Connecting the Dots - SaaS Support for the 21 st century

Paul Lake - Director, Support
Oracle CRM on Demand

Your company is about to start selling its on premise product in a Software as a Service model. You can hear the groans ripple through your support organization.

But -- Wait a Sec! The tough road ahead can be exciting and successful! We invite you to come explore with Paul, one successful strategy for enabling your customers' success in a Saas environment.

Turning the Corner from Software-Driven to Services Led

Liz Murphy - Vice President, Professional Services
Datatel, Inc.

Eight years ago Liz Murphy was challenged by the Datatel CEO to move from her position as Vice President of Marketing to Vice President of Professional Services. The goal for the transition was to drive revenue growth from what had traditionally been an implementation services based business. After a lengthy journey riddled with political challenges, employee adjustments, and lots of business intelligence, Datatel now enjoys strong performance from a comprehensive PSO that has increased margins, revenue and client satisfaction and leads the company in revenue planning. Liz will present a framework for migrating to services-led organization along with tools and techniques for success and prescriptions for common ailments.

Developing a Collaborative Global Support Environment - It Takes A Village

Andy Westlund - North America Support Director
Mentor Graphics Corporation

In the world of social networking, supporting customers is rapidly evolving into a community based activity. To move our support organizations further along the Knowledge-Centered Support continuum, the challenge is how to encourage collaboration within the support organization, especially across regional boundaries.

At Mentor Graphics we believe this challenge is akin to the challenge of motivating customers to interact with one another in an online community: A problem is presented to a loosely defined group of potential problem-solvers, none of whom are obligated to take ownership of the issue. What motivates someone to contribute an answer? How are such contributors recognized and rewarded? Or, in some cases, coached and corrected?

Andy Westlund, North America Support Director, will chronicle Mentor Graphics’ recent experiences in addressing these issues. Hear about the progress that has been made with Mentor Graphics Communities, as well as the new Mentor Ideas web site where users can vote on product improvements. Learn how lessons from external communities are being applied to encourage and increase collaboration within the support organization.

How to Develop Your Path to PS Performance Excellence

Jeanne Urich - Managing Director
Service Performance Insight

How do you drive Peak Performance for your Professional Service Organization? How does your PSO measure up? What are the most important Key Performance Measurements and where should you focus? Where do you begin? How do you measure the business value of improvements?

PS Executives need both a baseline understanding of their organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as well as how they compare to industry benchmarks. In this session, industry expert Jeanne Urich will discuss the current market drivers affecting PSOs and provide analysis and recommendations for improving performance. She will provide key performance metrics from her recently published “The New Professional Service Maturity Model” 2008 Benchmark along with real-life Case Studies showing how PS organizations have used the PS Maturity Model to implement their own PS transformations.

You’ll Learn

• Common Service Challenges
• The five pillars of PS Performance
• Key Performance Indicators and where to focus
• Best practices to improve your professional service performance
• The business value of enhancing your PSO
• Real-life case studies of PS organizations who have used the PS Maturity Model to transform their organizations

What's all the buzz about collaboration?

Greg Oxton - Executive Director
Consortium for Service Innovation

Is a healthy support organization a quite calm place or a beehive of activity and interaction? The Consortium for Service Innovation has been studying collaboration as a critical element of the support process; we call it intelligent swarming. In this session we will describe the work we have done on assessing the health and value of collaboration in support. We will explore questions like;

• When does collaboration create value and when is it inappropriate?
• Is your organization a collaboration friendly place?
• What can you do to improve the collaboration factor and what are the benefits?

Everybody Sells Services (at Least They Should!)

Jim Alexander - Founder
Alexander Consulting

Selling services is different from selling products—way different. Different knowledge, different skills, and a different mindset are required to successfully demonstrate the value of intangibles and sell the invisible. The presenter’s research backs this up—only 17% of senior executives surveyed felt that the right services were being sold to the right people in the right way!

The key to services selling success is getting everyone who touches the customer committed, comfortable, and confident in their selling role.

Transforming from a Product Centric to a Customer Centric Organization

Beth Martinko - Vice President, Customer Success
Avid Technology

As the world leader in digital media creation tools for film, video, audio, animation, games, and broadcast markets, Avid Technology Inc. has had a strong product focus due to its industry leading brands. Beth Martinko, Vice President of Customer Success for Avid will discuss the strategies used in - and the challenges arising from – transforming the global support organization into a customer-centric operation. Beth will highlight how the company has aligned the efforts of its three major business units into a cohesive, customer focused organization capable of effectively serving the needs of a diverse and expanding global client base.

Productize Your Implementations for Excellence

Scott Snow - Vice President of Implementations
JPMorgan

Do you implement SaaS or engage vendors that do? Despite the promise of SaaS do you feel the implementation takes longer then expected, seems unnecessarily complex, has too many defects, cost more than budgeted, or proves difficult to service? To address these challenges Scott teamed with his sales, product and engineering groups to productize the implementation. As a result implementation duration, cost, and number of defects were all cut by over 50%. Scott will walk you through the process, share his experience, warn you about the pitfalls, and discuss where he thinks we go from here.

Vendor Management - Strategies for Managing Your Outsource Relationships

Scott C. Lessard - Sr. Program Manager, Global Support, Vendor Management
NetApp

Outsource providers often hold the keys to meeting business strategy objectives. However, many organizations either do not have a dedicated vendor management function, or worse, do not have a specific vendor management strategy. It would seem for every client-vendor relationship that is failing, there is an organization that isn't managing their vendors as effectively as they could. In this session, we will discuss the keys to having successful vendor engagements from vendor selection to multi-vendor strategy. Using NetApp's recent vendor search for outsource technical support as a case study, we will look at the steps that will help ensure the vendor you select is the right vendor. Additionally, we will look at NetApp's new vendor management function within the Global Support organization and show how your company can benefit from a cohesive strategy towards strategic vendors.