Agenda

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Hosted by:

Robert Gofourth
Executive Vice President, Operations
Team Focus Insurance Group
Customer Engagement Leadership Council Member
 

Why You Should Listen to Robert:
Robert has more than 30 years of operations, customer experience and risk management across a variety of industries including insurance, mortgage banking, government enterprise, and outsourcing. He is also the best-selling author of Hack the Corporate Ladder: Move Your Career to the Next Level.

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Abstract:
As a result of the pandemic, the contact center has become more relevant than ever to your enterprise. This session will challenge you to examine your current environment and challenges, define an aspirational future state, and develop strategies and plans to get you to that future state.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on positioning the contact center as the cornerstone of your enterprise servicing strategy
• Framework for developing your strategic vision and implementation plan
• Lessons learned for measuring your success and communicating with the C-Suite

Headliner:

Janet Solomon
Vice President, Client Operations/Contact Center Solutions
Fiserv

 
Why You Should Listen to Janet:
Janet is a transformational leader dedicated to helping Customer Experience Centers be their best “Voice of the Brand”. With over 30 years in the financial servicing industry, she is particularly engaged in driving excellence in service delivery through automation, intentional process design and agent engagement. Janet led an 1,800 FTE enterprise-wide contact center for a large bank, including 8 domestic and global sites. Today, she leads the Contact Center Solutions team at Fiserv responsible for service delivery for 3000+ financial institutions.

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Abstract:
Customer experience is the new battleground and a key differentiator. If we want to continue to exceed customer expectations and make a significant impact on their experience, we must take an outside-in human centered approach to better understand and design for those rapidly evolving expectations.

Key Take-Aways:

• A proven human centered framework to truly understand an individual’s journey and exceed their expectations
• A guide to manage Customer, Employee, and User Experience like a product to drive impact and measurable change
• Skills and basic steps you can take to use this framework today

Rockstar Insights:

Todd Allmond
Director, Customer Experience (CX) Center of Excellence
Microsoft
 
Why You Should Listen to Todd:
As Director of the CX Center of Excellence at Microsoft, Todd leads experience research and the future state of customer experiences across all modalities and phases of the customer life cycle. Over the past 13 years, he’s worked across a variety of industries with a focus on better understanding customers through a human-centered research framework and using those insights to design a future state end to end experience that wows and delights.

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Abstract:
Sustainable employee engagement plays a key role in retaining top talent and often leads to delivering best-in-class customer experiences. This interactive session will focus on one company’s journey of building a culture of engagement and will provide ideas on how you can do the same while demonstrating the ROI to your organization.

Key Take-Aways:

• Framework and success factors of an employee engagement program
• Best practices for building and implementing your own sustainable employee engagement program
• Case history of one company’s quest for sustainable employee engagement – from beginning to outcomes and next steps

Fab Facilitator:

Amy Bouthilet
Vice President Global Talent
Alta Resources
 
Why You Should Listen to Amy:
With 15+ years of consumer care experience, Amy has a proven track record of increasing employee engagement and helping global brands maximize customer experiences through applied innovation. Whether in a corporate support role or in direct management of a consumer care team, Amy has a personal passion to deliver results. Currently Amy serves as Vice President of Global Talent for Alta Resources, a customer service and sales contact center provider (BPO) representing some of the most recognizable and fastest-growing brands in the world.

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Abstract:
Great CX is delivered in moments of truth. This interactive session will examine how the latest advancements in human aware AI are enabling the next generation of call center coaching capabilities to rocket CSAT and employee engagement. Discover how call center agents in all settings (hybrid, remote, in-house or BPO) are being coached in-call through AI augmentation, driving enhanced business outcomes and positively impacting agent wellness and guarding against burnout.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices for implementing in-call coaching strategies in your service operations
• Guidance on leveraging AI and human service agents to deliver the ultimate CX
• Fortune 100 case examples of organizations leveraging in-call coaching to drive CSAT

Fab Facilitators:

Rex McCully
Associate Vice President, General Manager, Health Advocacy Solutions (retired)
HCSC
 
Why You Should Listen to Rex:
Rex has more than 20 years of experience leading large-scale physical/behavioral health care management programs. His unique view of the patient experience, operational processes and efficiencies, financial management, cost of care strategies, product development and sales is influenced primarily by his leadership over a broad, comprehensive, and large-scale set of programs and products within the payer space.
 
Dr. Skyler Place
Chief Behavioral Science Officer
Cogito
 
Why You Should Listen to Skyler:
Skyler has over fifteen years of experience developing and implementing new approaches to better predict and improve human behavior. His team of behavioral scientists, analysts and consultants apply best practice principles and novel insights to ensure higher performance for both organizations and individuals. Prior to Cogito, Skyler led large-scale academic research projects at the intersection of artificial intelligence and behavioral science.

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Abstract:
In this interactive session we will explore the process of transforming your contact center from the traditional Quality Monitoring model to a fully automated solution that empowers your agents to deliver remarkable customer experience.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices on how to leverage the combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence
• Insight on how to distinguish and quantify coaching needs
• Fresh perspectives on how to incorporate effective coaching into your WFO/WFH model

Fab Facilitators:

Jennifer Gormer
Senior Director, Training & Quality Management
getaroom.com
 

Why You Should Listen to Jennifer:
Jennifer brings 23+ years’ experience as a Senior Learning & Talent Development Leader and consultant for Fortune 100 companies and is an Executive Board Member of Big Thought, Inc. Her expertise includes Andragogy, measurement & evaluation, LMS administration, traditional and Agile Project Management, and Talent & Quality Management. Jennifer is a 3-time best-selling author and a keynote speaker, who was nominated for the 2019 Dallas Business Journal 40 under 40 Award and was named 2015 Best of Business Professionals by Examiner.com.

