This workshop focuses on the development and execution of strategic plans that will take the organization to the next level. Participants discover how to improve and communicate their value, focus on results, manage customer perceptions, and identify the processes and procedures that are necessary for success.

This certification verifies that the support center manager possesses the knowledge of best and common practices necessary to successfully manage the operational and tactical components of a support organization while strategically aligning with the needs of the business.

This certification verifies that the desktop support manager possesses the knowledge of best and common practices necessary to successfully manage the operational and tactical components of a support organization while strategically aligning with the needs of the business.<br>

This knowledge management provides support center supervisors, managers, and directors with a set of practical steps for capturing, storing, and successfully reusing knowledge. Participants will learn how to implement a strategy for adopting knowledge management that creates and maintains knowledge as a by-product of the incident management process.

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This certification verifies that support professionals in a team lead or supervisor role possess the fundamental leadership skills necessary to provide operational support to the organization and the coaching skills necessary to promote staff development.

Customer Experience is the next competitive battleground: Are you ready for the battle? After completing the two-day C/X workshop – you will be. This workshop is designed for leaders who want to be on the front-lines initiating, improving and optimizing an effective CX program. <br><br>This workshop focuses on key topics such as:<br>CX vs. Customer Service <br>Key CX Metrics <br>Journey Mapping <br>Voice of the Customer <br>Customer Experience Maturity<br>You'll walk away with the knowledge of how to build and design a C/X Program to maximize customer experience. <br>

The primary goal of service management is to deliver quality services that enable desired business outcomes. To accomplish this, service providers often face a precarious balancing act of managing customer relationships and requirements, understanding and managing demand and patterns of business activities, aligning internal and external suppliers, while maintaining fiscal responsibility through sound IT investments. If you want to increase the value of your IT services to the business, you should focus first on customer facing processes.

This interactive, consultative workshop – facilitated by industry expert Jeff Rumburg – will provide a comprehensive overview of best practices in performance measurement and management for IT Service and Support.

"No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind."<br>⎯ Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)<br><br>Are you a technical support or service management leader in higher education who's looking for a unique opportunity to network, share, and learn from the experience of other higher education leaders who share your same pain points and challenges? MasterMinds is a place for professionals in universities, colleges, community colleges, and other institutes of higher learning to bring their unique challenges, collaborate on innovative solutions, and gain long-term benefits from a new group of peers in the industry. MasterMinds will help you develop new skills to bring back to your workplace and put into immediate use. Take a deep dive into topics and issues like (but not limited to):<br><br>• Running your support center as a business<br>• Onboarding a student workforce<br>• Case studies in demand management and identity/access management<br>• Interdisciplinary collaboration and service desk consolidation<br>• The service desk of today's university<br><br>Come to experience an open forum where you'll receive individualized advice, hear diverse perspectives, and build connections, relationships, and skills that will endure.<br>

<br>"No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind."<br>⎯ Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)<br><br>Are you a technical support or service management leader who's looking for a unique opportunity to network, share, and learn from the experience of leaders who share your same pain points and challenges? MasterMinds is a place for professionals across all industries and from organizations large and small to bring their unique challenges, collaborate on innovative solutions, and gain long-term benefits from a new group of peers in leadership roles across a variety of industries. MasterMinds will help you develop new skills to bring back to your workplace and put into immediate use. Take a deep dive into topics and issues like (but not limited to): <br><br>• The current leadership landscape: lifelong learning, diversity, and inclusion<br>• Current pain points and challenges, crowdsourced from the group<br>• Case studies on recent projects or implementations<br>• The future of service management in the enterprise<br>• Managing a remote workforce<br><br>Come to experience an open forum where you'll receive individualized advice, hear diverse perspectives, and build connections, relationships, and skills that will endure.<br><br> <br>

"No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind."<br>⎯ Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)<br><br>Are you a technical support or service management leader in the healthcare industry who's looking for a unique opportunity to network, share, and learn from the experience of other healthcare leaders who share your same pain points and challenges? MasterMinds is a place for professionals in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare systems of all sizes (public, private, nonprofit, university-supported) to bring their unique challenges, collaborate on innovative solutions, and gain long-term benefits from a new group of peers in the industry. MasterMinds will help you develop new skills to bring back to your workplace and put into immediate use. Take a deep dive into topics and issues like (but not limited to):<br><br>• The strategic value of the service desk in healthcare systems<br>• Data and analytics tools for strategic decision making<br>• Best practices in service portal design<br>• The challenges of change management in a fast-paced patient care environment<br>• Best practices for implementing or upgrading an EMR/EHR<br><br>Experience an open forum where you'll receive individualized advice, hear diverse perspectives, and build connections, relationships, and skills that will endure.<br><br> <br>

"No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind."<br>⎯ Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)<br><br>Are you a desktop support leader who's looking for a unique opportunity to network, share, and learn from the experience of desktop support leaders who share your same pain points and challenges? MasterMinds is a place for professionals across all industries and from organizations large and small to bring their unique challenges, collaborate on innovative solutions, and gain long-term benefits from a new group of peers from desktop support. MasterMinds will help you develop new skills to bring back to your workplace and put into immediate use. Take a deep dive into topics and issues like (but not limited to):<br><br>• The role of desktop support in information/cyber-security<br>• Metrics and analytics for desktop support<br>• Choosing and implementing new technologies<br>• Current pain points and challenges, crowdsourced from the group<br>• The pros and cons of self-service vs. concierge service<br><br>Experience an open forum where you'll receive individualized advice, hear diverse perspectives, and build connections, relationships, and skills that will endure.<br>

