The Fall 2013 Contact Center Conference was in Phoenix, AZ this week. Phoenix is a great city to visit and the weather was perfect. 

There are a lot of contact center conferences throughout the year so it’s impossible to attend them all. And, it can be tough to keep track of all the great content even if you do attend. That’s why I put together this short re-cap.

Conference Overview

If you didn't attend, you may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference:

• Conference Overview
• Conference Sessions

Resources

Here are some additional resources that you can use to get even more content and perspectives from the conference.

• Twitter Backchannel - #cccon
• Ruth Lochary’s excellent re-caps of Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3

Conference Highlights

It's impossible to attend all the sessions. There were even a few great ones scheduled at the same time I was scheduled to present The Journey to a Customer-focused Culture. However, there were three sessions that really stood out for me:

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff’s session on building a business case for multi-channel customer service. Her session took us through seven steps, but I was really impressed that step one was social listening. She suggested that businesses start by finding what their customers are saying about them on social media and where they are saying it. This in turn can provide business intelligence that can reduce contact volume, improve products, and ultimately win more business. I also found a nice YouTube video where Petouhoff explains the nuts and bolts of calculating the ROI of providing customer service via social media. 

Bruce Belfiore’s session on what agents really think. Belfiore is the CEO of Benchmark Portal, a company that specializes in benchmarking call centers.  He presented the results of a research study to find out what contact center agents are really thinking. Overall, it seemed that agents are fairly satisfied, but the survey did identify a few areas for improvement. Chief among them are the transition from training to the call center floor, providing realistic job previews during the hiring process, and senior leadership inspiring trust.

Fred Van Bennekom’s session on customer service surveys. Van Bennekom shared many examples of ways that surveys can be deliberately or inadvertently manipulated to provide false data. The biggest problem revealed is that companies get fixated on achieving a certain score rather than using the survey to drive continuous improvement. When that happens, companies start finding creative ways to get customers to give a positive rating. Van Bennekom outlined an excellent example on his blog.

If you attended the conference, what were your biggest take-aways?