 
Jim Iyoob
Chief Customer Officer
Etech Global Services
 

Why You Should Listen to Jim:
Jim is a 33-year veteran of the call center/BPO industry with an impeccable track record of innovation and advanced business intelligence. Due to his level of expertise, Jim has been featured in numerous publications, including CIO Review, Contact Center Pipeline, Connections Magazine, and was also listed as one of the ‘Top 20 Influential People to Follow’ on Twitter by “Iwantitnow.”

 
Shawndra Tobias
Vice President of Customer Experience
Etech Global Services
 

Why You Should Listen to Shawndra:
Shawndra has been with Etech since 2000 and has served in various roles including OSS Reporting Specialist, Account Leader, Project Manager and Senior Director of Operations. In her current role, she determines operational strategies by collection, cleaning and analysis of interaction data that assists clients in delivering an optimized customer experience and enhanced performance. Shawndra is directly responsible for creating frameworks for call center analytics, QA product development and iterative machine learning that establishes a strong data foundation for robust analytics to be performed.

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Abstract:
With consumer demand for digital channels and the current labor shortage, brands are feeling pressure to create an efficient and satisfying digital customer experience. Frontier Communications will share their experience with leveraging Intelligent Virtual Assistants powered by Conversational AI to automate transactions across the entire customer journey for a consistent, integrated, and conversational customer experience.

Key Take-Aways:

• Proven ways to simplify even the most complex use cases to raise the bar on customer experience expectations
• Success factors on how to enable efficient self-service while still supporting an empathetic approach
• Best practices for facilitating seamless transitions between channels and providing a consistent digital customer journey
• Insight on how to provide the same consistent service at scale despite the current labor shortage

Fab Facilitators:

Jen Johnson
Senior Vice President, Business Transformation
Frontier Communications
 

Why You Should Listen to Jen:
Jen has 25 years of experience with Frontier, starting out as a Sales Representative and moving quickly through leadership roles to Director and Vice President levels in both Consumer and Commercial Contact Center channels. Most recently she has been assigned to lead the Customer Experience team at Frontier. This is a cross-functional leadership role, focused on strategic efforts in the consumer organization, to achieve quantum improvement in the quality of customer experience.

 
Jim Freeze
Chief Marketing Officer
Interactions
 

Why You Should Listen to Jim:
Jim brings more than 25 years of experience leading marketing teams at Fortune 1000 and other enterprise technology companies, a history which includes proven success in all aspects of marketing, sales and business development. Jim is a published author sharing his insight on the AI and CX industries.

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Abstract:
With the massive shift away from service reps working in a physical location to work-at-home, new opportunities to rethink how we approach work are emerging. This interactive session will explore some of the new developments, and how you can leverage them to drive substantial improvements in employee satisfaction.

Key Take-Aways:

• Key factors in building a global approach to staffing and hiring to improve business resiliency
• Proven ways to motivate employees to rise to challenges and achieve CX objectives
• Critical considerations when leveraging technology to shift the CS mindset from reactive to proactive

Fab Facilitator:

Nina Brown
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
DATAMARK
 

Why You Should Listen to Nina:
Nina Brown has over 20 years of experience and expertise in technology and process improvement, and is uniquely poised to identify opportunities for business optimization and business growth.

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Abstract:
Undertaking conversational automation without a well-thought-out plan could be a mistake that undermines the success of the entire initiative. Join this interactive session to understand where you are in the automation maturity scale and how to define a comprehensive conversational automation strategy, short- and long-term. Whether you are in the beginning planning phases, evaluating platforms, or already on your automation journey, get ready to roll up your sleeves and participate with like minds to create a scalable strategy that will deliver a future of excellence in customer self-service.

Key Take-Aways:

• Proven ways to craft a vision and set the direction for creating an organizational strategy
• An understanding of the people, skills, knowledge and processes you need to get started or take it to the next level
• Quick wins and building blocks for a longer-term action plan

Fab Facilitator:

Rob Fardin
Vice President, Americas
Cognigy
 

Why You Should Listen to Rob:
Recognized as an automation software strategist, Rob has taken leadership of the go-to-market engine at Cognigy, driving further expansion of conversational AI into North American and Latin American markets to improve employee and customer service. For nearly two decades, Rob has held various strategic sales leadership roles and demonstrated a consistent record for delivering growth.

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Abstract:
The continued importance, proliferation and sensitivity for data security and privacy, coupled with the new reality of flexible work environments, creates a unique challenge. Organizations have to find a way to make this data safely available to front‐line associates and protect this data while provisioning service from geographically dispersed locations.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices to create a secure Work‐from‐Anywhere environment
• Methods to securely provide information to the frontline anywhere
• Techniques to collect and process sensitive data in a secure manner
• Proven ways to protect sensitive data

Fab Facilitator:

Tom Gebhart
Senior Vice President, Business Development
Teleperformance
 

Why You Should Listen to Tom:
Tom brings over 30 years of experience both managing Customer Experience operations and designing and delivering innovative outsourced solutions for some of the world’s largest brands.

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Abstract:
More than half of the world’s website visits come from a mobile device accounting for more than $359 billion in sales last year. How mobile-friendly is your brand? This interactive session will uncover mobile trends and provide guidance on how to meet your customers where they want to be met.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insights into what your customers really want in 2022
• An understanding of the role SMS can play in your CX strategy
• Best practices for aligning your brand with the expectations of today’s customers

Fab Facilitator:

Bailey Boyd
Director of Business Development
TaskUs
 

Why You Should Listen to Bailey:
Bailey currently serves as the Director of Business Development for the Global Retail & eCommerce Industry at TaskUs. She started her career at IBM where she specialized in industry solutions and global business services for the Retail & Consumer Products space. Driven by a mission to empower businesses to better serve their customers, Bailey is best known for helping hyper-growth Direct to Consumer and eCommerce brands to scale exceptional experiences.

