Dan Stockdale knows that true leadership is an adventure like none other. His tailored presentations address the key challenges that organizations and leaders at all levels of experience face everyday. Dan teaches principles to achieving success and mastering leadership while conquering the wild and unexpected challenges your team faces in the real world.

Dan Stockdale is a highly successful leadership speaker with a reputation for effectively transforming companies. What makes Dan so effective is his ability to combine best-practice leadership principles with his expertise in human and animal behavior. With an educational background in psychology and decades of experience working with exotic animals, Dan has made remarkable discoveries that have led to the development of principles that are as revolutionary as they are practical and effective. Dan uses humor, real-world examples, and exciting demonstrations to drive home these success principles.

From attending this session, you will be able to:

• Define “Emotional Intelligence” in layman’s terms

• Identify the 3 Core Capacities that are the foundational building blocks for Emotional Intelligence

• Understand the business case for Emotional Intelligence, and how strengths in this area contribute to the bottom line

• Understand how the Core Capacities fuel your performance competencies such as flexibility, adaptability and the ability to remain calm and effective in the most challenging situations!

• Learn experientially about your own EQ capacities and identify specific, practical exercises you can apply immediately to enhance your EQ competency!

Take-aways:

• 160 page Spiral-bound Handbook EQ Fitness Handbook: 150 Practices for Daily Living, • Available for $8.00 ~ 50% off retail cost.

• Handout summarizing key EQ Concepts, Core EQ Capacities and indicators of Under Developed vs. Well Developed EQ Competencies.

• Article Reprint(16 pgs): EQ in the Workplace, by Jan Johnson, MA and Dave Erb, PhD, Used with permission.

• Drawing for one participant to win a complimentary online EQ in Action Assessment with Consultation /Debrief with Dr. Griffing, a $350.00 value!

Outsourcing / Insourcing - State of the Industry (Part 1)
Bill Price, Driva Solutions

Is India imbloding? Now that Canada’s loonie has reached parity with the US dollar, is the game over? Is Brazil the next big outsourcing location? Will we see more agents at home? So many questions, so little time.

Take Away: Guidelines to support your decision

Stress Relief and Productivity: Managing a Positive Working Landscape
Mia Melanson, Principal Performance Consulting

With endless service requests to respond to, incidents to resolve, and complaints to overcome, an effective support professional needs multiple and creative ways of managing stress.  Add to that continual technological or organizational change, and you have an extremely challenging working environment to manage.

 In this session, we’ll discuss proven methods of stress relief for you and your team, including energizers, healing techniques and coping resources for work-related stressors.  And you’ll have an opportunity to examine some management best practices to reduce stress in your organization.

Benefits of Attending:

• Learn to identify signs of stress in yourself and others

• Understand the impact of stress on productivity

• Adopt techniques and habits to reduce stress throughout the workday

• Initiate planning to improve resilience and team effectiveness

• Embrace the big picture - the really big picture

In this session, we will focus on the true meaning and value of service.  And we’ll discuss your role in consistently delivering outstanding service, customer by customer. Finally, we’ll look into the future and address the fundamentals of sustaining professional and personalized service in the years and challenges ahead.

The proliferation of technologies and the needs of a multi-generational customer base has presented Intuit Payroll Services with the challenge of evolving their customer service model. This session will explore how the Payroll Services organization developed their strategic approach to an expanded customer service model that leverages self-service tools, social networking and collaborative knowledge management methodologies.

Benefits of Attending:

• Learn how self-service technologies can improve the overall customer experience

• Explore different self-service channel technologies and how they complement and support varying customer requirements

• Understand how Web 2.0 and Social Networking technologies are enabling new levels of customer support

• Gain insights into user based contribution models and the impact they have on customer satisfaction

• Learn how knowledge management techniques can provide a more holistic and resource efficient model for the creation and management of agent and customer knowledge

Managing the People Side of Change: Top Five Contributors to Organizational Success
Phil Eastman, Executive Instructor, Prosci Research Inc.

Changes to processes, systems and tools ultimately require people to change how they do their jobs. Yet, employee resistance remains the number one obstacle to successful change. Change management is the key to minimizing resistance, gaining buy-in from executives and reducing any impact on your customers. This session will provide a change management foundation and share lessons and best practices from Prosci’s 2007 global change management research study. Learn how well you are applying the top five contributors to project success.

The complex challenge facing many companies today is how to attract, motivate and influence employees to want to be part of their company.  (“Own it!”).  Values, beliefs and attitudes are significantly influenced by what was happening in the world around them during their formative years. The employee/employer equation has changed. From the first contact or touch with the potential employee, employers must be demonstrating “we meet your needs and we want you.” No longer is it a one-way street.

• Learn the differences of generation values, beliefs and attitudes.