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Never before has communication and leadership effectiveness had such a direct impact on our organization's performance. We live in a world where time is money and results. Imagine if you could figure out why people do what they do—and get them to do more of what you want and need them to do. Wouldn't that take half the stress out of your day?<br><br>Core Motive is a psychometric that measures "why we do what we do" and is the foundation of emotional intelligence (EQ). Your Core Motive is as intrinsic as the color of your eyes. And you can learn your Core Motive and others' easily. Leaders who understand and apply the strategies of Core Motive: <br>• Communicate more effectively<br>• Build better quality relationships <br>• Provoke better, faster results <br>• Reduce conflict <br>• Foster autonomy and empowerment <br>• Promote increased collaboration<br>Attend this workshop to learn about your Core Motive and learn how to assess your people's Core Motive to improve communication, collaboration, and performance.<br><br>

Alex Banayan will take you on an unprecedented adventure – from the private office of Bill Gates to a nightclub with Lady Gaga, from a star-studded party with Steven Spielberg to a massive stadium with Warren Buffett – to share the game-changing research behind his new book, The Third Door.In this dynamic keynote you'll go behind the scenes of The Third Door's pages and hear insights gleaned from exclusive one-on-one interviews with some of the world's most successful people. Packed with practical business lessons and riveting anecdotes, this session will empower you to find The Third Door in your own work and life, and changing the way you achieve your goals.<br><br><a data-mce-href="https://youtu.be/s1wzyVQD27I%20" href="https://youtu.be/s1wzyVQD27I%20" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">See what Alex has to say about his keynote. </a>

Get some outdoor exercise and meet fellow attendees before the conference begins! Meet up at the Registration Desk doors for a run or walk, led by HDI marketing director, Michele Langer, beginning 6:30 am sharp.

How can seeing the world through the Blue Man Group Creative Lenses help us to understand, and ultimately overcome, our own perceived limitations? In this highly-interactive keynote, Randall Jaynes, veteran Blue Man and Sr. Artistic Director of the Blue Man Group will describe their approach to creativity as illustrated by the six Blue Man character archetypes. Explore the creative and collaborative possibilities that arise when we move away from comfortable isolation into connectedness, and understand the ways in which letting go of ego opens up new ways of thinking and allows us to connect with others more authentically. The tools you learn will enable an invaluable new approach to addressing challenges, both personal and professional.<br><br><a data-mce-href="https://youtu.be/Ge08m13iRM8" href="https://youtu.be/Ge08m13iRM8" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">See what Randall has to say about his keynote. </a>

When you're working with a group of employees that spans multiple continents, countries, languages, and cultures, how can you build them into a single team? From just getting started to enabling the team to take ownership of their own career growth, empowering them to lead their own team meetings and celebrate their own successes, learn how one person stumbled through some false starts until he finally figured out what it took to truly make a global team work.<br>

You've gone to great lengths to hire the right people. Now the challenge is getting new analysts to bring their best selves to work every day while still fitting in with your team's unique culture. In this session, Jeff Toister will walk you through five distinct stages of employee onboarding and show you how to help new hires thrive from day one. You'll discover why the first day of work is so critical, and how to create a positive first impression. And you'll learn how to describe your service desk culture in clear, actionable terms so you can effectively share it with your new analysts.<br><br>

If we look at some of the most anticipated IPOs this year, we see a telling trend. "Experience-born" companies like Uber, Airbnb, Slack, and StitchFix have redefined how brands interact with customers, raising the stakes for every business around the world. These all started from a mindset of "let's create the best possible experience for someone (regardless of whether it scales) and then let's work back from there."<br>With experience-born companies becoming the norm, we're in the midst of a dramatic paradigm shift in consumer expectations. <br><br>There has been talk about putting customers at the center of all you do for awhile, but actually doing it is much harder. And the demand for it is much more real now. In this session, Elisabeth Zornes will explore the importance of the true customer-at-the-center paradigm, focusing on:<br>• What business can do about it<br>• Why it's essential to strive for human-first experiences<br>• Why you must continually reintroduce yourself to the customer<br>• How to find the new sweet spot between empathy and technology<br>

Has your organization struggled with duplication of effort, a lack of customer- centric processes, high volumes of incidents and open work orders, increased customer escalations for aged service requests, minimal or no notification of projects or expansions, or resource gaps? We have, too! At Emory Healthcare, the demands on field services operations were increasing as new facilities and staff members were added to the network. So we launched a successful restructuring initiative to consolidate support teams, created a specialty desktop support team, and increased employee engagement—without adding any additional FTEs! As a result, we improved operational efficiency, created a balanced workload, and increased customer satisfaction. Attend this session to learn how to increase team performance by transforming a good team to a high-performing GREAT team.<br><br><br>

Join John Custy and a panel of service management experts for an interactive introduction to ITIL 4. Learn about the difference between the service value system and the service value chain, and how they can improve the value and the management of your IT services. Learn how ITIL 4's Guiding Principles can assist you on your continual improvement journey and why the focus of ITIL 4 has matured to emphasize practices, not just processes. We'll also explore the change in the service desk role, from a function in ITIL 3 to a service management practice in in ITIL 4. If your organization is leveraging Agile, Lean, or DevOps practices, you will appreciate how ITIL 4 has progressed to better integrate with these practices.