Hosted By:

Vannessa LeBoss
Director, Connect Direct
Communication Service for the Deaf
 

Why You Should Listen to Vannessa:
As a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC), Vannessa is directly responsible for creating and bridging accessible communications between the Deaf community and businesses worldwide, with a specialized focus on the U.S./ASL market. As part of the world’s largest social impact organization for the Deaf community, Communication Service for the Deaf, Vannessa strategizes with companies like Google and Comcast to implement direct video customer support services for the Deaf community.

Hosted By:

Francoise Benoit-Betters
Vice President, Merchant Service
First American by Deluxe
 

Why You Should Listen to Francoise:
With over 17 years of Merchant Service experience, Francoise has an extensive knowledge of the credit card processing industry by providing 5 star quality support to over 140,000 merchants. Customer support is essential for cultivating successful, lasting partnerships, and First American by Deluxe’s hard-earned reputation is rooted in care with our highly trained, in-house customer support, installation, PCI compliance and Retention representatives capable and empowered to resolve issues for partners and merchants.

Hosted By:

Michelle Norcross
Executive Director, Customer Care
The Avon Company
 

Why You Should Listen to Michelle:
With more than 30 years in the customer service industry, Michelle has experienced it all. Having personally worked in nearly every role in a contact center, Michelle’s passion lies with people and data. She has a proven track record for attracting and retaining high performing teams who deliver exceptional results through a strong focus on data driven decisions & unbridled curiosity.

Hosted By:

Brian Gustin
Senior Director of Business Operations and Customer Engagement
Crocs, Inc.
 

Why You Should Listen to Brian:
Embracing Crocs Inc.’s “Come As You Are” philosophy, Brian works to create customer experiences that are “as comfortable as our shoes.” This involves prioritizing inherent simplicity and people-purposed design in systems, policy and process creation – and also celebrating the fun of being a little different.

Hosted By:

Chris Vetrano
Head of Partner & Customer Engagement – Bikes, Scooters & Transit
Lyft
 

Why You Should Listen to Chris:
Chris leads customer experience for bike, scooter and transit riders at Lyft. Before leading Lyft’s multimodal support experiences, Chris stood up the social media support team for their rideshare business and was integral to the company’s global support expansion.

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Abstract:
Learn from real world experiences in repositioning a company’s culture and underperforming NPS scores. Gain insight on how to obtain higher scores than your competition resulting in empowered team members, exceeding target expectations, and growing asset.

Key Take-Aways:

• Demonstration of an instrument design for improving NPS scores
• Key steps toward operationalizing customer touch points
• Ways to quantify analytical success by numbers
• Keys to establishing accountability by department

Rockstar Insights:

Barbara Barry
Chief Marketing Officer
Max Approvals
Former Chief Experience Officer, NuVision Federal Credit Union
 

Why You Should Listen to Barbara:
As an Executive leader Barbara is an innovative visionary for marketing, sales, and operations, who designs strategic direction for executives. Barbara aligns management teams along a single set of goals and builds professional organizations with high standards that significantly improves customer experience and management processes. Her experience consistently results in: customer satisfaction being higher than any of the competitors and exceeding set targets; significant asset growth; and higher employee satisfaction.

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Abstract:
Increasing customer satisfaction seems like a no‐brainer, but there is no silver bullet to doing this. This session will focus on a real‐world success story from humble beginnings to rockstar CSAT scores by using lessons learned and best practices to increases CSAT, along with sustainable next steps to keep CSAT scores at an all -time high.

Key Take-Aways:

• Guidance on how you can align your QA program to achieve proven results for CSAT
• Techniques on how to create or repair relationships with your customers that lead to higher satisfaction scores
• Specific action items and steps to leave you walking away with a plan for your organization

Rockstar Insights:

Justin Davis
BMV Contact Center & IT Director
State of Indiana
 

Why You Should Listen to Justin:
A dedicated and passionate customer experience professional, Justin Davis is passionate about utilizing the best technology to help organizations provide world class customer experiences and ensuring customers “obsess” over your brand. Utilizing his experience focused, data-driven approach, Justin has spent most of his career in contact centers helping organizations figure out who they want to be when they grow up.

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Abstract:
Miranda and Shantanu are a part of a team that is at the epicenter of driving customer happiness through insights on customer experience and working with cross-functional stakeholders through a very structured approach. Drawing from their experience, they will share their path to developing a customer happiness model and using that as a way to bring cross-functional alignment.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on analyzing customer feedback using advanced NLP models across shopping, fulfillment & incident journeys to identify drivers and model issue trees for customer happiness
• Proven ways to utilize “Customer happiness scorecard” to drive adoption & accountability with journey owners at scale, ultimately improving customer loyalty
• A proactive approach to identifying and establishing closed loop communications with “silent sufferers” to show empathy and win them back

Headliners:

Miranda Conlon
Director, Customer Service
Wayfair
 

Why You Should Listen to Miranda:
As a strategic Leader, with over 20 years in the eCommerce Contact Center space, Miranda continues to empower her teams to collaborate, innovate and provide relentless customer focus in an ever changing environment. She is passionate about process improvements and optimization, and executes on every business decision and solution based on the impacts to her people, cross-functional team, broader Wayfair, and the customer.

