The ROI to Attend IT EXPO

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

Doing more with less is today’s mantra. ITEXPO West, which is taking place Sept 1-3, 2009 at the Los Angeles Convention Center is the best venue to find out how to do this by learning about new and practical solutions and how best to buy and apply them to deliver maximum ROI for your contact center.

ITEXPO West is about leading-edge productivity-and-service-enhancing and cost-saving technologies such as broadband, call recording, unified communications (UC), voice over IP, and wireless. Information and insight about them are communicated through informative interactive conference sessions and exhibits.

ITEXPO West Conference
ITEXPO conference has several tracks including one dedicated for contact centers. Here is a snapshot of the sessions being featured this year:

• UC in the contact center

This session will address the role that the contact center plays in a successful UC strategy. It will focus on best practices for leveraging contact center and UC applications in tandem and how companies can make use of existing and next generation technologies to make this happen.

• Driving efficiency and compliance in outbound contact centers
This talk will look at recent trends in outbound contact centers, including new regulations, new dynamics in agent employment, and new technology advances that combine to yield a unique opportunity for improvement. You will be presented with architectures and best practices to leverage this context for superior results.

• Next generation contact center applications

You will learn how to make the contact center more valuable to the business by incorporating next generation features like service-oriented architecture and Web services to help drive greater efficiency and flexibility in the contact center, reduce costs, and speed time-to-revenue.

• Agent performance and ROI

The focus is on the necessity of agent performance management solutions and how to build a solid business case and ROI for such tools. You will find out how to get the best performance out of agents as well as be presented with studies on customer satisfaction and how the two can be aligned.

• IP quality assurance

This is an examination of assuring IP telephony voice quality in the contact center and the enterprise. The concepts and discussions will revolve around active call and multilayer monitoring, using performance management to assure that service level objectives are met and how recurring failures can be identified and prevented in real-time.

• Hosted services

A look into the issues surrounding implementing a hosted on demand delivery of contact center service and provide a guide as to where these services are and are not appropriate. It will provide a generic guide to new applications that the on demand platforms can allow as well as review the ROI model for on demand services.

• Voice documentation and recording

An examination of how voice documentation technology is used to manage risks and ensure ethical, professional and customer-friendly employee conduct. Specific topics will include compliance, personnel development and collaboration and how voice documentation can contribute to each of these areas. It will also address the role of VoIP call recording, different implementation approaches, and keys to ensure a smooth implementation.

There is in addition an entire track on UC with sessions including:

• Leveraging UC to optimize the customer experience

The presentation will discuss how to leverage contact center and UC applications in tandem to drive increased productivity and more responsive service, including what organizations should look for from technology partners. It will also identify UC strategies that you can begin to implement today to realize more significant ROI, get ahead of business demand and gain a competitive advantage

• ‘Best of Breed’ versus ‘Best of Suite’ when buying UC solutions

This session covers picking discrete UC tools or purchasing bundles. You may already have a UC component, such as IM. Do you buy each separately as they come onto the market or do you buy an integrated package when these appear?

ITEXPO West Exhibitors
There are a wide range of top firms exhibiting at ITEXPO West. Here are just a few of the companies with contact center/contact center-related solutions that will be there:

• Aastra
• AItech
• Avaya
• Duxsoft
• Infradapt
• Interactive Intelligence
• OrecX
• Qwest
• Sipera
• Volt Delta

Yes TMC’s magazines, sites, and webinars provide excellent information on these topics and companies. Yet they supplement rather than substitute for the real-time direct knowledge and insights gained by attending sessions, speaking to presenters and other attendees, and meeting with and seeing demos from exhibitors. Information that you can beehive to your staff when you get back or directly via your wireless device...which further boosts the value and ROI from being at ITEXPO West.

Register today at our site www.tmcnet.com/voip/conference/west-2009/overview/w09-registration.aspx  and see you at
ITEXPO (News - Alert) West!

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