After introductions, our day began with a welcome from Brian Vogt, CEO Denver Botanic Gardens, who spoke to their focus on the customer experience. They have been in the process of rebranding, expanding infrastructure, and overall process improvement.

At the heart of their customer service culture is promoting “authentic joy in the hearts of their employees,” so that interactions with visitors are uplifting and inspiring. Personal interaction with visitors increases satisfaction and enhances their experience.

Russ Schmuhl, our ICSA Program Co-Chair and a member of the Botanic Garden Board of Trustees, expanded on these thoughts before we left for a very informative tour of the spectacular gardens! Based on our experience, there is no doubt they are living up to their missions and values.

Upon returning to the meeting room, Connie Smith, Chief Evangelist, Envision 

Telephony, gave her presentation, “Resolve To Be a Better Contact Center

Leader.” As always, Connie brought great insight into the “why’s” and “how’s” of

performing as a leader in a contact center. Using excerpts from Dan Coen’s book,

Building Call Center Culture, she explored employee personality types and how to

lead them more effectively.

Following lunch Amy May, Principal, AMTECH Marketing gave her presentation “Internal Benchmarking for Persistent Performance.” This was an excellent opportunity to learn more about how to lead change in your organization while measuring and documenting improvement. This process includes analyzing the current situation, agreeing on action items, empowering the transition, and anchoring the change. And then starting over to continue with persistent performance.

Our last presenter was Scott Wooten from Globus Families. He covered a cased study of “Email and Voice Recognition.” In this he talked about change and growth in call centers over the years and the need to choose the right technology to keep up with these changes. This becomes especially important when looking at implementing voice recognition, email routing, screen pops, and knowledge base.

His case study detailed how email processing through Outlook was reducing agent

efficiency thereby requiring more staff and thus more cost. This was improved by

implementing technology upgrades for email routing through the phone switch.