 
Shantanu Das
General Manager, NA Customer Service
Wayfair
 

Why You Should Listen to Shantanu:
Over a decade of driving transformational programs across a diverse range of industries and geographies, Shantanu understands the need for agility and adaptability within the Customer Service space. He parlayed his institutional knowledge and 20 years of experience in operational management, automotive supply chain, design to value and procurement, into a commitment to grow and develop a team of individuals focused on delighting the customer.

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Abstract:
Since the pandemic, contact centers have changed for good, but have they changed for the better? In this session, we’ll discuss how leaders in the industry have leveraged the opportunity to transform support for agents and clients in unique engaging formats.

Key Take-Aways:

• Recommendations on leveraging forced changes into sustainable support models and implementing new metrics
• Methodology for implementing flexible solutions to weather future disruptions to operating models, roles and capabilities and processes
• Fresh perspectives on how customer needs have changed, and techniques to meet their evolving expectations

Moderator:

Erin McMillan
Associate Vice President Client Operations
Cox Automotive Media Group
 

Why You Should Listen to Erin:
Erin leads a diverse team with equally diverse functions spanning order fulfillment, customer care, even graphic design. Since joining the organization in 2002 as a Customer Support Rep, Erin has been focused on developing strong leaders and engaged employees that can deliver the ultimate customer experience.

Panelists Include:

Arnell Davis
Senior Director, Enterprise Service Center
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
 

Why You Should Listen to Arnell:
Arnell currently holds the position of Senior Director, Enterprise Service Center and is responsible for Global Contact Center Strategy, and service delivery for IT Service Desks. She is experienced in building high performance teams and the design and delivery of cost-effective, high-performance digital solutions to deliver global support strategies.

 
Justin Davis
BMV Contact Center & IT Director
State of Indiana
 

Why You Should Listen to Justin:
A dedicated and passionate customer experience professional, Justin Davis is passionate about utilizing the best technology to help organizations provide world class customer experiences and ensuring customers “obsess” over your brand. Utilizing his experience focused, data-driven approach, Justin has spent most of his career in contact centers helping organizations figure out who they want to be when they grow up.

 
Brian Gustin
Senior Director of Business Operations and Customer Engagement
Crocs, Inc.
 

Why You Should Listen to Brian:
Embracing Crocs Inc.’s “Come As You Are” philosophy, Brian works to create customer experiences that are “as comfortable as our shoes.” This involves prioritizing inherent simplicity and people-purposed design in systems, policy and process creation – and also celebrating the fun of being a little different.

 
Prabhu Kannan
Former Head of Global Business Process SMB
TikTok
 

Why You Should Listen to Prabhu:
Prabhu is a visionary leader who has over 20+ years of experience leading large scale operations for brands like Microsoft, Atlassian, Indeed and TikTok. He is a master at solving complex problems, a motorcycle enthusiaist and coffee connoisseur who understands the importance of treating customers and partners like people and with respect, rather than numbers, tickets or work. He has built a track record of motivating culturally diverse global teams to drive positive change backed by data, common sense and trust.

 
Radha Penekelapati
Vice President, Customer Success
Cruise
 

Why You Should Listen to Radha:
Radha has deep expertise building and scaling global operations across Customer Success, Support and Trust & Safety in high-growth companies like YouTube, Google, Salesforce and RingCentral. Radha scaled YouTube’s Trust & Safety content moderation operation 30x. She spent more than a decade building consumer operations in Google and Customer Success in salesforce and RingCentral. Radha loves building things and the prospect of building the customer experience for a company that’s a disruptor and category creator is what led her to join Cruise recently.

 
Chris Vetrano
Head of Partner & Customer Engagement – Bikes, Scooters & Transit
Lyft
 

Why You Should Listen to Chris:
Chris leads customer experience for bike, scooter and transit riders at Lyft. Before leading Lyft’s multimodal support experiences, Chris stood up the social media support team for their rideshare business and was integral to the company’s global support expansion.

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Abstract:
The war for talent is raging. Disruptive pressures are weighing down the workforce requiring innovation in the onboarding process and speed to proficiency to impact business results. Join us for an interactive session to discuss strategies for transforming the customer experience by attaining, training, and retaining the best agents.

Key Take-Aways:

• Proven ways to reduce agent churn costs
• Verified techniques to increase conversions & revenue
• Methodologies for empowering agents to go from 0 to 100 in 50% less time

Fab Facilitator:

Matt Coughlin
Chief Executive Officer
XSELL Technologies
 

Why You Should Listen to Matt:
Matt is a leader with contagious passion for great customer engagement, and the economic and business impacts created when customers are engaged in exactly the right way. Prior to founding XSELL, Matt had the opportunity to work with many quintessential brands helping them to bring their customer experience to life. His experience in these environments led to his observation of a power law in sales, regardless of the brand, wherein top performing agents were not marginally better than their peers – they were multiples better and they delivered disproportionately successful results.

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Abstract:
From recognizing empathy to building trust, AI is a reality in today’s contact centers and is serving to enable better customer experience – as well as objection handling, upsell, cross sell, or retention. Critical are the real-time behavioral guidance and workflows you want to enable, as well as agent engagement with those systems. Explore how Blue Nile, Holiday Inn Club Vacations, and Earthlink have improved their sales and care by leveraging AI driven solutions to drive better coaching, especially in a remote/hybrid environment.

Key Take-Aways:

• Examples of a behavior based approach to optimizing sales, care, and retention
• Proven ways to use insights to adjust in real-time for customer engagement and outcomes
• Techniques to reduce ramp time and attrition across your agents

Co-Facilitators:

Crissa Graham
Director of Tour & Travel
Holiday Inn Club Vacations
 

Why You Should Listen to Crissa:
Crissa has the pleasure of working for an organization whose growth road map includes growing Holiday Inn Club Vacations people and guest love, and becoming customer obsessed. Holiday Inn Club Vacations are taking it one guest at a time, by investing in our people through technology and training. It’s time to shake the cages of the industry and become the one that stands out from the rest! Being customer obsessed is only the beginning.

