Jeff Toister — The Service Culture Guide

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Day 1 & 2 Re-cap: ICMI’s 2013 Call Center Demo & Conference

This week, I’m attending ICMI’s Call Center Demo and Conference in Atlanta, GA. It can be tough to keep track of everything going on at a conference, so I’m posting this blog date to share my own perspective.

 

Conference Overview

Here are some links you can use to familiarize yourself with the conference:

 

Resources

You can also follow the conference via the Twitter backchannel or ICMI’s own updates:

 

Day 1: Monday, October 21

The first day of the conference featured half-day workshops and site tours of contact centers in the Atlanta area.

The Auto Trader site tour was a huge highlight for me. These folks were really well-prepared and took a lot of a pride in their work. One of the cool aspects of their center was everything was car-themed. Check out this beauty parked in their lobby:

The tour also generated quite a few complimentary Tweets, like this one:

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A few takeaways included:

  • They have nearly 4 million cars listed on their website
  • The support approximately 20,000 auto dealers
  • Their contact center has a lot of small, specialized teams. This allows for lots of coaching, feedback, and open communication.

 

Day 2: Tuesday, October 22

Lisa Ford kicked off Day 2 with a keynote on exceptional customer service. Michael Tudor tweeted my favorite point from the talk:

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After taking a quick tour of the Expo hall, I headed to a panel discussion on Innovation in the Call Center featuring Sean Hawkins of iContact, Josh Chapman of Cars.com, George Larribas of Wells Fargo, and Ryan Birchmeierfrom the City of Philadelphia. ICMI’s own Erica Strother live blogged the session. 

It was my turn to facilitate a session in the afternoon. My topic was Staff Up! 10 Ways to Hire and Train Faster.  If you missed my session, you can still learn 10 ideas by reading my recent articles, 5 Ways to Hire Faster and 5 Ways to Train Contact Center Agents Faster

My final session of the day was Lauren Ziskie’s Top Five Customer Experience Trends of 2013. Here’s a great takeaway shared by ICMI’s Sarah Stealey Reed:

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Stay tuned for another blog post about the last day of the conference.