"Speech Strategy and the Customer Experience: The importance of a multi-channel approach"
presented by Elaine Cascio

May 5, 2010
Online
CRMXchange Virtual Symposium on Speech Strategies
 

Behind every successful speech application is a multi-channel strategy. It drives applications, design, usage, success rates, and customer satisfaction. Without this strategic focus on customer contact, organizations get lost in internally-focused silos and initiatives. Sound familiar?

In this session, we’ll examine how to use speech as a critical component to build a positive cross-channel customer experience, bolster the brand relationship and build customer loyalty. We’ll look at real-life examples of organizations that provide seamless speech and cross-channel service, as well as some that don’t. You’ll learn how to leverage speech to not only improve customer satisfaction, but increase self service rates. Understand the critical steps to take to ensure that your customers' experience is engaging, seamless and positive.
 

"Leading Practices in IVR Design: Turn Your IVR from a Liability to an Asset"
presented by Elaine Cascio

November 19 , 2009
Online
11:00 - 1:00 ET

A poorly designed IVR application can cost hundreds of thousands  even millions  of dollars in low usage, irate customers, and lost business. On the other hand, a well designed IVR can save your call center anywhere from $5 to over $10 on every completed call, as well as improve customer satisfaction.

In this seminar, you'll learn the keys to designing successful, customer-focused IVR applications. We will:

Cover the basics of design  and redesign  for both touchtone and speech recognition
Provide a step-by-step overview of the process from development to implementation
Discuss how to keep your IVR application running smoothly
Well also discuss deciding whether to use touchtone or speech recognition and the keys to success when transitioning from a touchtone to a speech application. And well include ways you can evaluate your own IVR applications in line with best practices to increase use.

"Speech in The Customer Intimate Contact Center"
presented by Elaine Cascio

August 26, 2009
New York, SPEECHTEK 2009

As companies strive for greater customer intimacy through personalized service, customer-based sales, and proactive outreach, what is the role of speech? Hear real-life examples of successful, customer intimate applications and critical steps you can take to use speech to engage, not alienate, customers. We’ll cover the best ways to combine speech with live interactions to enhance the customer experience and how your company can leverage the power of speech for higher levels of customer intimacy and loyalty.

"Improving Your Customer Experience Through a Seamless Multi-Channel Approach "
presented by Elaine Cascio

August 18, 2009
Online

Customers do business with companies through many different channels, but the experience is often disjointed and inconsistent. At best, this causes confusion and frustration. At worst, you’ll lose customers, who will tell 10 of their friends about their dissatisfaction. In this course, you’ll learn what it takes to build a seamless multi-channel customer experience.

Behind every successful contact center is a clearly articulated customer contact strategy. It drives applications, design, usage, success rates, and customer satisfaction. Without this strategic focus on customer contact, organizations get lost in internally-focused silos and initiatives. Sound familiar? In this course, we’ll discuss how you can build a multi-channel strategy and the roles different channels play in customer contact.

Plus, you’ll learn the keys to developing easy to use, customer focused, self-service, from voice response and web applications to kiosks, text messaging, and other emerging channels for customer contact. We’ll show you how to consider (and involve) your customers at critical stages in development to meet your channel objectives. And we show ways you can optimize your use of multiple channels while providing customers with critical information how and when they need it.

"Meeting Business Goals with Speech Technology: Cross Channel User Experience"
presented by Elaine Cascio

SpeechTEK 2008
New York
August 19, 2008

The days of having a speech strategy separate from an overall user-experience strategy are over. For a strategy to be meaningful, organizations must consider speech technology as one element in a multichannel customer contact plan that encompasses all the ways in which the customer might interact with them. This session will provide valuable lessons in understanding how speech fits with the web, printed material, live customer service, and other channels through which organizations reach their customers.

"Measuring the Customer Experience: How, What and When"
presented by Elaine Cascio

Chartwell Best Practices Summit on Self-Service IVR and Web-based Applications
Scottsdale, AZ
June 12-13, 2008

One of the keys to measuring customer experience is doing something few companies ever do - and that's stepping into your customer's shoes. Only by actually experiencing what your customers do on different channels and media, across channels, in a store, on the web, on a phone call, at a kiosk, or via text messaging - can you begin to measure the experience. Only after you've completed this baseline (and you'll probably have lots of action items as a result!), you can establish goals and key metrics and tackle the job of pulling together data from all the different sources. We'll cover:

• How to put together cross channel customer maps in order to understand the customer experience.
• Identifying key gaps and customer dissatisfiers within and across channels.
• How to develop important customer centric measures of success.
• Understanding the difference between reports and metrics and how to measure customer experience success.

