Jon Ferrara has been recognized for pioneering innovation in the customer management category. Prior to founding Nimble, LLC. Ferrara was the creator and cofounder of the award winning customer management product GoldMine. In 1999, Goldmine got acquired by FrontRange and Ferrara left to pursue other interests. During those years, Ferrara continued to watch the CRM market. He saw that most of the CRM products that were serving small businesses moved up market and became more costly and complex or fell by the way side, leaving the market underserved. It was at this point that he decided to create the next generation CRM product for small businesses, Nimble.

Social media is the electronic, global equivalent of a traditional open marketplace, where customers can praise, offer suggestions, or criticize vendors with others listening and adding their supporting thoughts or coming to the defense of the merchants. Wellknown companies and entrepreneurs, such as Johnson & Johnson, United Airlines, and Simon Cowell have found out firsthand the power that customers wield through this channel. Patrons’ comments on sites like TripAdvisor influence others’ decisions that impact on sales and loyalty.

Find out how and why the social channel is empowering customers to affect companies’ branding and business. Learn how your organization can utilize this changing customer behavior to benefit your bottom line.

The power of social media requires organizations to develop and finetune a key skill they have too often neglected at their peril: listening to their customers and drilling down to the core issues beneath the emotions. Yet, there are so many social outlets that trying to hear from customers becomes like picking out words from the yells of crowds. Moreover, many who comment on sites may have their own agendas, like participants in town hall meetings that are backing a particular side or candidate.

This session delves into the best practices of monitoring social media, including site tracking, identifying brand attacks, filtering and parsing your social media data to view and measure the “noise” and make sense of what is being said. It also explores discovering and tracing the influencers and opinion makers for future outreach.

A lot has been said regarding the impact of IP on the contact center but, regardless of the experiences, the undeniable fact is that IP is changing the industry. It has allowed new business models to emerge and finally deliver on all past promises, freeing contact centers from paying the hefty price tag of the traditional switches or dealing with forklift upgrades and embracing open source software and its associated advantages.

In this session, attendees embark on a journey through the IP Contact Center – its benefits, its challenges, deployment scenarios, technology decisions, and more – and will leave with an understanding of how to effectively deploy a state of the art, next generation IP contact center.

Session info coming soon…

Contact centers have become the hubs of customers’ interactions with organizations. Social media is adding a vastly different spin to them, because the engagements are not just onetoone and private, where the customer is known and can be identified. Rather, social media presents a onetomany communications platform, often public, and usually with unknown electronic “faces.” Responding to them can, therefore, be challenging, as the means is at present textbased; what is written must be wellthought out as it is the company’s reputation that is at stake.

Find out how to connect the strings of comments, issues, complaints and suggestions from social media to other traditional channels, so that your contact center can engage with your customers on their terms, achieving a unified view of them, in this landmark session. Discover how best to orient your center, including selecting teams to handle social interactions. Learn about valuable new tools, such as sentiment technology, to identify and prioritize comments about your firm for response by your agents, and see how it can be used as an excellent internal and external support tool.

Linking social media into CRM is arguably the killer app – doing so aggregates the multitude of voices heard through and interacted with via the social channel into information that rounds out the universe of customer data. There are repositories of individual data on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter that can be mined and aggregated with other knowledge to form complete yet dynamic customer profiles. Still, there are challenges in turning social media into a CRM technique. For example, its data is unstructured, which means standard BI tools, such as textparsing, may not work as effectively, because the terminology is different for various industries and verticals and regions, and social communities.

This session explores how social media can, and must, given its explosive growth be turned into a CRM tool. It looks at the benefits, solutions and the best practices to make the social channel integral to corporate customer management strategies and tactics.

Social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, are virtual communities and, like any community, to be successful in engaging with their inhabitants you have to know their cultures. This session will explore the dos and donts so that you will be accepted in them and can make them work for your business. This session taught by an executive with a leading site will outline the etiquette of these social community sites so that your company will be shown in when you visit them.

The work at home model for customer contact is growing by more than 30 percent per annum, predicts Frost & Sullivan, and for good reason. It’s green, it’s finally fully locked down in terms of security, and it drives customer engagement, revenue, and loyalty. If you are considering including the athome model in your customer contact strategy or scaling your existing program, this session is a must. Customer service groups as small as ten members and as large as 2,000 are embracing this highgrowth business strategy. Will you follow suit or fall behind?

The session will cover growth forecasts of the athome model, cost comparisons against other delivery models and variations of athome alternatives, the business case for athome agents, critical success factors and risks, hiring and training requirements, technology trends, and of course, best practices that contribute to a successful athome strategy.

The hosted solution is no longer the ugly stepchild of the onpremises offering. Rather, enterprises and SMBs worldwide are rapidly embracing hosted contact center alternatives to transform their communications capabilities. Offering quicker gotomarket, lower initial investment, and packaged knowhow, hosted platforms have emerged from their infancy and entered the mainstream.

This session explores hosted contact center elements from a buyers perspective: How to evaluate vendors, choose transport providers, and examine TCO, including realworld deployment scenarios.

Video is quickly becoming the hottest topic in the communications sector. However, the challenge remains to develop a model to monetize video, either through real increases in ARPU on the carrier side, or through breakthroughs in selfservice delivery, create new upsell and crosssell opportunities, and boost agent productivity at the enterprise level. This presentation will show where the proper application of video can actually increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and/or increase sales for the enterprise when used as part of an Interactive Voice/Video Response system or when implemented as part of a videoenabled contact center.

It is no secret that the most vital element of a successful Contact Center is its agents. When agents communicate with customers, they become the “face” of the company and each contact experience can make or break the company’s future with that customer. Contact Center technology is essentially designed to remove as many variables from the experience as possible but the key to eliminating unacceptable agent activity is agent training. Using Speech Analytics technology to target specific areas of agent weakness at an individual level and use systemcaptured data to generate a unique customized training curriculum will greatly improve the agent’s skills and your customer’s experience.

Speech Analytics has long been seen as a technology with the potential to solve many issues in the call center but it has rarely been seen as achieving good ROI or delivering on its promises of lowcost compliance validation and the identification of business intelligence or insight. This session will not only dispel the myths around speech analytics, but help attendees discover which speech analytics system will be most effective in driving agent productivity and customer satisfaction in their contact centers.

Contact centers are no longer limited to agents tethered to headsets connected to PSTN lines, working at employerprovided cubicles and desks. They are more mobile, including working from home, and for sales, field reps and supervisors especially on the go in large campuses or on the road. Down the road, wideband/HD voice, delivered over IP through unified communications, will untie your staff from the voice quality limitations inherent in TDM, enabling clear, shorter and customerfriendlier voice interactions. Attend this leading edge panel discussion on headset innovations and best practices to enable your contact center personnel to communicate effectively with your customers. Find out what impacts this untethering including wideband will have on IT requirements. Discover the unique attributes of home offices that need to be managed with the right sets. Get insights on planning your recording solutions in preparation for HD voice.

Being informed and informing others promptly of service issues or sales opportunities, and of comments on social media sites is just as important as their contents. There are a growing array of automated outbound and inbound multichannel alerting tools that can costeffectively enable you and your customers respond quickly to these matters. Learn in this techsavvy session about these solutions and how they can make a different in your customer service, support and sales strategies, and results.

Session info coming soon…