As data stores continue to grow within companies, knowledge workers spend increasingly more time searching for information to do their jobs effectively. A constant tension exists between the corporate knowledge management strategy to use knowledge to achieve strategic goals and the knowledge worker's habit of hoarding knowledge to ensure job security. To prevent the common failures of a knowledge management implementation, organizations must drive the organizational change that is required to support the creation, reuse, and improvement of knowledge. This session will identify the top ten reasons why knowledge management initiatives fail with the goal of helping organizations avoid ineffective knowledge management practices.<br><br>

Aligning the work of service management to the business value created by the enterprise has never been more critical than it is in today's digital world. In this session, Valence Howden will identify the critical elements required for a modern service management organization to create the right capabilities to purposefully produce, deliver, and iterate products and services with a true understanding of the importance of generating clear business value.<br><br>We will focus on:<br>• Defining and adapting the framework of value in your enterprise and translate that into the decision making around products and services<br>• Understanding your value systems and capabilities to ensure you can leverage internally generated practices and address/satisfy external influences on these systems and capabilities.<br>• Identifying key behaviors that create and sustain superior value delivery in products and services<br>• Ensuring that value provision can be measured in a way that allow sustain excellence in the provision of business value through service management practices<br>

You started out with a clear vision: to become a truly world-class organization. You measured the right things, hired the right people, cultivated the right culture, and achieved everything you set out to do as a support organization. What happens next? How do you keep the same excitement, momentum, and energy? Whether you've reached the peak, or need some inspiration and guidance to get there, Ben Brennan will explain how you can raise the bar even higher than world-class support by expanding your sphere of influence beyond the service desk to other organizations in the company, sharing the culture and mindset that got you to this highest echelon. It's not often the service desk team leads a cultural revolution in the whole organization—but when it happens, it's awesome!<br><br>Come join Ben and learn what happens after world-class.<br>

Why will people follow a leader? Out of all of the attributes of the best leaders one stands out: they're highly trusted. It's a myth that great leaders are born with the skill. Learning how to be a great leader is a journey, and trust development is an important and vital part of that journey. If you want to make a positive impact with people and within an organization, you must have the trust of the people who follow you.<br><br>But it's a mistake to assume that trust will come with a position or a title. Sometimes it's just the opposite. There are, however, actions that can be done to build trust and fortunately they can be learned. In this session, attendees will learn how to:<br>• Recognize when trust is a key issue for moving forward in a business or personal transaction<br>• Build more trust within yourself so you aren't second guessing all of your decisions<br>• Spot and overcome the obstacles to building trust<br>• Rebuild trust once it has been damaged and recognize when trust cannot be rebuilt<br>

Staff turnover is a fact of life for all support teams, but turnover isn't a bad thing when the staff stay within your organization. At Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, we found if you embrace it, encourage it, and promote it, staff turnover can be an employee and business advantage. We have produced a highly respected recruiting pipeline for the organization that has positively impacted team morale and performance.<br><br>During this informative, interactive, and entertaining session, Darryl Jacoby will share JHUAPL's approach to: <br>• Finding staff who are "right" for the organization <br>• Building trust and learning their career interest and desires <br>• Finding and providing them with meaningful opportunities beyond their normal job duties <br>• Providing them with advice on managing their career<br>

<p style="margin: 0px;" data-mce-style="margin: 0px;">It's incredible to think about how much has changed recently in the customer experience and Voice of the Customer (VoC) space. New listening paths that go beyond traditional surveys and new technologies are providing a far higher quality and quantity of customer feedback data than ever before. Sadly, our ability to build compelling metrics using this data is often lagging. NPS is old enough to have its own driver's license, and CSAT has a passing correlation to loyalty. While these metrics certainly still have a place on our CX dashboard, we must challenge ourselves to modernize the way we collect, analyze, and report on customer data! <br><br>Join us to learn about:<br>• Building your listening paths to cover the end-to-end customer journey<br>• Collecting different types of customer feedback using new tools and techniques <br>• Enhancing your experience dashboard with customer engagement score, customer growth engine, ease of business, and other modern CX metrics <br><br></p>

Does your desktop support team suffer from a backlog of tickets? Do customers reach out to you directly, bypassing the service desk? Have you ever played "phone tag" with customers trying to get tickets resolved? Do customers complain about the time it takes to resolve their IT problems? Retailers such as Apple, Microsoft and Comcast have already adopted the walk-up model for consumers, so why haven't we brought it to the enterprise? Join this session to learn how walk-up services can transform your end user experience and decrease time to resolution from days to minutes. Boost your customer satisfaction and have more happy and productive employees!<br><br>

An explosion rocks your organization's data center, resulting in loss or degradation of all IT services, impacting your entire user base – what do you do? How do you assess safety conditions, communicate with key stakeholders, and field the calls overwhelming your help desk, all while coordinating service restoration and performing root cause analysis?<br>Disasters can occur any time, any place, leading to IT service degradation and outages. While we all strive to maintain 100% uptime, it's nearly impossible. In this case study, Matt Lacy and Scotty Shepherd will share their lessons learned from a very similar scenario and how they developed, formalized, implemented, and matured their major incident process, which has led to improved communication with IT service providers, stakeholders, and leaders, and a more resilient IT organization overall!<br><br>This case study will cover the importance of:<br>• Having thoughtful major incident process for business continuity and disaster recovery<br>• Creating an effective major incident communication plan<br>• Determining critical roles for your major incident response team

