Draft Agenda
QATC Annual Conference
September 17-19, 2024
Monday, September 16
2:30-5:00 p.m. – Registration
3:00-4:00 p.m. – Complimentary Pre-Conference Session
Roadmap to the QATC Annual Conference. New to the QATC conference? Come to this fun and interactive session to hear how to make the most of your time at this event. Review the agenda and learn how these key topics will give you specific takeaways for your organization and help you with business decisions down the road.
4:00-5:00 p.m. – Complimentary Pre-Conference Session
Speed Networking. Everyone has heard of Speed Dating. Attend this session for a variation that will help you start off the conference with a bunch of new friends! In our Speed Networking session, you will spend just a few minutes getting to know some of your fellow attendees, and exchange business cards so that you can talk more over the next few days and keep in touch after the conference is over.
Tuesday, September 17
7:30-9:00 a.m. – Registration & Continental Breakfast
9:00-10:30 a.m. – Welcome & Keynote Address
More Than A Motto: Creating Your Leadership Legacy. Join Justin Robbins in this opening session exploring the critical link between words and actions in leadership. Discover practical strategies to align daily efforts with organizational goals, boosting motivation and commitment among your team. Gain insights into maintaining trust and influence through a bias for action, overcoming complacency, and driving meaningful change. Learn actionable steps to establish a leadership legacy based on integrity and accountability, transforming your approach to inspire others and ensure every word spoken is reinforced by decisive action. – Speaker: Justin Robbins, MetricSherpa
10:45 a.m.-12:00 p.m. – Workshops
Improving Call Soft Skills with Quality Monitoring. With every customer contact there are essentially two dimensions: the technical components and the softer communication elements. The hard truth is soft skills most often have more influence on a customer’s satisfaction with the call outcome. Customers who encounter agents who are compassionate, concerned, and show a sincere desire to help and resolve their issues are the ones who remain loyal. This session tackles the challenge of identifying objective soft skill behaviors and offers ways to measure them with quality monitoring. – Speaker: Deelee Freeman, Call Center Training Associates
Who Are These People? Networking and Selling Quality Assurance and Training within the Enterprise. Do you find your team is an island unto itself when it comes to the rest of the enterprise? This session is geared towards breaking down barriers between Quality Assurance or Training and other departments within your company. We will focus on selling the benefits of your team and networking with other departments such as sales, marketing, finance, payroll, and the increasingly important 'back-office' operational groups within the enterprise. This session aims to instruct you on what you can offer each of these groups, as well as what they can provide you to make your job easier and your team more effective. This session is an absolute must if you have issues selling and communicating your value and needs to other areas. – Speaker: Marshall Lee, CVS Health
AI Essentials for Learning and Development Professionals. This session will begin to explore AI in learning and development. Attendees will learn a brief history AI, including large language models and generative AI, and discover practical use cases and improved prompting techniques. The session will include a collaborative activity where participants will create a list of AI tools to experiment with in their organizations, offering practical actionable knowledge to enhance their design efforts. – Speaker: Paul Kern, Wisconsin School of Business
Exploring Successful Team Structures for Coaching. Coaching is the quintessential skill builder in any quality-conscious service delivery program. The question customer service leaders continue to wrestle with is where does this role really belong? Our time together will explore some excellent examples of successful team structures that offer a variety of creative and common coaching structures. This session will also share lessons learned to avoid the pitfalls of “we’ve always done it this way.”