 
Jason Love
Director of Contact Center Training
Holiday Inn Club Vacations
 

Why You Should Listen to Jason:
Holiday Inn Club Vacations are in the people business. When you improve team members’ personal lives and make their professional lives more effortless through training and technology, you create a culture of engaged, happy employees. Holiday Inn Club Vacations take “Customer obsession” personally at HICV “To be the most loved brand in family travel.”

 
Michael Parker
Chief Marketing Officer
Cresta
 

Why You Should Listen to Michael:
Michael Parker is a seasoned executive, advisor, and successful entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in high-tech, most recently in helping to lead the AI revolution in Contact Centers.

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Abstract:
Employee experience is highly linked to customer experience. This interactive session will examine how to equip your team with the right tools and processes to improve the customer experience.

Key Take-Aways:

• A guide to pulling the right data to identify friction points in the CX process
• Recommendations on action items to remediate top issues affecting customer experience
• Steps to track progress towards key CX metrics improvements

Fab Facilitators:

Colleen Bolton
Senior Manager Customer Experience – Quality
DraftKings Inc.
 

Why You Should Listen to Colleen:
Colleen has been with DraftKings on the journey from a small one-office daily fantasy sports start-up to an internationally known sportsbook and entertainment company, and now the leader in sport’s themed NFT’s and crypto currency. Staying fluid and embracing the changes in the needs of the business, customer, and CX team Colleen has helped establish the DraftKings CX team as an award-winning leader in the iGaming industry. She is not content there, however. If 5 years at DraftKings have taught Colleen anything, it is always to have an eye to the future and look forward to shaping what is next.

Vasu Prathipati
Chief Executive Officer
MaestroQA
 

Why You Should Listen to Vasu:
Vasu is the founder and CEO of MaestroQA – software that empowers managers to coach customer service agents. He grew up in San Diego, went to the University of Pennsylvania, and started MaestroQA (after a couple pivots) right out of school. He loves living in New York City for its colorful, high energy, and fast-paced lifestyle and enjoys spending free time with people who are passionate about their craft and curious about the world.

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Abstract:
Since 2020, adoption of digital channels has skyrocketed, highlighting the need to expedite digital communication strategies. Join this interactive session as we explore which channels have become mainstream, which are cutting edge, and what companies are doing to meet their customers while navigating modern-day customer service challenges.

Key Take-Aways:

• Critical factors in expanding your digital channel presence to reach more customers
• Success factors for building a digital transformation strategy
• Best practices for building a culture that thinks digitally

Fab Facilitator:

Jason Smith
Director – CPG, Retail, Travel & Hospitality
Cognizant
 

Why You Should Listen to Jason:
Bringing extensive experience working with over 200 global contact centers to improve operational performance and efficiency, Jason’s experience spans Travel & Hospitality, Automotive, Insurance, Healthcare, Utilities, Sales, and BPO. Leading the CPG, Retail, Travel & Hospitality portfolio at Cognizant, Jason has helped organizations realize the benefits of a true digital transformation strategy and maximize efficiencies for future growth.

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Abstract:
Flexibility in workforce management is key to future success. As the world of work continues to rapidly change, how do we stay ahead of the innovation curve and keep up with today’s workforce demands?

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices for leveraging tools and technology for real time reporting to ensure efficiencies and alignment
• Ways to use performance data and industry trends to forecast work demands and drive constant improvement and accuracy in staffing and scheduling
• Guidance on delivering optimal value through insights and analysis of forecasts to better predict, plan and respond to consumer needs, reduce costs and drive better business outcomes

Fab Facilitator:

Chris Wallace
Senior Vice President, Sales
24-7 Intouch
 

Why You Should Listen to Chris:
Chris is actively involved in the industry, acting as the Central Canada Representative for SOCAP Canada, as well as a member of the SOCAP Canada Steering Committee and the Business Partner Advisory Council.

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Abstract:
Today’s consumers demand better, faster service from their trusted brands. To provide exceptional customer experiences, equip your CX agents with the right tools and technology. Learn how modern cloud‐based contact centers leverage AI, intelligent automation, unified knowledgebase and agent assist to shorten wait times and prevent customer frustration and disloyalty.

Key Take-Aways:

• Ways to showcase an effective customer 360 view to agents to enhance agent productivity
• A guide to how intelligent automation can speed up agent activities, such as card activation, claims processing, account setup, validation, etc.
• Insight on modern knowledge platforms to effectively assist agents on real‐time basis
• Real-world examples of how AI is being used by businesses to significantly increase call deflection and self‐service

Fab Facilitator:

Venu Gooty
Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Transformation
HGS Digital
 

Why You Should Listen to Venu:
With 20 years of technology and business consulting experience, Venu uses digital technologies within marketing, support, and CX organizations to transform customer experiences. Having worked with C‐level and executive teams at many large and mid‐sized enterprise customers in solving their business problems with technology, Venu and his team build CX solutions that simplify customer experiences via operational efficiencies and marketing journey optimization.

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Abstract:
Modern CX organizations have a proliferation of data from many systems. Is your organization focusing on the right data metrics to drive the best customer outcomes and loyalty? This interactive session will examine how to leverage data to improve your culture, employee performance, and customer experiences.

Key Take-Aways:

• Pitfalls of too much data and what to watch out for
• Guidance on the best practices on utilizing data for performance management
• Recommendations on creating a framework for working with BPOs

Fab Facilitator:

Ramon Icasiano
Chief Customer Officer
Pathlight
 

Why You Should Listen to Ramon:
Ramon Icasiano is an award-winning, 20+ year CX industry leader and visionary. Before joining Pathlight, he led CX organizations at Netflix, Zynga, Verizon, and Earnin. He is passionate about helping other CX leaders create winning strategies, excellent cultures, and smart technology stack decisions.