<p style="margin: 0px;" data-mce-style="margin: 0px;">In 2016, a Fortune 500 health insurance company was given five business days to evacuate a building holding over 1,500 employees. The building was the primary contact center for fifteen states – and it was the beginning of the annual plan enrollment cycle, the health insurance equivalent of Black Friday for retail.<br><br>In this case study, Steve McMillan will explain how this emergency arose, seemingly from nowhere; why the existing, tested BCP plan was inadequate in a real moment of truth; how IT used vendor partnerships, community relationships, creative thinking, and thousands of hours in IT staff, from the service desk to the engineer level, to deliver a solution; and how the company met imposed deadlines and did not miss a single contact center call in the process.<br><br>This case study will address the importance of:<br><br>• Reviewing your business continuity and disaster recovery plans for relevancy – often<br>• Plan scale and how "loopholes" can spell disaster<br>• Involving the C-Level in funding the right plans<br>• Creating a runbook for disaster<br></p>

We've been seeing signs of the coming of artificial intelligence to ITSM – digital assistants, AI-guided self-help, chatbots, orchestration – for a couple of years now. But in the past year, the promise of AI has become reality. What does this mean for the service desk: is this the apocalypse, or is an opportunity to reinvent the service desk and correct the ITSM sins of the past? In this session, Doug Tedder identifies the opportunities that AI brings to ITSM overall, and the service desk specifically, and what you need to do to exploit the promise of AI technologies.<br><br>This session will cover:<br>• What AI in ITSM is…and is not<br>• What you need to do to get ready for AI<br>

ITSM got you down? Getting tired of the same old day-to-day, tickets-in-tickets-out lifestyle? What if there was a way to keep up with the daily ticket grind, but also push boundaries and reinvigorate your passion for ITSM? This session covers how you can use innovation and design thinking techniques to push the boundaries of your ITSM systems and processes and drive continual service improvement through the use of out-there and outside-the-box ideas.<br><br>Chris Chagnon, mad scientist, will showcase dozens and ideas that push ITSM to the next level through the use of design and technology, including AI, machine learning, and IoT. Attendees will walk away with a framework for innovation, as well as ideas and information for carrying out dozens of innovative ideas in your own environment.<br><br><br>

Navy Federal Credit Union has improved its engagement score dramatically by hiring the right people, creating an environment of collaboration and appreciation, and by displaying absolute interest into each individuals professional and personal aspirations that is aligned with the organization's mission. In this session, learn how to build a roster of great candidates (hint: "Don't build a team full of Michael Jordans"), tactics for keeping the team engaged, and tips for promoting collaboration and appreciation.

Much attention is given to employee engagement given its correlation to customer satisfaction, but employee empowerment – which drives both employee engagement and customer satisfaction – is often overlooked. This interactive session will focus on defining team empowerment and understanding its three core components. Explore the key challenges to empowerment and discover tactics for overcoming them. We'll share industry insights as well as real-world examples of what has worked in HDI's Customer Care Center to empower and motivate our team.<br><br><br>

<div><span>Customer Experience (CX) can be an intimidating subject! There are many aspects to consider; sometimes it's challenging even to get started. This session will demystify the fundamentals of CX and examine the impact of experiences on internal and external customers. We'll explore how to measure the value of CX initiatives and communicate their importance to senior leadership. You'll walk away with an action plan to transform the customer's journey through your Support Center.</span></div><div><span><br></span></div><div><span>This session will cover:</span></div><div><span>- Exploring the foundations of Customer Experience and learn simple practices to launch CX initiatives.</span></div><div><span>- The impact of Support Center experiences on both internal and external customers.</span></div><div><span>- How to measure the value of CX projects and communicate the return on investment to leadership.</span></div><div><span><br></span></div><div> </div>

Much attention is given to employee engagement given its correlation to customer satisfaction, but employee empowerment – which drives both employee engagement and customer satisfaction – is often overlooked. This interactive session will focus on defining team empowerment and understanding its three core components. ExFirst contact resolution (FCR) is one of the most common support metrics, across all channels. Tracked over time, it can increase customer satisfaction and enable efficiency and cost savings. But it can be challenging to track and should be treated with caution. In today's omnichannel environment, does FCR still have the same value, or is it time to move on? In this session, two industry experts will discuss and debate the role of FCR in the 21st-century support organization. Come with an open mind and be ready to weigh in!

We are all familiar with the work IT does, from designing and building, to testing and launching, to running and supporting products and services. However often these steps are often not built, run, or integrated as seamlessly as they ought to be to deliver optimum value. The core proposition of ITIL 4 is that this work is all part of a single value chain, with a variety of different types of work passing through it (known as value streams). A key element in achieving this is understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to achieving success across different organisations. In this session, Roman Jouravlev will highlight some of the key concepts and practical guidance from ITIL 4 to show how it enables Lean and Agile ways of working.<br><br>

As the technology landscape evolves, organizations must shift from managing tasks to driving business value. But many IT organizations struggle with this transition. In this session, Dr. Alma Miller will share a case study of a government organization going through the pains of adopting a business-driven value culture and discover how applying the "Organizational PAC" model helped to ultimately drive the change they were looking for. <br><br>Attend this session to learn about:<br>• Techniques for identifying opportunities for improvement and raising awareness<br>• The main obstacles that hinder organizational change<br>• Practical takeaways and lessons learned for any organization in the midst of change