Harnessing AI to Transform Your Quality Program. Generative AI is the top strategic investment priority according to Aberdeen’s State of the Contact Center 2024 report. Your organization is likely to be thinking along the same lines. This investment will have a profound impact on your quality program. In this session, we will explore the tools and technologies that are set to revolutionize the future of quality in contact centers and how you can leverage this opportunity to enhance your quality initiatives. Whether you're just starting to develop your quality program, or you already have an advanced program in place, we will discuss strategies and best practices for adopting these new technologies at any stage of quality program maturity. Join us to learn how to get started and make the most of your AI investment. – Speakers: Lauren Maschio & Jaime Standridge, NICE
12:00-1:30 p.m. – Luncheon
1:30-2:45 p.m. – Workshops
Quality Standards in a Brave New World. As the nature of how businesses design and deliver service evolves, so must the approaches and metrics used to evaluate the quality of those interactions. In this interactive session, attendees will go on an exploration of evolving their contact center's quality assurance standards and building a plan for ensuring their future success. They'll learn how to create and measure more effective QA criteria, better connect the dots between QA and coaching, and mature their contact center's overall relationship with quality assurance and coaching. Key takeaways include how to differentiate and determine the best ways to evaluate quality service interactions, frameworks for ensuring quality assurance results drive meaningful coaching sessions and sustainable performance improvement, ways to decide what can and can't be automated in your quality assurance program, tips for shifting the perception of the quality assurance program inside of your business, and guidance for evolving and maturing the role of your quality analysts. – Speaker: Justin Robbins, MetricSherpa
To Train or Not to Train: How Do I Ask that Question? When leaders aren't seeing the performance they expect out of their direct reports, they often turn to training as a solution. However, lack of knowledge isn't always the reason why performance suffers! In this session we'll go beyond the "skill vs. will" binary to explore six contributors to performance, discuss how to diagnose performance issues, and identify ways to partner with leaders and stakeholders on a solution. – Speaker: Kerry Polley, Western & Southern Financial Group
What Organizational Structure Works Best for Training & Quality Assurance? The Training and Quality Assurance groups work together hand-in-hand – trainers must be preparing agents to take calls and fulfill the mission of the organization, and QA is ensuring that the agents are doing the job. There should be continuous dialogue and strong bonds between these two groups. But what organizational structure works best? Hear from the panelists how their teams are aligned, and the pros and cons of QA and Training being together and apart from both a scoring and customer experience perspective.
Applying Quality Processes to Non-Phone Channels. Applying the exact same processes as a traditional contact center may not be the correct way to drive value and quality from non-phone channels. This panel session will have speakers from different organizations share best practices in monitoring and evaluating customer interactions across e-mail, chat, and social media contacts. We will highlight the most effective ways to monitor and evaluate written interactions, and will answer questions from attendees.
Enhancing Quality in Contact Centers through Employee-Driven Transformation and AI. Quality programs have evolved beyond mere reporting requirements; they now prioritize an agent-centric approach. Rather than checking boxes on a quality form, the focus should shift to delivering tangible outcomes. But how can you create a quality program that benefits customers, employees, and your business? In this session, discover how to fundamentally rethink your Quality program’s core and leverage AI as the secret ingredient to drive outcomes. Learn how AI can drive meaningful results, enhancing both employee satisfaction and customer experiences. – Speakers: Maria Arp, MSC Industrial Supply, Nicole Nevulis & Trent Isaacs, Verint
2:45-3:45 p.m. – Afternoon Break
3:45-5:00 p.m. – Workshops
Best Practices for Rolling Out QA Automation. This session will be spent sharing success stories and best practices and lessons learned for rolling out QA automation will be shared with attendees. The workshop will take participants through the entire process from designing the QA form, building keywords and phrases, creating a nesting period, encouraging adoption of Auto QA, developing the dispute process and supporting operational leaders along the entire journey. – Speaker: Dawn Mangelsen, Cox Automotive
Meet the Metrics, Promote Service, and Display Winning Behaviors from Day 1. In this session discover how to incorporate and develop the behaviors and metrics, management want to see. While instilling the book smart knowledge and street smarts behaviors. Imagine your Training and Quality teams being advised the expectation is not just to meet the metrics and behaviors from day 1 in their new role, but the metrics standards the new hires are to meet have been cut in half. We will be sharing strategies to setup your newly hired agents to successfully showcase the behaviors, knowledge, and metric goals from the first day on the job. – Speakers: Michelle Chevalier & Beth Battani, EquiTrust Life Insurance Company
Do You Know Who You’re Training? As training professionals, we have the tools to execute a great training to our staff. However, understanding our staff is one of the most pivotal tools of a great training. We can’t take a one size fits all approach, and we certainly can’t negate some of the major factors that contribute to how our staff retains information (outside of visual/auditory/hands on learning). In this presentation, I will explain why having a general understanding of adult learning theory will improve your training, how different generations receive and digest information, and leveraging this information to maintain engagement. – Speaker: Maleeka Holdson, Vibrant Emotional Health
Don’t Forget to Train Your Coaches! Coaches play a key role in the success of your employees. Has your company adopted a particular coaching model and have all your coaches been trained? What do you do beyond that training to ensure your coaches are using the model properly and encouraging the reps for good work while also lining up plans for opportunities to improve? The panelists for this session will share what they’re doing and provide insight that could work in your contact center.