Interop
with Don Van Doren and Marty Parker

Las Vegas
April 27 – May 1, 2008

“Creating Your Enterprise Unified Communications Plan”
presented by Marty Parker

Unified Communications (UC) offers enormous opportunities for dramatic enhancements to your communications environment. But there is a real need to organize these opportunities into a coherent and cost-justified plan for your company or institution. This one-day workshop will provide you with the information and tools to create that plan for your enterprise.


“Communications-Enabling Business Applications”
presented by Don Van Doren

In addition to combining different communications media, Unified Communications also allows enterprises to add communications functionality to business applications that previously lacked such tight integration. UC vendors claim that you can drive worker productivity by adding voice or instant messaging directly into, for example, an ERP or spreadsheet application. This session will closely examine such visions of "communications-enabled business processes", to help you understand how much is hype and how much is feasible in the near term


“Justifying Unified Communications Investments Today”
presented by Don Van Doren

Almost everyone believes UC will be a major factor in the networks of the future, but how do you justify investments in today's UC technology--and what elements offer the best payoff? This session will offer real-world examples of UC investments that paid off, and will describe how the payoff was achieved. It will also offer guidelines on whether you can bank on "soft" productivity enhancements to justify the cost of implementation--and whether such gains will pass muster with your CFO.

VoiceCon Orlando 2008
with Don Van Doren and Marty Parker

Orlando
March 17-20, 2008

Sessions include:

Preparing an RFI/RFP for Unified Communications
presented by Marty Parker

Implementing Unified Communications requires knowing what to buy and what requests to make to the vendors. This tutorial will help you get the most out of UC for your enterprise by providing a framework for creating and issuing an RFI/RFP targeted at one or more of the top five ROI-justified UC applications:

• Resource Access and Problem Resolution
• Collaboration Workspaces
• Contact Management
• Seamless Information for Mobility
• Information portals with Communication

The tutorial outlines the solution elements required for basic and advanced versions of each application, analyzes ROI justifications, and provides the information you need to shop for and select the necessary UC technologies.

The Company as Contact Center
presented by Don Van Doren

Agents often need to tap expertise that doesn't reside within the contact center, and that creates challenges ? knowing if the person is available, how he/she prefers to be reached, etc. Unified Communications tools are becoming available that can be incorporated into contact center communications systems and improve the process of connecting the right specialists to customers, colleagues, contact-center agents and help-desk staffs. In effect, experts throughout a company can become an adjunct to the contact center, and this can affect everything from business processes to customer loyalty. This session examines how companies will use these new capabilities.

We consider some key questions, including:

• What's currently available to link agents and customers to specialists who can immediately address detailed questions?
• What's likely to be available over the coming 12?24 months?
• What frameworks are emerging for deploying Unified Communications tools and systems within contact centers?
• What are the elements to measure in preparing an ROI analysis?
• What are the organizational and training implications of deploying these new systems?
• How will Unified Communications change buyer-seller relationships in the contact center market?

Communications-Enabled Apps
presented by Marty Parker

Everyone agrees that applications are the payoff for IP Telephony, UC and converged networks, but talk is cheap. In this session, you'll hear technologists who have implemented communications-enabled applications and are realizing business benefits from the effort.
 

Some key questions we will explore include:

• What types of applications can yield significant business benefits when integrated with communications capabilities?
• What are the technical challenges involved in implementing and running these communications-enabled business applications.
• How does an enterprise IT organization support communications-enabled business applications most effectively?
• What are the different issues involved in implementing communications-enabled business applications via internal development teams, versus working with ISVs and other outside providers?

Integration Challenges I: CTI, CRM and Customer Intelligence Systems
moderated by Don Van Doren

The more you know about your customers, the more productive your contact center can become. There's a new set of metrics that are on the minds of contact center managers -- customer defection saves, service-to-sales conversions, and cross- and up-sell ratios ? but the ability to produce those metrics requires a new level of hardware and software systems, all of which must interoperate to present contact center agents with an accurate history of the callers. This session will explore the emerging systems and analyze the leverage points for integration.
 

Integration Challenges II: Can These Systems Ever Get Along?
moderated by Don Van Doren

The contact center brings together a wide array of communications and network equipment and services. Some adjunct systems have been important parts of a contact center infrastructure, and now that we're adding unified communications and new customer intelligence systems, the number of piece-parts will further expand. Contact center executives, who have long faced a major a challenge getting traditional elements to work together, find that the future is likely to be even tougher. This session will examine ways to ease this long-standing struggle.

"Leading Practices in IVR Design: Turn Your IVR from a Liability to an Asset"
presented by Elaine Cascio and Linda Van Doren

March 14, 2008, Online

A poorly designed IVR application can cost hundreds of thousands – even millions – of dollars in low usage, irate customers, and lost business. On the other hand, a well designed IVR can save your call center anywhere from $5 to over $10 on every completed call, as well as improve customer satisfaction.