<div><span>Chatbots are the subject of a lot of hype when it comes to changing the nature of customer service, whether those customers are internal or external. They scale (functionally) infinitely, up or down or sideways. They cannot be victims of social engineering. They do not call in sick. They do not get embarrassed, they do not lash out at your customers. So…why aren't they more commonplace? Jamie Vernon, an IT executive with over 10 years in the customer care technology space, will walk you through the potential and the pitfalls of using chatbots for customer care. He's going to share some tales of how chatbots launch well, and why some launched poorly. Armed with his roadmap on how to implement this technology for your own organization, you'll be better equipped to address the questions and concerns from your stakeholders. Learn about:</span></div><div><span>• The business drivers and potential benefits of chatbots</span></div><div><span>• The relative costs involved in creating and launching a chatbot</span></div><div><span>• How to know whether your organization is ready for chatbots</span></div><div><span>• Technology and skillsets required</span></div><div><span>• Customer expectations of chatbots</span></div><div><span>• How chatbots are different from chat</span></div><div><span><br></span></div><div><span>Our panelists will share their chatbot, provide an overview of outcomes and customer reactions (so far), and take a look ahead to the next evolution of chatbots.</span></div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div>

FC Bayern München has been one of the most consistently successful soccer teams on the planet more than five decades. Since the formation in 1963 of the Bundesliga, the top tier league in Germany, the club has captured 28 league titles – more than all other teams combined. This success is rooted in the "Mia San Mia" culture that Bayern developed and continually reinforces with everyone affiliated with the club – from the executive leadership team, to the administrators and support staff, to the coaches and trainers, to the players, and finally to the Youth Academy that represents the next generation of players.<br><br>Join Doug Rabold for an exploration of the 16 guiding principles that have made Bayern München a consistently successful organization, and learn how you can apply them to your organization to create a culture of consistent success.<br><br>

Sure, the Star Wars universe is a fictional world with incredible action, but we can draw correlations to our everyday work life and apply the lessons learned. Luke Skywalker spent a lot of time in the swamp learning how to use the force – leadership is like the force. It's a skill that we can learn by taking classes, reflecting, seeking feedback from others, mentoring, and, of course, doing. In this session, we'll explore:<br>• Mastering the self <br>• Knowing who can help you and asking for help when needed<br>• How projects and rollouts can be like the Death Star<br>• What the Leadership Dark Side is and how to avoid it<br>• Finding and using the "Leadership Force"<br><br>This is the session you are looking for! It will allow you to transition from a galaxy far, far away to an office close, close to your workplace.<br><br><br>

Are you new to leading a team? Every single leader at some point started out with their first team that they had to manage or supervise. Many have the same questions such as "How do I lead a team?" or "Will they listen to me?" or "Where do I even start?"<br>This session is geared towards newly appointed managers or supervisors who haven't had a lot of exposure to leading a team. Oftentimes, they're asked to lead a team with no direction in where or how to start, and often spend the first 120 days "drinking from the fire hose." This session focuses on the most relevant administrative and operational tasks that any new supervisor will need to either be aware of or have exposure to. <br><br>At the end of the session, attendees will have a clearer sense of the answers to:<br>• What areas do I pay attention to as a new leader of teams?<br>• What should I do to become an effective and successful new leader?<br><br><br>

The role and importance of IT is often overlooked when defining a customer experience (CX) strategy. Yes, IT is expected to set up and manage the technology infrastructure used to manage the customer experience, but what about the need to respond quickly and consistently when technology is what actually creates a challenge for the customer? <br><br>In this Breakfast Briefing, Andrew Pritchard will identify the essential processes and KPIs that need to be in place between customer support and IT operations to ensure that CX is a priority for all parts of the business. He'll also explain the importance of DevOps to a CX strategy, and the ways in which customer support, operations, development, and sales have complete visibility into incidents, issues, and cases relating to a customer's experience with the organization.<br><br>Attendees will learn about:<br>• IT's role in CX<br>• How to compare your environment against best practices<br>• How to identify priority projects that need to be scoped or completed<br>• Real-world examples of customers that have already addressed these

Your support team has written or made available lots of detailed user documentation in the form of online manuals or good old PDFs. But here's the dilemma: no one reads that 75-page user manual! And when they don't read the long documentation, they email and call your support agents to ask for help. How can you solve this dilemma? By writing a quickstart guide, the super-short, <br>getting-started guide that explains a process, product, or tool.<br><br>This technical writing session will give you the nuts-and-bolts of writing<br>

Managing technical changes should be the ultimate destination for any organization, but in higher education, that destination is often filled with traffic jams of confusion or highjacked by groups that aren't willing to participate. Join this session to learn how Texas A&M's Division of Information Technology overcame these roadblocks to complete the first stage of change management and then shifted gears to head for stage two. Kyle Boatsman will identify what's needed in an initial change process (including governance and basic policy considerations, addressing practitioner concerns, and organizational change issues), steps for maturing the change management process, and lessons learned.<br><br><br>

For many of us, our minds are littered with detours, potholes, and accidents waiting to happen. Fear, self-doubt, lack of direction, inhibitions of all kinds – these beliefs reside in our subconscious and prevent us from reaching our conscious goals. But if you set your GPS -your Great Programmable Subconscious- for success, you can achieve anything while enjoying the ride of your life.<br>Through an unforgettable interactive hypnosis presentation, Wayne teaches you positive programming tools to optimize your performance at work and at home. He'll helps you access and harness the power of your subconscious mind to overcome the negative habitual thought patterns which block our productivity. Learn one specific strategy you can use immediately to overcome stress, change limiting beliefs and perform better, as well as a 10-week goal achievement program that will make the message last a lifetime.<br><br><a data-mce-href="https://youtu.be/Neqm0Crb6i4%20" href="https://youtu.be/Neqm0Crb6i4%20" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">See what Wayne has to say about his keynote. </a>