• Learn the best practiced questions to ask your employees so they feel relevant and appreciated.

• Identify the gaps in your company (Leadership/employees/turnover.)

• Learn how to sustain rewards and motivation throughout your organization

• Seek advice and strategies from other companies

Take-aways:

• Handout listing references and links to relevant topics.

Driving the quality of conversations in the call center is the key to building loyalty in your customer base.   Speech analytics gives you the opportunity to change the game in both the quality and volume of calls that you monitor.  In addition, it provides instant feedback to management on the adoption of process change, trends in your call drivers and can provide a measure the effectiveness of training.

If it weren’t for our team leaders, where would we be?  Unfortunately, these unsung heroes of the contact and support center are often at a loss of what to do, and many aren’t even cut out for the huge task ahead of them.  In this session, customer care operations and consulting veteran Bill Price will share tips from the front line.

Benefits of Attending:

• How to select the best team leaders, and find better roles for those who won’t make it

• How to assess team leader performance

• Ways to make sure your team leader delivers

Take-aways:

• Guidelines to help you select the best team leaders and measure performance deliverables

Participants in this session will learn about the relationship between the Service Desk function and the ITIL process known as Incident Management. We will learn how everyone in the entire IT organization plays a role in the timely restoration of service, and is not just the sole province of the Service Desk. We will discuss strategies for forging alliances between the Service Desk and key technology groups to improve the quality of service and reduce the stress on the Service Desk and between technology teams. We will consider these strategies in an ITIL-driven organization and in organizations not yet adopting the ITIL framework. Finally, we will discuss the long-term path to fully mature Incident Management, in service of timely service restoration. 

Participants of this session will learn:

Coaching for Results (Part 1)
Randy Celaya, Results Focused Training

Coaching and Mentoring is more then a set of management actions for improving performance, it is an involved supportive approach for allowing others to realize their full potential.  Coaching and Mentoring focuses on motivation and interpersonal influence rather than on getting others to comply through a chain of command or hierarchy.  It is a partnership for achieving results.  In this workshop, you will learn that Coaching/ Mentoring require good chemistry, communication, observation and caring.  It is the heart of peak performance in every successful organization.

• Handout with references and links to working effectively globally.

Case Study: Service Desk Growth with Critical & Clinical Systems in a Top Rated Hospital
Darlena Luppino Torres, UCSF Medical Center at San Francisco

There are few things more important in our society than our healthcare institutions providing quality healthcare.  Yet largely due to human error, the number of patients who die each year from medical errors is roughly equivalent to the crashing of a Jumbo jetliner, approximately 100 people per day.  Healthcare organizations across the nation are working to eliminate this problem through the automation of clinical systems.  The Support role in this endeavor cannot be underestimated:  once a system is implemented, seamless support of critical systems becomes the lifeblood of IT Operations.

UCSF Medical Center, recognized as one of the top 10 hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report, has successfully implemented medical charting.  As the hospital lays the foundation for its next phase, Physician Order Entry, growing and developing a best practice Support Center is an integral part of this implementation.

Coaching for Results (Part 2)
Randy Celaya, Results Focused Training

Coaching and Mentoring is more then a set of management actions for improving performance, it is an involved supportive approach for allowing others to realize their full potential.  Coaching and Mentoring focuses on motivation and interpersonal influence rather than on getting others to comply through a chain of command or hierarchy.  It is a partnership for achieving results.  In this workshop, you will learn that Coaching/ Mentoring require good chemistry, communication, observation and caring.  It is the heart of peak performance in every successful organization.

This session is especially great for new Supervisors or Managers, or those just in a rut and want to become better leaders. This timely topic of leading and motivating today is based on certified management consultant, JJ Lauderbaugh’s tele-coaching, mentoring and consulting with real world call center, help desk and IT managers in the last three years. The lessons these managers have learned will lead to other managers’ enlightenment to meet their own current challenges too. The examples include, getting more work done through others, learning important attitude shifts that are necessary and often missing, increasing people skills to manage the behavior of the people reporting to them, discovering what motivates and what does not, how to keep staff motivated over time, and the three steps to intuitive problem solving. Increase respect, cooperation and direction through these new leadership examples and insights.

Benefits of Attending:

• Gain knowledge on solving your management problems through Other Peoples’ Experiences (OPE)

• Increase staff’s cooperation and individual contributions to the team

• Decrease turnover and the revolving door by becoming the Manager of Choice

• Understand your manager’s true role and grow personally and professionally in the process

• Gain skills to improve individual and team communication to meet current challenges

• Utilize opportunity to brainstorm and discover solutions to your own problems

Take-away:

Power Benchmarking: Leveraging Metrics to Improve Your Center and Your Career
Bruce Belfiore, BenchmarkPortal

This session will highlight the skills Senior Executives seek when looking to promote the next strategic leaders. Though your current job might be in the technical arena, when it comes to moving up, you’re going to need to pair your technical expertise with some business savvy skills. We’ll discuss the 5 key Executive Business skills you’ll need to possess and hone to attract promotion attention.