In this seminar, you’ll learn the keys to designing successful, customer-focused IVR applications. We will:

Cover the basics of design – and redesign – for both touchtone and speech recognition
Provide a step-by-step overview of the process from development to implementation
Discuss how to keep your IVR application running smoothly
We’ll also discuss deciding whether to use touchtone or speech recognition and the keys to success when transitioning from a touchtone to a speech application. And we’ll include ways you can evaluate your own IVR applications in line with best practices to increase use.

VON – Unified Communications Conference
with Don Van Doren and Marty Parker

Boston
October 30-31, 2007

Don Van Doren and Marty Parker, along with other founders of UCStrategies.com Jim Burton and Blair Pleasant, are helping to organize the Unified Communications conference sponsored by Pulvermedia. The four spoke and/or moderated at a number of sessions including:

• "What is Unified Communications?"
• "Unified Communications Market Overview"
• "Applications Drive Unified Communications"
• "The Future of Endpoints in a UC World"
• "Mobile Information Portals"
• "Unified Communication Enabled Call Centers"
• "Visual Conferencing Capabilities"
• "IBM as a Communications Solution"
• "OCS (Microsoft) as a Communications Solution"

• “Unified Communications: Preparing an RFI/RFP”
  Tutorial by Marty Parker
  August 20, 2007

Unified Communications has become a central theme in business communications.  This tutorial will help you get the most out of UC for your enterprise by providing a framework for proceeding on an RFI/RFP targeted at the top five ROI-justified applications.

• "The Company as Contact Center"
  Speaker and Moderator: Don Van Doren
  August 20, 2007
  
  Agents often need to tap expertise that doesn't reside within the contact center, and that creates challenges knowing if the person is available, how he/she prefers to be reached, etc. Unified Communications tools are becoming available that can be incorporated into contact center communications systems and improve the process of connecting the right specialists to customers, colleagues, contact-center agents and help-desk staffs. In effect, experts throughout company can become an adjunct to the contact center, and this can affect everything from business processes to customer loyalty. This session examines how companies will use these new capabilities.
   
• “Next-Gen Technologies for the Contact Center”
  moderated by Don Van Doren
  August 21, 2007

  This session examines prospects for emerging contact-center technologies and explores what's on the horizon. We'll look at the prospects for speech enablement, speech analytics and other ways of increasing self-service, and how presence enables contact center personnel to find the right person that can help a customer. Attendees will come away with insight into the technologies that will drive industry-leading contact centers in the years ahead.
   

• “Matching Performance to Promise”
  moderated by Don Van Doren
  August 21, 2007

Voice/data convergence and the migration to IP offer opportunities for innovation and efficiencies in the contact center. Applications and servers can be centralized. Dispersed groups of agents can be managed as a single, virtual environment. Multi-modal capabilities are easier, enabling interaction through voice, email, the Web, or video. Higher satisfaction and lower costs were the promise. How are we doing?

• Unified Communications Portals and Interfaces"
  moderated by Marty Parker
  August 21, 2007
  
  Unified Communications enables users to connect to the enterprise using almost any type of communications tool, from a mobile smart phone to a PC to a telephone. So what types of interfaces should these devices employ to optimize device features and provide the most useful and flexible experience for the user? In this session, you will get a clear sense of how the user interface should be tailored to the work being done and the business processes being employed.
   
• "Unified Communications ROI: The Search Is On"
  moderated by Don Van Doren
  August 22, 2007, 2:45 PM
  
  Enterprises are searching to demonstrate the return on investment for Unified Communications. What metrics are available to allow management to prove and track ROI for UC? On this panel, representatives from leading providers will offer their advice and suggestions and will describe real-life reference cases.
   
• "Migrating Your Messaging System"
  moderated by Marty Parker
  August 22, 2007
  
  We're leaving a world of separate voice and email systems and entering a world where voice and text messages are delivered across a converged network to different types of servers and endpoints. But how will you get form here to there? This session will give you advice on managing the migration to next-generation messaging.

• “Presence: New Cornerstone of Enterprise Communications”
  moderated and presented by Don Van Doren
  August 23, 2007

Dynamic, robust presence capabilities are the key to providing much of the efficiency and transformation promised by Unified Communications. In this session, a panel of leading vendors will review current and pending presence capabilities, including applications, benefits and federation between enterprises. You will come away with an understanding of what you need to do to provide true presence capabilities to all your workers who need it, in whatever media they use.

• Locknote Panel
  with Marty Parker and Don Van Doren
  August 23, 2007

Marty and Don participate in the Locknote panel at the close of VoiceCon.