Customer care is much different than support: support solves a customer's problem; care builds a relationship, and a loyal customer than can differentiate your company from your competition. For internal support centers, a culture of customer care can build strong employee relationships across divisions. <br><br>In this case study, learn about the components that drive a culture of customer care, including a cooperative business model and the 4 Cs of communication. Discover how NISC has created a culture where coworkers support each, customers see us work as a team, and a job well-done is celebrated!<br><br><br>

In this immersive session, participants will engage in a powerful reflective exercise designed to evoke clear and specific attributes of the leaders who most inspired us and who we most aspire to emulate. You'll leave with a fresh take on accountability as a trust-building tool. You'll leave knowng how to be more intentional and deliberate in your daily journey. You'll leave feeling fantistc. And you'll leave 100% able to recreate this experience with your teams!<br><br><br>

Most successful support teams have a knack for getting employees absolutely obsessed with customer service. Their secret is a customer-focused culture. A strong culture helps guide analyst performance, shapes strategic decisions, and ultimately becomes part of the organization's brand. <br><br>In this session, Jeff Toister will share the essential elements that leading support teams use to develop customer-focused cultures, including:<br>• Three ways that culture can influence our employees' actions<br>• The essential elements of a customer-focused culture<br>• Tools to help you get your support team obsessed with servic%MCEPASTEBIN%

Over the past two years, the IT Service Desk at the Duke University School of Nursing has transitioned from a support group for primarily on-premises services to a team focused on a growing cloud-based infrastructure. Transitioning services from a local data center to Amazon Web Services presented some interesting challenges, ranging from a new set of 24x7 alerts to complex, container-based DevOps for a suite of in-house business apps. In this interactive session, Glenn Setliff will share how they evolved their team to expand the breadth of support offerings without an increase in staff or budget – and while maintaining consistently high levels of customer service

<div><span>Rapid and flexible response to constant changes is critical to any support organization's success. Consequently, the Agile methodology has gained a great deal of traction throughout our industry. Although borne of software development, agility for the service desk speaks of adaptive, timely interactions with the customer that reduce downtime, which ultimately delivers value to the organization. </span></div><div><span><br></span></div><div><span>In this session, Ric Mims will explain how your service desk can be an Agile, value-driven service and support team, leveraging principles such as process automation, integration with proactive tools, and the right business-based KPIs to enable you to address productivity leaks and identify areas of weakness. </span></div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div>

If you're like many senior IT leaders, you've come up through the ranks of IT. At every level, the vantage point and the associated thinking is increasingly abstract and more strategic. The mindset and skills that got you to this level aren't what you need to be successful in it.<br><br>Using IT Change Management as a backdrop, former CIO and IT Service Management author and international speaker Greg Sanker gives executive insights from the vantage point of tactical, operational, strategic and executive viewpoints. He offers practical been-there-done-that advice on providing the right leadership and strategic vision for effective IT operations. <br>

We work to live. We don't live to work. As such, how life and work integrate is so important to employees, with many desiring increased schedule flexibilities. Everyone is also different, too, in terms of what they want and need from an employer. Gone are the days where everyone needed to work the same hours, tied to a desk or cubicle. Balancing the needs of the business with everyone's personal needs doesn't have to be so hard. <br><br>In this session, attendees will learn about the importance of offering increased schedule flexibility for support professionals, providing a culture that promotes working when, how, and where someone is most successful. By embracing change and technology, evolving how scheduling can be done for support professionals, you can successfully balance personal preferences and business needs.<br><br>

Do you want to better connect with the people you work with every day? This thought-provoking session will show you how to make powerful connections with your team, your manager, your peers, and even your customers! Come find out how to improve engagement, how to increase awareness of how you are listening in any given moment, and how to identify and modify your communication style so it resonates with your audience. You'll leave with ideas and techniques that will allow you to better connect with people to drive engagement, collaboration, and outcomes.<br><br>This session will cover:<br>• Listening to your self-talk and better managing your focus<br>• Speaking in the language of your audience<br>• Listening with positive intent and being present with a purpose<br>

Your team is growing and it no longer makes sense for everybody, including your managers, to try to do everything for their own teams, let alone try to do it manually - or any which way they think it best. Lack of uniformity in training and QA approaches by different supervisors, lack of consistency in general, will hurt you in the long run, guaranteed.<br><br>Learn how to identify your team's operational needs, create supporting roles, and align said roles with team efficiency and company goals to produce a positive ROI. Andrea Silas will share how her support operations groups have evolved, and how they're contributing to organizational efficiency as well as team happiness.<br><br>

The last few years have seen significant focus on the direct correlation between employee engagement and customer experience. Disney, Zappos, and Nordstrom are just a few of the corporate titans that have thrived and positioned themselves as industry leaders by leveraging this approach. Yet few organizations outside of retail and hospitality truly grasp and have leveraged this concept.<br><br> In this session, Doug Rabold will explain why: <br>• How employee engagement and customer experience are directly correlated<br>• Why employee engagement is measurable but not always evident<br>• How the most successful organizations, regardless of industry, recognize and promote employee engagement<br><br>