Brenda will give tips to successfully lead in a technical arena at the executive level and will also review specific traits and leadership skills necessary to lead and champion change within an organization. Brenda is a highly experienced IT practitioner with first hand experience overseeing major IT projects and high performance teams in Fortune 100 companies.

In her current role, she provides guidance to IT executives on their Service Management / Delivery initiatives. Moving from line level to middle or executive leadership is a whole new league and this session will help prepare and equip you with the skills you’ll need to move up.

Benefits of Attending:

• Learn the 5 key Executive Business skills needed to move up

• Exploration of how to actually apply the 80/20 principle

• Is there beauty and effectiveness in simplicity?

• What about homogenous organizations ... does everyone think like you?

• What does it take to be an influencer?

Take-away:

• 5 Key Executive Business Skills Quick Reference

• Resource Reference listing

Social Media, Web 2.0, Web 3.0? You probably think that this is just the stuff that your kids and their friends spend endless hours doing. While it’s probably all new media to you, it’s not hard to grasp how these tools can make your contact center more efficient, effective and accessible to your customers.

Private and government organizations use new media like web chat, wikis, RSS and blogs successfully to improve processes and reach new audiences.

In this session, I will describe the differences between new media and demonstrate successful (and unsuccessful) examples of new media use. I will also discuss the U.S. General Services Administration’s lessons learned with web chat and our blog, GovGab http://blog.usa.gov/roller/.

We will get interactive at the end and talk about how you might use these tools in your contact center.

Making Emotional Connections With Technology on the Net
Patrick Bultema, The Bultema Company

Many or most of you are delivering global customer service. This session will sharpen your knowledge and skills of diverse customers’ expectations based on the geography of customer service.  Whether your customers are from different parts of the USA or from different countries/cultures, tool yourself and your team to step outside of your own perspective and into that of your customers!
 

While not a popular topic of discussion in the industry, this is one of the most common challenges confronting all support center managers. Attrition can lead to reduced customer loyalty, missed goals and low Support Center morale. This session will identify and offer suggestions on how to stop the leaks.

Benefits of Attending:

• Gain knowledge of the hiring process affects turnover
• Learn the costs of reaching staff proficiency and why it is important
• Understand how high attrition affects support center morale
• Learn how high attrition affects customer loyalty
• Explore the reasons for high turnover

More for Less: Minimal Project Management for Maximum Results
Lou Russell, President and CEO, Russell Martin & Associates

Let’s face it; most people spend their days in chaotic, fast-paced, time- and resource-strained organizations. This course is designed for today’s busy professional who needs advice and guidance on a wide array of tools designed to provide you with the flexible structure necessary to have increased success delivering business results through your projects.  

This workshop will guide and help the Project Manager to plan, organize and control the project effort as well as costs.  You can deliver the results the business demands!

Every year it’s worth planning how we’re going to improve in the next 12 months – and this is a great time to plan ahead for 2009. We need to take every opportunity to shake up our game and position our Service Desks to be an effective business tool. The session will identify the key areas where improvements are possible, how we should go about them – and the benefits that we’ll notice in terms of quality improvement and service to customers.

Benefits of Attending:

• Understand the likely new customer profile of 2009

• Learn how to deliver better service to your business by getting MUCH closer

• Discover how to position and market your Service Desk to be an effective business tool

• Use the right technology effectively – and don’t get dominated by it

•  Create the ideal learning and career development environment for your people

Case Study: Contact Center Satisfaction Index
Rick Tate, CFI Group

Contact centers face multiple external and internal challenges. Externally, customers who are exasperated with poor service complain to friends, family and coworkers about long waits, incompetent representatives, and frustrating interactions where their most basic issues are not resolved. At the same time, private sector contact centers struggle internally to be viewed by the larger organization as more than just a cost that does not contribute to firm’s bottom line. And, government call centers have shrinking budgets as agencies are increasingly mandated to provide better customer service to citizens.

In an effort to better assess the critical role of contact centers in achieving success, CFI Group launched a study to develop the Contact Center Satisfaction Index (CCSI) in 2007. In 2008, with the support of The Federal Consulting Group, this pioneering benchmarking study added a sampling of government Call Centers (e.g., Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, Medicare/Medicaid, Veterans Administration, State Department, National Parks Service, and others).

Case Study:  Starting a Contact Center on a Small Budget with State of the Art Technology
Jerry Keely, Pinal County Arizona

Need to set up a Contact Center or Help desk and don’t have a big budget? Us too!