Change is Good! We face change from every direction. So how do we embrace and welcome change? How do we prepare ourselves to adapt and thrive in a new environment? Come to this interactive session to learn about the human aspect of embracing change and some practical principles to welcome change.
5:00-7:00 p.m. – Networking Reception
Wednesday, September 18
7:45-9:00 a.m. – Breakfast & Industry Roundtables
9:00-10:15 a.m. – Workshops
Workshop for Best Practices in Quality Evaluation Form Design. If you want to learn how other call centers have designed their quality forms, this session is for you! Participants will be placed in small groups and given quality form-related topics to discuss and share what has worked best in their centers. Next, the group as a whole will create a master list of best practices. Some of the topics will include: Form layout (i.e., number of attributes and categories), scoring, use of auto-fail, bonus points, and how to make quality more objective.
Balancing Service Level with Employee Development. Frontline leaders are constantly challenged with balancing service goals with the development of the employee. Is there a way to achieve both? Hear from industry leaders share their tips to maximize training and development plans along with the customer experience.
Using Data to Find Problematic Interactions & Opportunities to Improve Your Contact Center. Can you take simple and easy to access contact center data and use it to pinpoint contacts that might be an issue? Not just frustrated utterances, but bigger picture trends that point to training or other improvement opportunities? Of course, and that’s why we are here! Randomly listening and grading calls has its very real purpose, but in this session, we will discuss how to find interactions that statistically seem questionable and may point to a bigger problem. In this scenario the additional purpose of QA would be to find and fix issues with agent training, motivation, or fixing company communication. There will be graphs and analyses, but we promise to make them fun and insightful. – Speakers: Ric & Chris Kosiba, Real Numbers
How Real-Time Analysis Exponentially Improves Quality and Coaching. The majority of call centers today only have the resources to review 3% of their calls, meaning that there is no visibility into what's happening on 97% of the interactions with your customers. We will share multiple best practices on automating quality scorecards, compliance, and agent behavior for 100% of calls to dramatically improve quality, customer satisfaction, and overall operational efficiencies. Taking quality to the next level looks at quality in real-time, enabling AI to alert agents of script problems, predict customer aggression levels and propensity to buy, alert supervisors pro-actively as problems begin to surface in calls based on customer tone, keywords and intents, and more. Additionally you will learn how AI tools like agent assist BOTs can help (NOT REPLACE) agents by recommending the next best steps and actions to ensure quality is better on literally every call, and acts as an automated coach/trainer for each agent at any stage of their career. Join us for insights on how real-time analytics can dramatically improve your quality starting at day 1. – Speaker: Jon Arnett, Yactraq
New Thinking About an Old Problem. With the change in the nature of work over the past few years, it’s time for a fresh look at employee attrition and what can be done about it. Grounded in research from 20+ academic studies, this session offers a fresh look at why people really leave - and how Quality and Training can impact retention. You’ll leave with some new ideas, as well as tools and resources you can use to build stronger teams when you get back to the office. – Speaker: Lee Waters, C2Perform
10:15-10:45 a.m. – Break
10:45 a.m.-12:00 p.m. – Workshops
Call Coaching Fundamentals: Preparation and Delivery of Impactful Feedback. You can have the most advanced quality recording technology, evaluation and analytical tools, but if you are not delivering impactful call coaching, you will continue to fall short in providing reliable high-quality service to your customers. This session provides practical suggestions to 1) create a coaching plan; 2) deliver feedback and 3) follow-up with continued support. You will learn three specific approaches to call coaching aimed to motivate and develop behaviors required to meet process requirements and create a satisfying, memorable customer experience. – Speaker: Deelee Freeman, Call Center Training Associates
