As we roll out the details on Enterprise Connect 2024, I’m excited to share that we’ll be adding a new type of content to our program lineup: Training.
In the just-completed 2023 No Jitter annual Career & Salary Survey that I wrote about two weeks ago, we saw a strong interest in technical training. A full two-thirds of respondents expressed an interest in this type of training—and more than one-third cited AI specifically as an area where they’d be keen to get some additional learning.
This confirmed a short survey we conducted of our audience database this past summer, as we were planning for Enterprise Connect 2024. When we asked what topics they’d want training on, the top responses were: Microsoft Teams, contact centers, and AI. So that’s what we’ll have in Orlando this year.
As I mentioned last week, we’ve seen strong interest in a more strategic look at the most critical topics, and so the four-hour trainings we’ll offer are aiming more at managers whose priority is a solid grounding in all the key elements of the technology. This is intended to help them make the right decisions about how to use these technologies to advance the business.
Microsoft Teams is obviously a critical topic for many enterprises, as this collaboration platform has continued to gain adoption and expand its functionality. To help you understand the full breadth of Teams’ potential role and impact in your organization, and how that role may evolve, we’ve got a Microsoft MVP, Tom Arbuthnot, principal of Empowering.Cloud, delivering our tutorial. He’ll provide an overview to help you understand Teams—including such critical issues as capabilities, licensing, PSTN connectivity, and the Teams ecosystem--before moving into some specific key areas:
- Measuring and Driving Adoption
- Teams as an Application Platform
- Governance
- How to Keep up to Date with the Constant Change in Features and Capabilities
- Operational best practices
For our session on contact center strategy, we’ve got the guy who literally wrote the book: Brad Cleveland, founding partner & senior advisor for the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), and author of the most-read book on contact centers, “Contact Center Management on Fast Forward." He'll lead a training session entitled, “Decoding Contact Centers: How to Boost Performance and Value.”
In keeping with the strategic theme of our training program, Cleveland’s session is intended to give technology leaders a broader perspective. As the session’s abstract notes, “This is not a review of specific technologies—rather, an objective look at how contact centers operate and how and where the right technologies and processes can supercharge performance.” Key topics will include:
- Challenges unique to contact centers
- The three levels of potential value
- The planning and management process
- Immutable laws defining contact centers
- The 7 metrics that gauge progress
- Supercharging performance and value
Finally, I’m delighted that our training on AI in the Contact Center will be led by Josh Streets, Founder & CEO, Scoreboard Group Consulting, who’s already a veteran in the area of contact center AI training. As he describes the session in his abstract, “you will learn about the core concepts of AI and automation, how to align it with your business strategy and service level commitments, how to design the right architecture, and how to deliver measurable results that transform your organization.” Among the key takeaways:
- Assessing your current AI maturity
- Implementing a 5-stage AI strategy framework
- Leveraging the right use cases, technologies & critical thinking skills to improve performance
- Understanding the importance of governance, change management & hiring for an AI future
- Best practices to avoid the common pitfalls of an AI transformation in the enterprise & contact center
All three of our training sessions will take place Monday afternoon, March 25, 2024, at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL. Your Training pass also gets you into the EC2024 keynote sessions and full access to the exhibit floor, among other benefits. You can add a 3-day Conference pass to your Monday Training, to get a full week of intensive, in-depth, vendor-neutral content—most notably, our amazing lineup of end-user-led sessions. (The full roster of enterprise end user speakers continues to grow and can be found on the event homepage.)
I hope to see you in Orlando next March!