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Abstract:
New research shows a persistent gap between business perceptions and customer experiences. While most companies felt they delivered consistent customer experiences across channels, most consumers disagreed. Automated channels often failed, forcing customers to escalate to an agent at least half the time. Furthermore, when switching support channels, almost 90 percent of customers were asked to repeat information. So how do we fix this?

Key Take-Aways:

• Proven ways to “right-channel” your customer experience
• Key findings on where to place the “small bets” for digital investments
• Insight on the difference between outsourcing options: BPO vs. CX-as-a-Service
• Best practices for proving your efforts are paying off: Measuring ROI

Fab Facilitator:

Dax Lopes
Vice President Digital BPO
[24]7.ai
 

Why You Should Listen to Dax:
Over 20 years’ experience in BPO & Digital Transformation, working with clients across various verticals globally. Dax has helped clients transform their CX enterprise by improving their CSAT/NPS while at the same time reducing costs through leveraging Transformative AI Led Conversational Voice/Chat/Messaging Back Office RPA & At Home capabilities to support the customers and agents.

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Abstract:
Our customers and workforces are becoming more and more global. And hiring and retaining top bilingual talent is more important than ever before. This collaboration zone will discuss how a focus on language ability will lead to a stronger bilingual workforce, higher employee and customer retention, improved CSAT scores, and more.

Key Take-Aways:

• A solid understanding of language ability’s impact on most—if not all—hiring and operational processes
• Recommendations for building a better bilingual strategy
• Best practices for using automated language testing to identify top omnichannel, bilingual talent

Fab Facilitator:

Brigham Tomco
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder
Emmersion
 

Why You Should Listen to Brigham:
With experience living and working in several countries around the world, Brigham has an extensive background in language learning and international business. Drawing from his experience in digital transformation and managing both on- and offshore contact center operations, he recognizes firsthand the impact of accurately and efficiently proving language ability. His passion for communication comes from his desire to promote economic impact in communities where they need it most.

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Abstract:
If it wasn’t hard enough already, the contact center leader of the future must be an expert in AI capabilities to understand how to best marry their human + non‐human resources for a seamless CX. While this has been a conversation for years, AI advancements over the last 18‐months have made the specifics to this answer a perpetually moving target while principles remain the same.

Key Take-Aways:

• Guidance on the emerging symbiosis between AI and humans
• Real‐world examples across different industries
• A grip on a fast emerging trend: Human + AI instead of AI vs. Human

Fab Facilitators:

TJ Clayton
Assistant Vice President, Administrative Services
Legal & General
 

Why You Should Listen to TJ:
TJ has made his career in leading customer service and administration organizations to find optimal solutions for customer needs. He is Assistant Vice President at Legal & General America, a life insurance company protecting America’s families. With highly emotional and complex products and services like insurance, it’s critical to strike the right balance between AI and the human touch. TJ’s team of customer service professionals have achieved industry leading Net Promoter Scores.

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Marilyn Cassedy
Vice President, Customer Success
SmartAction
 

Why You Should Listen to Marilyn:
Marilyn is the Head of Customer Success at SmartAction where she’s partnered with customers across a range of verticals to implement and expand their self-service footprint in the call center. After more than a decade of experience in customer success, Marilyn knows how to help customers get value from an enterprise solution through avenues including cost reduction, increased agent retention, and improved call center efficiency.

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Abstract:
Support leaders agonize over improving the efficiency of their call centers, but often fail to recognize the immense opportunity that exists at earlier stages in the customer journey. In this interactive session, we’ll discuss why many self-service strategies fall short and how businesses can adapt to meet — and exceed — customer expectations.

Key Take-Aways:

• Guidance for bringing self-service and automation to the customer support experience
• Recommendations for effectively integrating automation into existing workflows
• Best practices in Knowledge Management to ensure customer success

Fab Facilitators:

Sam Johnson
Associate Director of Support
Achievement First
 

Why You Should Listen to Sam:
Sam has been a support and self-service extraordinaire at Achievement First for over six years. Working primarily between IT, data, and staff and student software, he has worked to ensure that school and network staff have everything they need to provide a quality education to underserved youth within Brooklyn, Queens, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

 
Joe Jorczak
Head of Industry, Service & Support
Yext
 

Why You Should Listen to Joe:
Joe is responsible for defining and executing the strategic direction for the company’s service and support offerings. Throughout his 20+ year career, Joe has held influential roles at several large tech companies including Oracle, Medallia, IBM, and most recently Zendesk, where he led sales strategy, solution development, and go-to-market strategy for the global Communications, Media & Entertainment industries.

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Abstract:
The future of work is upon us, and very few organizations can achieve or sustain high customer loyalty without a core of inspired, and loyal employees. This is especially true for customer service representatives, the front line voices of the company. In this interactive panel discussion we will examine and discuss some of the most pressing challenges, processes, and benefits for investing in employees and building a better culture to ultimately increase eNPS.

Key Take-Aways:

• Engagement use cases that truly make a difference with employees
• Tools, techniques, and metrics for taking impactful action to move the needle on eNPS
• Tactics for effectively engaging, training, coaching and connecting with empathy in a remote environment

Moderator:

Robert Gofourth
Executive Vice President, Operations
Team Focus Insurance Group
Customer Engagement Leadership Council Member
 

Why You Should Listen to Robert:
Robert has more than 30 years of operations, customer experience and risk management across a variety of industries including insurance, mortgage banking, government enterprise, and outsourcing. He is also the best-selling author of Hack the Corporate Ladder: Move Your Career to the Next Level.