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is one of the most common support metrics. But it's no longer the only metric support organizations should be tracking to paint a full picture of the customer experience. In today's support and service environment, does CSAT still have the same value, or is it time to move on? In this session, two industry experts will discuss and debate the role of CSAT in the 21st-century support organization. Come with an open mind and be ready to weigh in!<br><br><br>

With all the hoopla about chatbots and the introduction of artificial intelligence as a means of providing services to our customers, Julie Mohr wanted to understand what AI was all about and what it took to develop an effective chatbot adoption strategy. After a few weeks of research, she decided to implement a chatbot on her own website, dedicated to knowledge management culture: theknowledgeculture.com.<br><br>During the implementation of Sherlock – the knowledge bot about knowledge – Julie learned a great deal about chatbots and the effort it takes to create a conversational interface that can successfully support customers. An adoption strategy must first identify the required customer-facing knowledge to effectively program the bot. Based upon her experiences, she'll share tips and lessons learned about strategic chatbot strategies that you should consider before you jump into the world of bots.<br><br>

Most surveys stink, and they're wrecking the customer experience! If you can't articulate what makes a survey terrible, good luck developing a decent one. In this session, we'll dissect mediocre surveys from the wild, and we'll discuss how they make customers feel. We'll explore some techniques that can detract from the customer experience, along with strategies for developing surveys that customers love and managers can action. You'll walk away with a more critical eye towards surveys, so you can explain what works and what doesn't work for you.

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There's no universal definition of employee engagement, yet everyone seems to know what it means. How can this be? Although the term hasn't been rigorously defined, there seems to be universal agreement that employee engagement and employee job satisfaction are highly correlated. But they're not the same thing. Employee engagement is a complex set of behaviors driven by numerous practices that can be hard to quantify. These include employee recognition, wellness, personal growth, training, coaching, team huddles, and relationship with peers.<br><br>Despite the fact that the underlying drivers of employee engagement are subjective, they can be quantified and managed. Moreover, these underlying drivers can be leveraged to produce an employee engagement scorecard! In this session, attendees will create their own employee engagement scorecards, and will know their employee engagement score by the end of the session!<br><br>

<br>Our research shows when you're successful at improving employee engagement and retention (particularly with important employee groups, like high performers, mission-critical job roles, and Millennials), it acts like a rising tide that lifts many other key business metrics. Engaged employees bring the commitment, energy, and desire to excel that deliver the meaningful experiences that customers demand.<br><br>In this session, discover innovative strategies for creating a culture where high performance, team work, and empowering leaders energize the people around them. We'll cover how employee engagement affects key operational performance metrics, including NPS, call quality, first-call resolution, customer satisfaction, revenue, and other KPIs.<br>Learn about: <br>• How improving employee engagement results in higher retention<br>• What you should do during their first 90 days to optimize employee retention<br>• Ways to better leverage your frontline leaders in your engagement effort<br><br>

What if you could increase customer satisfaction, increase sales, and reduce cost per interaction—without hiring additional staff? In this session, Robert Norris will explain how his team at Relatient achieved all of the above using natural language processing, psychological rapport building, and "Pacing and Leading" to overcome resistance, de-escalate potential conflict, and encourage cooperation. He'll also explain how strategy and values elicitation can help you determine what's most important to your customers/end users, and how you can use that information to facilitate communication.<br>

With the focus on ITIL 4, AI, chatbots, and self-service, help desks seem to get all the love these days. Do we even need field support? In this session, Mark Kimionakis and Jill Beckman will share the story of how this role has evolved over the past five years at Boston University. Learn about the role of the desktop specialist in relationship management, their efforts towards rebranding their team, and where they think the role fits in a DevOps/Agile/ITIL 4 world. Let's explore about the future of desktop support together!

Change management can be a divisive process. Instead of enabling more effective operations and support, it becomes an iron hand of compliance on the neck of flexible, innovative improvement. Instead of speeding things up, it often slows things down. <br>When our team was faced with significant change management issue – a process we didn't own – we instead created a holistic process improvement model that allowed us to manage the processes we controled that impacted change management. During this year-long process, we tripled the average number of changes we handled while reducing the time it took to implement changes by two-thirds!<br><br>This case study will cover:<br>• One analytical technique that helped us figure out what we needed to do<br>• The concept of integrated process models and how improvements in one process can have a great impact on other processes <br>• How to implement procedural improvements without significantly modifying the governing process ("Changing Change Without Changing Change!")<br><br>

Join us as we celebrate excellence in service and support. HDI's Technical Support Awards are the most prestigious in the industry and recognize individuals and teams who have excelled in a number of categories. Come cheer on your peers and enjoy featured performances from the Blue Man Group.

Grab your most bitchin' disco garb, put on your dancing shoes, and hustle on over to the MGM Grand's electric nightclub at Hakkasan and enjoy beverages, light hors d'oeuvres, and plenty of far out 70's entertainment. We'll party to the max – can you dig it? (If you'd like to bring a guest, additional party tickets are on sale at the HDI registration desk.)