From Ticket Takers to Subject Matter Experts. So many customer service workers have been placed in a very tight box. Take these tickets...follow these uninspired steps to get a quality score...ignore that problem that’s been there for years. The job can be suffocating if we don't find the right balance. These service workers are capable of so much more. It’s time we free ourselves of the legacy connotations and embrace the true nature of CX work today. Join Nate Brown of CX Accelerator to learn how he has helped cultivate service workers into knowledge curators, not just ticket takers. Key insights include the role of intrinsic motivation in a modern Customer Service function, how we can "be the guide" the make the brand come to life, and how to draw your service workers into your knowledge management process in extremely meaningful ways. – Speaker: Nate Brown, CX Accelerator
What’s the Best Training Delivery Method? In today’s contact center, we have many different types of training at our disposal: classroom, e-learning, web seminar, role-playing, etc. But what works best? The answer may be “It depends on the topic,” but come to this interactive session to hear different viewpoints and share your ideas as well.
Fostering Employee Engagement in Today’s Contact Center. Employee engagement is critical in contact centers, as agents act as the frontline to your customers. Agents need to be brand ambassadors, remaining positive about the organization even in the face of customer issues. Contact centers that focus on increasing employee engagement are certain to reap substantial rewards. Join us for a discussion about how to foster employee engagement in today’s contact center environment.
Navigating the Hybrid Work Environment. The future of work is no doubt comprised of a hybrid work environment which has a lasting impact on contact centers as well as the quality assurance and training teams supporting new and tenured agents. We will discuss real questions and provide real answers to hybrid work, to include people, processes, and technology challenges. Going beyond just the pros and cons, we will focus on humanizing hybrid work and rethinking the employee and customer experience. Hear keys to succeed in a hybrid world and a roadmap to help your teams do things differently to support a hybrid workforce.
12:00-1:30 p.m. – Luncheon & Contact Center Jeopardy
1:30-2:45 p.m. – Workshops
Developing a Quality Culture. A great call center culture begins from the top, with every functional or line of business owner being held accountable for the aspects of their business that impact both the customer and agent experience. Join us in this session to discuss techniques and best practices to cultivate a quality culture from the top down. – Speaker: Allyson Diffley, Delta Dental
Home Alone: Training without Trainers. Are you a team of one without a dedicated training team? Are you a trainer but you have far more students than a proper ratio will support? Do you have seasonal ramps that require far more training resources than you have today? This session will help you understand the basics of how to develop and deploy a Subject Matter Expert (SME) supported training model. The aim of this session is to help answer the question how can I train with fewer trainers, when SMEs are not always good at instruction? Come to this session as we journey through how to support an SME model. – Speaker: Marshall Lee, CVS Health
Making the Right Hiring Decisions Comes First. If you’re been searching for one single thing you can do to improve training success, staff retention, call quality, and overall performance of your staff, there is a single solution that will significantly improve all these other areas. Simply make the right hiring decisions on the front end and everything else is impacted in a positive way. Come to this session for a panel discussion to hear what has worked (and not worked) for some organizations.
Ask the Expert – QA. This event is your chance to ask our panel of experts anything Quality Assurance! This interactive session will answer questions submitted and chosen by conference attendees. If you have a question or an issue that has been a challenge to your team, bring your question to the panel! The audience will also get a chance to give some input. This session should be dynamic and informative, but the topics covered will be chosen by you and your peers at the event.
