content in discussion boards, and peer-to-peer support growing in popularity as a new channel, many legacy processes for tracking issues and publishing content must be re-evaluated. And as more technology vendors adopt Web 2.0 technology standards, new hybrid applications are born, with companies no longer tied to a single vendor; best-of-breed, end-to-end enterprise software suites are finally becoming a reality.
In this interactive session, we will explore the new world of Web 2.0. Learn about the key elements for success: developing a reputation model for community participants; proper usage of blogs, forums and mashups for consumer and technical support; and how to track the impact and influence of your customers—both fans and detractors. Led by the SSPA vice president of research, John Ragsdale, the session will also include guest speakers from the SSPA membership and key Web 2.0 technology experts.
About John Ragsdale
John Ragsdale is Vice President of research for the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA). Ragsdale's area of expertise is creating strategies for improving the customer experience, and selecting and implementing CRM, eService and customer service technology. John drives the association’s highly regarded content and research agenda, delivering insightful, thought-leadership research and analysis on the most pressing business issues facing technology services leaders to enable them to better plan and execute their service strategies.
Prior to joining the SSPA, John was Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research. John has been involved in customer service for most of his career. Before joining Forrester, he worked for J.C. Penney for more than 10 years, managing both internal and external customer support organizations. John has also held product management and marketing positions at eService and CRM vendors.
Frederick C. Van Bennekom, Dr.B.A.
Founder and Principal,
Great Brook
Attend this workshop and learn how to:
- Understand the Balanced Scorecard approach to organizational measurement
- Measure the effectiveness of a service operation and the role of individuals in services management
- Know the trade-offs involved in critical decisions in a survey project.
Service organizations have two broad objectives: first, applying resources efficiently, and second, being effective in the eyes of the customer. The trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness frequently leans toward efficiency metrics since effectiveness is harder to measure, relying upon soft or qualitative measures. Further, effectiveness is multi-dimensional. Yet, the quality of service as viewed by the customer is key to long-term customer loyalty and organizational success.
This workshop will present a framework of a service organization’s various methods to measure effectiveness, all which provide the “balance” in the balance scorecard. The methods to capture customer perceptions covered will range from internal techniques, such as call monitoring, to techniques that directly involve the customer, such as focus groups and surveying.
After discussing the framework, we will devote an extended period to customer feedback surveys, examining critical trade-off decisions in survey project management. Topics covered will include: the process of creating a survey instrument, key criteria in drafting questions, question format options, and survey administration considerations. Workshop attendees will receive a calculator for determining required response rates.
About Frederick C. Van Bennekom, Dr.B.A.
Dr. Fred Van Bennekom is the founder of Great Brook, a company which helps organizations increase effectiveness by applying customer feedback. Fred helps support groups integrate customer needs into new product development, yielding higher quality products at lower Total Cost of Ownership. Fred teaches operations and quality management in Northeastern University’s Executive MBA and Harvard’s Certificate in Management programs.
Fred holds a doctoral degree from Boston University’s School of Management.
David Kay
Founder and Principal,
DB Kay & Associates
Attend this workshop and learn how to:
- Increase capacity using your team's collective knowledge, and maintain this knowledge without costly review queue
- Staff and manage a knowledge management initiative while using the right metrics to drive performance
- Overcome cultural barriers to knowledge sharing and understand how to enable knowledge management with technology
Support organizations are increasingly looking to knowledge management to increase their internal effectiveness and drive more successful customer self-service. Knowledge management initiatives often focus on new technology, but successful implementations are less about technology than about the people and process changes it enables. The cornerstone to success is implementing the right practices and aligning the culture with the goals of knowledge sharing and reuse--and then selecting the right technology.
In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn industry best practices for knowledge management that have been proven in your peers' support organizations. Based on the industry standard Knowledge-Centered Support, the practical steps to knowledge management success demonstrated in this workshop will give each attendee the tools they need to plan, kick-off, or tune up a knowledge management initiative in their own organizations.
About David Kay
David Kay is the founder and principal of DB Kay & Associates, a strategic consulting firm that offers support organizations and the vendors serving them strategic consulting on knowledge management, self-service, and collaboration. 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 three patents on support technology, and speaks frequently on his own work in knowledge and on his analysis of trends revealed in his research with support industry leaders.
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