Guide to Call Center Week (Part 1): Making the Most of Zappos, Visa Keynotes

Yes, Call Center Week is an opportunity to spend a beautiful late-spring week in Vegas. It is an opportunity to rekindle connections with colleagues and meet new professionals who share in your pursuit of customer service excellence. It is an opportunity to interact with hundreds of innovative companies that are solving today’s most pressing call center challenges. It is a chance to establish oneself and one’s brand as revered, unforgettable entities within the call center space.

But the world’s largest and more comprehensive customer service event is not simply a fun networking excursion. It is not simply a branding opportunity. It is not simply a portal for trying new call center technology products. It is gateway to the largest, most actionable wealth of call center and leadership insights on the planet.

From proven success stories, to outside-the-box perspectives on customer centricity, to brilliant strategies for motivating team members in a business division often condemned for its bleakness, the Call Center Week presenters possess knowledge that can empower customer service organization of all sizes in all industries.

Divided by topic—leadership for world class service, customer-centric innovation and experience excellence, aligning technology and strategy, maximizing performance and productivity and webRTC and future technology—the breakout "track" sessions make their intent very clear. Opportunities for attendees to focus their learning efforts on their most pressing needs, the targeted, nuanced track sessions help make the 1800-attendee-strong event a personalized experience.

But the road to call center success is not simply paved in specificities. For any targeted strategies to work, businesses must approach them against the backdrop of a broader, organization-wide commitment to customer-centric improvement.

Enter the keynote sessions. While less specific in focus, they are potentially more significant in application. Led by executives who are not simply knowledgeable in call center topics but accomplished in making their perspectives resonates as well with stakeholders as they do customers, the keynotes represent the truest link to meaningful success. They represent a platform for putting the event’s specific teachings together into an effort that definitively moves the needle. Business objectives—which are inextricably linked to call center objectives in the best businesses—become attainable realities rather than distant fantasies.

In part one of our guide to the 15^th Call Center Week, which takes place June 9-13 at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, we look at the best approaches for each keynote session on June 11, the first main conference day. By applying these perspectives, you can assure that you are not simply hearing a presentation but receiving customer service empowerment.

SEIZING CONTROL OF YOUR CULTURE AND REALIZING THE POWER OF THE HAPPY

Jenn Lim, CEO & Chief Happiness Offi cer, Delivering Happiness & Zappos Culture Book Creator, Zappos.com

Unless you operate an online shoe retailer named Zappos.com, do not treat this session as a blueprint for the best possible call center culture. Instead, think about how Zappos, while cognizant of its own, unique customers and own, unique workplace environment, created such a revered culture. Apply those principles—not the specific practices—to your organization to create an environment that optimizes your own business’ levels of agent and customer engagement.

VISTAPRINT MAKES CUSTOMER ADVOCACY, RELATIONSHIPS AND ENGAGEMENT CARE A STRATEGIC PRIORITY

Scott Hays, Senior Director Product Marketing, KANA; Ali Ghedira, CARE Operations Manager, VistaPrint

There is saying you care about the customer, and there is actually caring about the customer. This opportunity reveals how to make the leap from the former to the ladder. While listening, pay attention to the connection being made between customer engagement and business success. Moving forward, if you are unable to demonstrate the business impact of greater customer-centricity, you do not deserve to advocate on behalf of the customer.

CHIEF EXECUTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: DESIGNING CUSTOMER­ CENTRICITY: A VIEW INSIDE THE BOARDROOM

Dr. James L. Merlino, Chief Experience Offi cer, Cleveland Clinic Foundation; Ashley Kohlrus, Chief Experience Offi cer, Allegacy Federal Credit Union; Tony Gaines, Chief Customer Offi cer, LOGIC Electronic Cigarettes

To give customer-centricity the best chance of becoming a reality within your business, you need to secure the call center function a seat at the executive table. Pay attention to how these individuals established the value not simply of customer service but of giving the voice of the call center—and thus the voice of the customer—a speaker in the executive boardroom.

Insofar as that pursuit might not be a quick one for all organizations, however, it is also important to understand precisely how the customer experience is valued by non-call center executives. While today’s C-level executives claim to prioritize the customer experience above all, call center professionals routinely claim about a lack of buy-in. That difference needs to be reconciled – and this session will provide a window into what stakeholders are truly demanding from the customer experience.

A WORLD WITHOUT BOUNDARIES: GLOBAL CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE, THE NEW CUSTOMER EXPECTATION

Adriana Torres, Global Head of Customer

Like multi-channel customer service, the question of globalization raises an important question: how do you balance the need for experiential consistency with the need for regional nuance? Whether a business is local, regional, national or global, it will reach a myriad of customers through a myriad of touch points. The goal for this session should be determine how the best elements of a customer service strategy can be made to resonate at any time, in any channel on any continent.