The Agile Contact Center – 5 Hallmarks that Ignite Results-Driven Performance. To be effective, customer service must be central to the organization and integrated into the business sectors that interact with and impact customers. Customer service goes beyond the department. Customer service is a strategic leadership principle that serves as a direct bridge and relationship to customers. It is a key concept that must be instilled in and throughout the organization. When customer service is aligned with the client's needs, the appropriate dialogue, actions, projects, and initiatives occur. What 'drivers' must be present to set this in motion? In this interactive session, Tonya Haynes shares the lessons, experiences, and pitfalls she's learned over her 20+ years of directing customer service organizations, as well as the approaches she's used to establish service and support infrastructures that are sustainable, innovative, and profitable. Attendees will learn the secrets to hiring the right People, aligning operations for the greatest customer experience, identifying, implementing and integrating Systems and Technology, and establishing feedback channels, monitoring and governance efforts. – Speaker: Tonya Haynes, Phoenix Business Development Group
2:45-3:45 p.m. – Ice Cream Social with the Sponsors
3:45-5:00 p.m. – Workshops
Tips for Hiring & Retaining the Best Quality Assurance Specialists. How do you hire the best quality assurance specialists? Come to this session to learn the characteristics that make a good QA specialist, and then continue the discussion about where the QA discipline can take someone beyond that entry role. We will also discuss how to measure the performance of our QA team and the critical KPIs we should be reviewing.
New Hire Training Debrief: Collaborating for Improvement. Learn how your Training and Quality Assurance teams can connect after each training class to discuss how the new hires are developing as they transition to their new role, along with the opportunities, trends, and wins. Hear how to find ways to improve future training classes and support the current new hires as they transition to the contact center.
40/20 Ideas in 60 Minutes – Coaching, Rewards, & Recognition. Yes, you read it correctly! 40 ideas will come from the panel and 20 ideas will come from you, the participants, instead of all 60 ideas coming from the panel. Plan to learn what others are doing and to share what you are doing. Come prepared to share your success stories or even things you tried that didn’t work.
Noteworthy or Nonsense: Real-Talk on the Top CX Trends of 2024. Generative this, artificial that, automated everything, and human-assisted nothing. If the CX hype cycle and industry marketing engines have your head spinning and your business still struggling to drive improvements, you're not alone. In this session, hear a candid conversation on how to sort CX fact from fiction. We’ll get real on why most businesses still struggle to design and deliver great customer experiences, share how technology is (and isn't) changing the way they work, and reveal where they're focusing their attention over the next 12 months as they mature and evolve their businesses. Key takeaways include how to ensure that you're clear on your contact center's strategy and connecting it to key business objectives, ways to address shiny object syndrome and avoid its harm on delivering real business value, insight on where other contact center leaders are focusing their investments and the results they're seeing (or not), and advice on how to sort fact from fiction in current customer experience innovations. – Speaker: Justin Robbins, MetricSherpa
Selecting New Technology. Are you getting ready to acquire new technology? Is it something you’ve not had before or a replacement of an existing system? This session will review the steps to developing a comprehensive request for proposal (RFP) and the process needed to review the options available while considering the role of IT, Finance and Purchasing in the analysis of options and final decision. Learn a proven process for making a well-balanced decision that considers system technology, vendor capabilities and financial concerns. – Speaker: Maggie Klenke
6:15 p.m. – Depart for Evening Event
6:30-9:30 p.m. – Evening Event at Friends in Low Places
Thursday, September 19
7:45-8:45 a.m. – Breakfast & Topic Roundtables
8:45-10:00 a.m. – Workshops
Call Calibration: Achieving Quality Scoring Consistency. You can have the most advanced call recording technology, evaluation tools and a dedicated quality staff but without consistency in scoring, the integrity of your entire quality program will be compromised. Call calibration is vital to the health of your quality program, but so many find their calibration sessions frustrating and not necessarily helpful in taking consistency to the next level. This session provides everything you need to know about setting up an effective Call Calibration Program, how to measure calibration, and most importantly how to run a successful calibration session where participants are engaged and committed to the consistent application of quality standards to call behaviors. – Speaker: Deelee Freeman, Call Center Training Associates
Training Across Cultures: Effective Training Strategies for a Global Workforce. Today's call center workforce is commonly comprised of resources from all corners of the globe. Whether you work with global agents through BPOs or have directly staffed agents beyond your local borders, you likely have encountered miscommunications that arise due to cultural differences. This session will explore ways to identify those cultural differences, along with some real-life examples, and provide strategies to train agents around these topics in a way that is open and respectful. – Speaker: Sarah Stockler-Rex, Cloudbreak Health
60 Ideas in 60 Minutes – Training. This fast-paced session with a panel of vendor experts will provide you with a practice idea each minute. This is not a sales pitch for products. These are the vendor experts that can provide tips on how to get the most out of a WFM investment from the early planning stages, implementation, training, and ongoing use. This format will give you some last minute tips to take home and implement immediately!