Panelists Include:

Anthony Caravella
Senior Director, Learning and Performance Enablement
Northwestern Mutual
 

Why You Should Listen to Anthony:
An accomplished Learning and Development leader, Tony has been plying his trade for nearly 25 years across the banking, healthcare, and insurance industries. He specializes in building high-performing learning organizations that have a keen emphasis on measurable outcomes while putting the employee at the heart of the decision-making process.

 
Amod Kelkar
Vice President, Customer Service
Honda Aircraft Company
 

Why You Should Listen to Amod:
As a customer focused senior leader at large scale multinational corporations, Amod has led and empowered big teams in various business hubs around the world. While adding value to the aviation industry with strategic vision, he attributes the business success in 40+ countries to a direct linkage between strong employee engagement and superior customer experience.

 
Erin McMillan
Associate Vice President Client Operations
Cox Automotive Media Group
 

Why You Should Listen to Erin:
Erin leads a diverse team with equally diverse functions spanning order fulfillment, customer care, even graphic design. Since joining the organization in 2002 as a Customer Support Rep, Erin has been focused on developing strong leaders and engaged employees that can deliver the ultimate customer experience.

 
Timothy Rauschenbach
Vice President of Customer Service
Shipt
 

Why You Should Listen to Timothy:
Tim started his career at Disney as an intern, learning all aspects of Disney’s culture from its foundation. He had the opportunity to see the Disney Institute built from the ground floor. Later Tim led UPS’s customer service organization during their service transformation. The book entitled “Aiming High” highlights that transformation. Tim then headed customer service at Amazon.com. He led a team of 5000+ team members, in 9 operations in 7 countries during the early stages of Amazon’s explosive growth. Tim’s team formed a customer experience roadmap that provided the highest customer experience and loyalty rankings in the history of the retail sector. Tim has continued to serve in customer success roles in high growth, startups, and corporate transformations. Tim now serves as Senior Vice President of Customer Service at Shipt.

 
Victor Sachs
Senior Vice President, Customer Care and Digital Transformation
First Advantage
 

Why You Should Listen to Victor:
With a maniacal passion for ‘best in the world’ Customer Service, Victor Sachs has worked at some of the most respected companies in the world helping transform companies from within. He spent most of his career in High-Tech companies including Dell, HP and Salesforce, and has recently taken on a new opportunity to help transform an industry by leading with technology and differentiating with Best in Class customer service.

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Abstract:
The ability to systematically build trust among your team and across the enterprise is a must have for leaders in today’s business environment. Join us for a unique and interactive exercise to discover how you personally rate as an executive in the eight core dimensions of trust.

Key Take-Aways:

• A dynamic learning tool you can leverage in multiple situations
• A new capability to deepen relationships within your team and across your enterprise
• Key patterns that reveal how to more effectively interact with five of your most key colleagues (and your significant others)

Headliner:

Michael O. “Coop” Cooper
Founder
Innovators + Influencers
 

Why You Should Listen to Coop:
Ever since he was a little child, Michael “Coop” Cooper has been fascinated with changing people’s minds – it began by trying to change the tiffs his parents were having at home and emerged into a full-blown business where he helps leaders at companies around the world sell their ideas and strategies. If you can recognize the underlying NeuroEfficiencies that people have, you can speak directly to what is important to them. Changing minds can be difficult, but often it’s much easier and simpler than we might think.

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Abstract:
In The Great Recession and War for Talent, agents are now empowered more than ever before to set their expectations for competitive hiring. Because of this, contact center leaders are being forced to adapt their hiring processes and offerings and simply cannot do what they used to do. In this interactive crowdsourcing session, we will utilize the audience to co-create a new agent job description that’s aligned with what is most important to the agent in this day and age.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices for flexible scheduling, compensation, benefits packages, and career growth
• A framework for new hiring, on-boarding, and training processes
• A new agent job description that can be applied to all types of industries

Rockstar Insights:

Arnell Davis
Senior Director, Enterprise Service Center
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
 

Why You Should Listen to Arnell:
Arnell currently holds the position of Senior Director, Enterprise Service Center and is responsible for Global Contact Center Strategy, and service delivery for IT Service Desks. She is experienced in building high performance teams and the design and delivery of cost-effective, high-performance digital solutions to deliver global support strategies.

 
Fred Kleiman
Vice President, Customer Service
AMC Networks
 

Why You Should Listen to Fred:
Fred is described as a positive force in CX and has a passion for excellence and video streaming. Fred has spent most of his career building award winning teams in CX and his passion is finding career enthusiasts in customer service who share his passion and are looking for a long term CX career on his team.

 

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Abstract:
As the business world continues to evolve at rocket speed, it is of paramount importance for organizations to challenge the status quo to create new innovative strategies. This session will focus on the blending of traditionally separated functional groups such as; Customer Experience, Supply Chain and Operations to create a new method to innovate as rapidly as possible. You will walk away from this session with key strategies on methods to identify synergies between functional groups and create a program to increase efficiencies exponentially.

Key Take-Aways:

• An innovative case study on identifying synergies between functional groups
• A framework to execute rapid change within your organization
• An ambassador program to leverage existing talent in the organization to launch a new program, all without increasing costs

Rockstar Insights:

Katrina Schiedemeyer
Senior Customer Experience Center of Excellence
Danone
 

Why You Should Listen to Katrina:
Katrina Schiedemeyer is an innovative leader in designing and executing strategic initiatives in numerous disciplines. Her expertise includes Customer Experience Design, Supplier Experience, Ethnographic Research, Six Sigma Data Analytics, Lean, and Employee Engagement.

