Jeff Toister — The Service Culture Guide

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Day 3 Re-cap: ICMI’s 2013 Call Center Demo & Conference

Jeff Toister

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 daily blog updates to share my own perspective. Today's post re-caps the third and final day. You can also read my re-cap of days 1 and 2.

 

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 3: Wednesday, October 23

The morning kicked off with Sarah Stealy Reed sharing some of ICMI’s call center research. Here are a few highlights:

  • The average call center requires 5 different applications to serve customers
  • Only 21.1 percent are using a simplified desktop
  • 60 percent support social (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), 32 percent support chat

ICMI has a lot of great research reports on their website. You can also tell them what content you are interested in seeing by taking their Community Interest Survey, open now through October 28. 

Sarah also invited call center professionals to contribute content to ICMI so they can share their best practices and ideas with their peers. Check out ICMI’s editorial calendar to learn more and submit your ideas.

Chip R. Bell was next up to deliver the morning keynote. He was funny, entertaining, and very informative. He was sharing insights from his book, Wired and Dangerous, which is available on Amazon.com if you didn’t pick up a copy at the conference.

There were a lot of great Tweets summarizing Chip’s key points. Here’s one that nicely sums up his presentation:

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The rest of the day featured some outstanding breakout sessions plus plenty of networking. 

My favorite was on serving customers via emerging channels. Sarah Stealey Reed moderated a panel discussion with Ian Hunter of USAN, Kim Martin of Voxeo, Chad McDaniel of Execs in the Know, and Jason Wolcott of Digital Roots. Erica Strother live blogged from the session.

The session also generated quite a few Tweets:

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Now what?

The whole point of going to a conference is to take back new ideas and contacts that can help you do even better. What were your biggest takeaways from the conference?