ICMI Article Series – ACCE 2012 Conference Recap
Hello readers! I just got back from Seattle and boy are my arms tired! I was up to my eyeballs in Contact Center Camaraderie and Commiseration at the ICMI ACCE (“ACE”) conference in Seattle. Since Vision Point Systems has historically been involved in telephony as an IVR provider, we wondered if a Contact Center Conference would be right for us, and it turns out that this conference was a perfect fit.
The ACE conference brought together all the tribes of contact centers – small, medium, and large centers; centers for vertical markets from health care to insurance to retail to finance to government. Every one of them (or so it seemed to me!) was in critical need of VoiceVision. The common lament was a lack of coordination across enterprise – from management to IT to marketing to the contact center.
I sat through 4 days of sessions on Contact Center operations and I swear I wasn’t bored. Now that probably says something about me, but it definitely says a lot about the presenters, including Brad Cleveland, Jean Bave Kerwin, Lori Buckland and speakers like Ryan Estis.
I won’t bore you with the details (what happens at ACCE stays at ACCE!) but the thing that makes me most likely to recommend ICMI to a friend is that every session was geared toward action. There was tons of theory, but each session included helpful rules of thumb and explicit action items. I came away with powerful DOs and DON’Ts and specific actions that I knew I’d be taking when I got home. After the conference I felt much more informed about the best, quickest, and most effective techniques to approach contact center effectiveness.
Having never been to Seattle, I found that city great to visit. I walked miles of it and loved the atmosphere. I’m already looking forward to 2013.
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