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Abstract:
Tired of your organization thinking your contact center is a “necessary evil”? We will dive into identifying the revenue opportunities and building a revenue powerhouse.

Key Take-Aways:

• Identification of the framework needed to drive sales
• Insight on selecting the success factors for your industry
• Key findings on how to operationalize the process from Pilot to BAU

Rockstar Insights:

Henry Sardina
Divisional Vice President of Customer Service
Saks OFF 5TH
 

Why You Should Listen to Henry:
With over 15 years of experience, Henry brings a passion for CX, Sales, and “real-life” practicality. He has worked in multiple industries and is currently in retail at Saks OFF 5TH. Henry has truly embraced the world of innovation and was one of the first to launch asynchronized messaging in the aviation world. He believes in automation but never at the cost of a genuine experience. Henry is always the guy in the room asking “Why are we doing it this way” and “What can we be doing differently”.

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Abstract:
Participants at each Customer Contact Executive MindXchange come away with a wealth of key learnings and it can be a challenge to take it all in. During this interactive session, members of the Customer Contact community will highlight the most important themes, key take-aways and lessons learned they can be readily operationalized once you are back in the office.

Moderator:

Katrina Schiedemeyer
Senior Customer Experience Center of Excellence
Danone
 

Why You Should Listen to Katrina:
Katrina Schiedemeyer is an innovative leader in designing and executing strategic initiatives in numerous disciplines. Her expertise includes Customer Experience Design, Supplier Experience, Ethnographic Research, Six Sigma Data Analytics, Lean, and Employee Engagement.

 

Panelists Include:

Francoise Benoit-Betters
Vice President, Merchant Service
First American by Deluxe
 

Why You Should Listen to Francoise:
With over 17 years of Merchant Service experience, Francoise has an extensive knowledge of the credit card processing industry by providing 5 star quality support to over 140,000 merchants. Customer support is essential for cultivating successful, lasting partnerships, and First American by Deluxe’s hard-earned reputation is rooted in care with our highly trained, in-house customer support, installation, PCI compliance and Retention representatives capable and empowered to resolve issues for partners and merchants.

 
Robert Gofourth
Executive Vice President, Operations
Team Focus Insurance Group
Customer Engagement Leadership Council Member
 

Why You Should Listen to Robert:
Robert has more than 30 years of operations, customer experience and risk management across a variety of industries including insurance, mortgage banking, government enterprise, and outsourcing. He is also the best-selling author of Hack the Corporate Ladder: Move Your Career to the Next Level.

 
Juan Manuel González
Research Director
Frost & Sullivan
 

Why You Should Listen to Juan:
Juan has more than 15 years of experience in Consulting and Market Research applied to the Information & Communication Technology Industry, with a particular emphasis in the contact center, customer experience and unified communications and collaboration industries. He is a thought leader, speaker, and passionate about how technology (and its adoption) is rapidly shaping the future of the world. Currently based in Miami, Juan graduated in Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires, he has a Master’s Degree in International Economic Relations from the same University.

 
Shane Longtin
Head of Global IT User Experience Office
Munich Re
 

Why You Should Listen to Shane:
Shane has been “on the front lines” either providing or managing IT support, or evaluating new technologies, for nearly 30 years. He’s now leveraging that experience to optimize the end user experience globally at Munich Re.

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Power up your smartphones and join us for an immersive 3D contact center tour of Northwestern Mutual headquarters in Milwaukee, WI to engage with industry peers on some of the common challenges facing your organization. Get ready for a truly interactive experience as the tour will be live streamed via 360 degree camera (we will provide googles) which will enable you to look around at your leisure, focus on areas of interest, and interact in real time with the host. It will be as if you were actually there!

From a service perspective, Northwestern Mutual’s multi-year plan is taking service to the next level. Rooted in a value chain-driven culture, balanced between digital and human solutions, and focused on reaching world class maturity, Northwestern Mutual is on a path to ensure service is a differentiator, is always on and connected, and defines experience from all perspectives.

This guided virtual tour will take a deep dive into the inner workings of Northwestern Mutual to help you understand the employee value proposition, how we innovate, and overall service center operations. We will explore the following areas:

• Public Commons, The Northwestern Mutual Experience (Museum), Tower Observation Deck
• Employee Facilities and Amenities (Fitness Center, Restaurant, Health Center, Credit Union, etc.)
• Intraday/Real Time Management Command Center
• Innovation Center, Experience Labs, Training Facilities
• Front Line Representative’s Physical Space (Cubicle, Team layout, etc.)
• Print/Mail Center and Scanning/Indexing Process

Hosted By:

Jim LeMere, FLMI, ACS, AAPA, ARA
Vice President, Servicing Capabilities & Enablement
Northwestern Mutual
Customer Engagement Leadership Council Member
 

Why You Should Listen to Jim:
Known for his thought leadership in the service industry, Jim has over 25 years of experience in service operations and contact center re-engineering, with a specialization in leading cultures to outcomes that drive employee engagement and operational efficiency to boost client experience and business results to new levels. A servant-leader, Jim believes the secret sauce to transformation is having laser focus on enabling the success of the front line by creating customer-focused cultures, enabled by technology and driven by ownership and accountability. His focus on organizational development is rooted in a specific value chain that sparks cultural evolution.

Hosted By:

Anthony Caravella
Senior Director, Learning and Performance Enablement
Northwestern Mutual
 

Why You Should Listen to Anthony:
An accomplished Learning and Development leader, Tony has been plying his trade for nearly 25 years across the banking, healthcare, and insurance industries. He specializes in building high-performing learning organizations that have a keen emphasis on measurable outcomes while putting the employee at the heart of the decision-making process.