Yesterday’s second annual Voice of the Customer retreat in Bolton was a nice affair, at the classy International country club in Bolton, just outside Boston. One of the most memorable quotes was from Marlene Bessette, VP for Strategy and Customer Loyalty at Xerox. “Culture eats strategy for lunch every time.” So true.

During the open mike session, I asked if anyone had success creating a common company-wide vocabulary regarding Voice of the Customer - even something as basic as who the most ‘important’ customer was. The answer was ‘no’ from all but the smallest (or single product) companies. Shows how long a way we have to go before we truly start embedding the Voice of the Customer into everything we do.

Speakers and topics for the October 7 “Voice of the Customer” retreat will explore a range of leading-edge topics in customer satisfaction and customer interaction, according to the organizers of the event, which will be held at a country club resort outside Boston.

The agenda includes the following speakers:

• Marlene Bessette, vice president of customer loyalty at Xerox, on how her company uses satisfaction data to identify and cultivate customer champions.
• Tina Taylor, vice president of global customer care at GE Fanuc, on using satisfaction scores to measure the results of internal process improvements.
• Dale Troppito, managing partner of The Gantry Group, on a new research study that explores best practices in pay incentives for high customer satisfaction scores.
• Matt Tippets, product manager at Parature, on using a Web forum to solicit and prioritize customer-inspired product innovations.
• Ann Walker, support team manager at The MathWorks, on a way to integrate customer feedback into the product development cycle.
• Peter Holt, director of worldwide technical support at Progress Software, on capturing and acting on “outside-the-box” customer feedback.
• Renee Bochman, senior director of global customer care at Endeca Technologies, on how to link internal knowledgebases and external community expertise into a single Web portal.

“Technology companies are wrestling with all the challenges of empowering their customers,” says conference co-producer Jeffrey Tarter. “We’ve brought together a group of people who have implemented very successful solutions to these challenges, and we know the discussions will be extraordinary.”

The “Voice of the Customer” Conference will take place on October
7 at the International, a world-famous golf resort and spa in Bolton, Mass. The registration fee is $285 per person.

Additional program information and registration is available at:
       http://www.first-wednesday.com/support_conference.html

I’m helping put together the second Boston area Voice of the Customer retreat on October 7at the luxurious International club near Boston. We have a stellar group of speakers and panelists.

The first keynote will be by Marlene Bessette, VP Strategy and Customer Loyalty, Xerox. “Your ideal customers aren’t just satisfied—they become evangelists for your company.” Marlene spoke at one of our First Wednesday Group roundtable meetings and she was a huge hit with her depth of knowledge and passion for the subject.

The second keynote will be by Tina Taylor, VP Global Customer Care, GE Fanuc
By using Net Promoter “willingness to recommend” scores, GE has developed a continuous improvement process for support.

Sign up for the retreat now - contact me for a $50 discount code per person.

Interesting factoids from some of the talks - from Sean O’Driscoll, former GM of Community Support at Microsoft, now on his own. One observation was that the search tool (e.g. Google) gets most of the credit for the content that you (or your customers) have created.

Another presentation was from the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon Church). Interesting factoid - the average age of their online knowledge base volunteers is 70!

The Euro Cup is going on, and it is wonderful to watch different communities celebrate as they win.

I’m heading off in a few hours to Berlin via Zurich, for the first ever Consortium for Service Innovation/TAUS joint conference. I’ll be doing the keynote at the event, which will be held very close to Checkpoint Charlie. For those of you read spy novels (or history), you can see why this is going to be an interesting trip on a personal level as well.

After many months of hard work by 25 volunteers, Wednesday’s MITCIO Sloan Symposium was a huge success. The event was co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School; the Sloan Alumni Club of Boston and the Society for Information Management (SIM). I was part of the content panel team that helped panel captains with their panels and also was a panel captain for the CIO keynote panel. I also was a judge for the first ever MITCIO CIO of the Year Award for IT Innovation.

The CIO keynote panel comprised of Gerri Martin-Flickinger from Adobe Systems Incorporated, Molly ONeill from the EPA, Stuart McGuigan from Liberty Mutual Group and Andre V. Mendes from Special Olympics. The session was moderated by Erik Brynjolfsson, a noted professor from MIT’s Sloan School of Business.

Met a number of interesting people (organizers as well as vendors/attendees/CIOs/students and had some stimulating conversations on a variety of topics. Will probably help out again next year.

I’m at the Disney Dolphin hotel in Orlando, putting the finishing touches on tomorrow’s talk titled ‘Aging workforce: Time bomb or Opportunity?’ for the IBM PULSE2008 event. If you are at the conference, stop by and say ‘Hi’ - it is at 10:30 AM ET.

I’ll reference aging statistics from around the world (two contrasting examples: Singapore, where the government offers dating classes to offset a decline in fertility that has been happening for 28 straight years. The contrast is India, where there are 500 million people under the age of 25. )  I’ll draw on research from IBM, Stanford and IBM on online gaming and the lessons business can take from them, particularly in terms of what it means to engage a younger workforce.

Should be fun, it is certainly a different topic and audience. Will be whisked off right after to the airport to make it for the pre-event dinner for the MIT CIO Symposium, where I’ll be meeting with the folks from my CIO Keynote Panel.

I just got back from a second trip to the west coast in a week. This time, it was the SSPA conference in Santa Clara. Didn’t get to stay the entire conference as I had meetings with clients and prospects, but there were a couple of interesting sessions.

One talk was by Geetha Panda, worldwide head of service delivery excellence at HP, based out of Bangalore. It was an interesting session, focusing on how they managed what they had control over ‘inputs’ rather than the ‘outputs’ (customer satisfaction etc.) A very six sigma approach, but one that seems to have paid off for The HP team.

Interestingly I haven’t found many managers of low-volume, high complexity support centers that have much use for the six sigma approach. I think there is a lot that both ’sides’ can learn from each other, but I’ll leave that alone for another time.

Just got back from the Santa Clara SSPA conference. Met with clients and also stopped by Adobe’s CIO at their HQ in San Jose as  part of the ‘meet and greet’ for the MITCIO Symposium, which I am helping to organize. For those of you keeping score at home, that is two trips to the west coast in a week.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to see too much of the conference itself, but sat in on two interesting presentations. One was presented by Dheeraj Prasad, a friend and colleague from Microsoft India who talked about ‘talent development’ in India, and the unique challenges with hiring and keeping technical support talent in India. The other was by Geetha Panda, the worldwide head of service delivery excellence for HP, whose six sigma based approach to escalations helped turn HP’s Bangalore center from a ‘at risk’ category to one of their highest rated centers of excellence.

I’m looking forward to the second Voice of the Customer conference on October 7th at the lovely International golf club in Boston. This conference, put together by the First Wednesday Group,  is for service and support professionals and received rave reviews last year.
The keynote will be by Marlene Bessette, VP for Corporate Strategy and Loyalty at Xerox, someone I have the privilege of calling a friend. The title will be called ‘Creating Customer Passion’.