Business and governments are always asked to improve customer service, but often times do not have a large budget to get it going. Starting your operation with a hosted ACD solution may be the answer for you.

• Learn about what technologies we implemented and what we learned throughout the process.

• Learn how we use the hosted environment to cerate a “virtual” call center with the ability to support an at-home worker program that can save money on facilities, employee costs and open up the door to tap into a workforce that you may otherwise miss.

• Learn about hosted call center solutions

• Learn why starting with a hosted contact center environment reduces capital investment, risk and a good platform for a proof of concept

• See how a hosted solution fits into your existing infrastructure

• Learn how a hosted solution supports a virtual call center

Contact center managers are faced with the challenge of providing outstanding customer service on a shrinking budget.  If only there were money for new technologies, software programs, and individual agent solutions!  But the innovative manager can provide the technology and resources that deliver – and keep the costs under control.  Using the lessons of Enterprise thinking, contact center consolidation, and creative resource acquisition, along with real-world examples, this program will give managers the tools and techniques to renew their approaches to providing “knock your socks off” customer service. 

Case Study: Creating a Successful Remote Workforce Program
Corina Stretch, Puget Sound Energy

Computers, e-mail, high-speed Internet access, secure networks and a host of other technologies have changed the way we work, and now even more, they're changing the way we commute — or whether we even commute at all. Across the country and around the world, more companies are catching on to the economic advantages of having a remote workforce. Learn the story of how Puget Sound Energy first started the At-Home Agent program in 1996 and how it progressed to the successful program it is today.

Benefits of Attending:

• Learn the staffing and recruitment process

• Hear how PSE monitors and Coaches

• Learn the benefits of At-Home-Agents

• Identify gaps and disadvantages of At-Home Agents

• Identify equipment and technology Platform (Standardizing technology)

• Hear the successes and lessons learned  

Interviewing Process Best Practices - 4 Steps to Improve Hiring Success will focus on improving one of the most important processes for your center. Without a structured, detailed, focused process the hiring process will be incomplete with an end result of wasted time, money, resources and ultimately a poor hiring decision. In this session we will discuss how to implement four key steps to ensure that your hiring process is successful. Each attendee will walk away with actionable ideas to implement in their center immediately.

1. Create a Pre-Screening Phone Interviewing Process

• Define a telephone pre-screening interview process

• Develop a telephone pre-screening interview form

2. Conduct Testing and Assessments

• Develop the testing process

• Select tests to be administered

  - Knowledge

  - Attitude

  - Skills

  - Psychological

3. Design Simulation and Observation Session Procedures

• Develop the simulation and observation process

• Determine the simulation tests to be executed

• Define the two methods of observation

• Develop an observation plan

4. Conduct the Face to Face Interview

• Develop an interview process based on behavioral based interviewing

Take-aways:

• Sample Telephone Interview form

• Behavioral Based Interview Questions

Case Study:  Why Wikis Work : Web 2.0’s Approach to Knowledge Management
Sameer Padha, Angel.com

Angel.com was looking for a content management system to facilitate the exchange of information within the company for reducing email traffic and increasing group participation. To meet this challenge, they chose to incorporate a Wiki and now they have extended the wiki to their customers and business partners to realize similar collaborative benefits.

Many firms are keeping secure wikis for purely internal affairs. But others are finding that opening them up to customers saves a surprising amount of time, energy, and money - and offers other benefits as well.

By attending this session, you will learn how Angel.com uses this technology and the benefits of opening the door to their external customers.

Benefits of Attending:

Tools of the Trade: Building the Business Case and Legacy System Integration (Part 2)
Jerry Keely, Pinal County Arizona

You have a legacy telecommunications system; you have a need to add ACD, queuing, skill based routing, even multimedia routing.

You are not alone. Many companies are faced with this challenge. The “fork-lift” approach is costly and cannot be justified. Upgrading and adding this functionality to an “end of life” telecommunications system is neither a good investment nor a good business decision.

This workshop will provide some cost effective alternatives to adding state-of-the-art technology to your company by identifying ways to ingrate it into your environment. We will discuss the benefits and challenges associated with hosted ACD solutions as well as server-based premise solutions. We will discuss how these types of integration reduce risk and reduce interruptions to the business during implementation.

We will discuss some key points to make in your business case that will help justify the benefits and the return on investment (ROI). We will address disaster recovery and business continuity support that the right implementation can provide.

• Learn about options that add the latest technologies and leverage your current telecommunication infrastructure

• Increase your chances of success by building a robust business case.

• Learn about hosted and server based ACD solution.

• Understand how disaster recovery and business continuity can be added to your organization through this type of integration.