No one runs into conflict intentionally. Usually it hits a manager or another employee like a photon torpedo, and far too often people are ill-prepared to handle these challenging scenarios. Do you manage the situation or the person? What are the best practices to mitigate the problem and deescalate the incident? Denis Rudd and Tom Wilk will open your view screens to the multitude of techniques that can be used to address conflict in business environments. Through the lens (flare) of Star Trek, they will eradicate your preconceived notions about conflict. Set your phasers to stun and get ready for warp!<br><br>This session will cover: <br>• An understanding of basic conflict management theory<br>• Best practices for handling challenging situations<br>• Exercises for managing conflict<br><br>

Cybersecurity isn't something you do; it's something that must become part of your organization's DNA. Bad actors probe, evolve, and learn; they're creative, agile, and persistent. Home Depot, Sony, Target, and others were home to advanced threats (in the case of Sony, for at least a year) before they were discovered. It's not a matter of if your organizational will become a target, it's a matter of when! You can't totally prevent a breach, but you can learn from the experiences of others and lower your risk.<br><br>In this presentation David will review: <br>• Well-known breaches, one lesser-known breach, and a chilling example of bad-actor creativity<br>• The cybersecurity controls that would have helped mitigate these breaches <br>• How you can develop your own cybersecurity program that works and evolves to meet both external and internal threats<br><br><br><br><br><br>

Is your success measured by customer satisfaction surveys alone? If your scores are high, do you stick to the status quo? Does customer satisfaction equal a great customer experience? Would you like to take your service to the next level – to really wow your customers? Too often, we use numbers to measure our success and assess the customer experience. However, the customer experience goes beyond an interaction with a support person working a ticket, and it can't be measured by a scorecard alone.<br><br>The customer experience is based on the service itself, the customer's ability to complete work or use the service, the interactions with people in IT, which includes their customer service skills, consistency of service delivery, how well processes work and how well we set and exceed expectations – every time! To accomplish this, we need to first understand expectations and business requirements, then build a foundation on which we can continually grow. In this session, learn how to continually evolve your skills, processes, and the overall customer experience.<br><br>

Where event monitoring once focused on the syslog messages of the organization's dominant system, proactive event management today is more likely to require an understanding of how distributed systems on multiple clouds environments interact. Messages related to single point failures are almost insignificant and the overall picture can be very difficult to evaluate. By necessity, management often relies on indicator systems rather than an actual comprehensive picture.<br><br>What if a reimagining of the information, the application of some statistics, and a relatively small database could result in a system that gave an actual data driven view of an organization's IT ecosystem: currently, historically, and perhaps even prospectively? This presentation will take a fresh look at event management, and how to build the monitoring system that today's environment requires, using stories from exploration and the sciences.<br><br><br>

A successful swarming support model is 80% culture and 20% process/technology. The Home Depot team set set a course to improve our caller satisfaction, our associate satisfaction and our partnerships with other IT teams by transforming our fundamental operational posture. In every aspect of their journey, they put culture first—everything else came easy after that. But our journey on this unbeaten path was a multiyear and multigoal effort.<br><br> Attend this session to learn why:<br>• Swarming is a game changing support model<br>• Immediate resolution can be the norm<br>• Holistically embracing a knowledge centered support culture and leaning in to doing what is right is a fundamental and critical key to unlocking success with swarming<br>

Is your company performance throttling? Did your customer experience ratings just get a flat tire? Are you or some of your colleagues running out of gas or do they simply suffer from engine burn-out? If so, then you need an employee engagement pit stop! Attend this session and become part of the pit crew so you can zoom past your competition. You'll confidently drive away with several simple, yet critical repairs for taking your shop from zero to hero in no time flat, even during such unprecedented remote workforce transitions brought on by COVID-19<br><br>This session will cover:<br>• What really impacts employee engagement<br>• Six proven strategies for increasing employee engagement<br>• Tips and tricks for driving these key strategies<br><br>

Shift-left is a common term in service and support, but it's not yet common practice. For those brave enough to take it on, they often wonder where to start. In this case study, Rich Sykora will share Blackbaud's experience shifting left. Starting off with a review of the shift-left concept, Rich will then present a framework for participants to reference when determining their organizations' readiness to shift-left, including key self-check questions:<br><br>• Have you documented your current processes?<br>• Do you actively conduct Kaizens? <br>• Do you study and or track closure code, case categorization, etc.?<br>• Have you conducted an inventory of current tools?<br>Participants will leave with an action plan that they can use to start shifting left.<br><br><br><br>

Northwestern Mutual's Technology Service Center (TSC), building on the transformative success of earlier support and service initiatives, is currently focusing on face-to-face, embedded Digital Wizards, and chat support services. To measure customer success, they've also developed a customer experience program, designed internally to make sure our internal partners and customers are successful by using all support resources available to them. Learn how Northwestern Mutual is continuously developing and transforming their support activities and resources to build a better relationship with internal customers and business partners.<br><br>

Organizations are in a constant struggle to keep up with the ever-changing needs and demands to be innovative. Consequently, a stakeholder's perception of value is often a moving target. It depends on who you ask and when you ask. Service providers need a mechanism for assessing organizational objectives, readjusting their delivery strategies, and making continual improvements.<br>This doesn't have to be a big undertaking. By taking a proactive approach to continual improvement and customer engagement, teams can create value, anticipate needs, and set customer expectations. In this session, Jessica Alfaro will dive into the core of ITIL 4, present the components of the service value system (SVS), and explain how Agile concepts can be leveraged to foster continual improvement at all levels.<br><br>

Internet privacy is more important now than it's ever been. In 2017 the Department of Justice approached DreamHost, an online service provider, with a problematic subpoena for customer data. When the request was refused, an avalanche of international media attention followed, bringing the issue of internet user privacy to the global stage.<br><br>In this case study you'll learn how one company used its core values to turn a public dispute over website logs with the DOJ into a wildly successful global campaign for internet privacy; one that united the PR, marketing, and technical support functions of the organization in a rapid-fire crash course in reputation management.