Thinking on Your Feet. What happens when things go wrong before your virtual training, coaching, or QA session? So many things can happen and you have to leave your frustrations outside the room! System outages, internet outages, absences... oh, my! How do you maintain a professional image in the middle of the chaos? Come to this session to hear tips and do’s and, don’ts when things don’t go exactly as you planned!
What XLAs are NOT. Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) have been at the crest of the Gartner Hype Cycle for the last few years. They have recently gained a lot of traction in the IT Service Management world but are only now beginning to be introduced into the contact center. If customer experience is important in your support center, this enlightening session will explain how XLAs can drive experiential improvement. Join multiple award-winning CX thought leader and influencer, Doug Rabold, for this introduction to XLAs - by defining what they aren't so you can avoid the pitfalls that others have fallen into when designing and implementing XLAs. – Speaker: Doug Rabold, Bold Ray Consulting
10:00-10:15 a.m. – Break
10:15-11:30 a.m. – Workshops
60 Ideas in 60 Minutes – Quality Assurance. This fast-paced session with a panel of your peers will have you writing furiously as you try to capture an idea a minute on paper! This format will give you some last minute tips to take home and implement immediately – if you can catch them all!
Generation WHAT? Understanding Generations and Their Impact on the Modern Contact Center. Gen Z, Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen X – some have names and letters? The years change, and what is a Xennial? Does any of this matter? What is a Yeet? The most awkward moments can come at a holiday meal when you sit around and the now grown up kids are home from college, and their parents are sitting with them, and the grandparents and everyone tries to connect; or it can happen in a Zoom – or in a shift bid. Generations and context matter because the world evolves – change is rapid, but the human experience is constant. In this session we will talk about some of the things that impact how each of the main cohorts in the workforce today can influence what you do, and how they impact your role and even your work as a team. No single session can cover all of generational theory, but we can equip you with some strategies to have some meaningful moments, give some understanding to what the current definitions are, and maybe avoid some cringe. – Speaker: Marshall Lee, CVS Health
No Silver Bullets: A Holistic Approach to Accelerating Agent Proficiency. In a realm where quick fixes are a myth, this session will give practical advice to improve agent onboarding over time. Discover how Renown Health revolutionized its call center training plan by merging evidence-based learning techniques with strategic business planning. This session will unveil our journey employing spaced repetition, retrieval practice, and cognitive schemas with operational insights and partnership. Come to this session to learn how we streamlined agent training into efficient, manageable units, reducing time to phones by 75% and full proficiency by 66% on our imaging scheduling team. – Speaker: Jon Snyder, Renown Health
Ask the Expert – Coaching. This event is your chance to ask our panel of experts anything Coaching! This interactive session will answer questions submitted and chosen by conference attendees. If you have a question or an issue that has been a challenge to your team, bring your question to the panel! The audience will also get a chance to give some input. This session should be dynamic and informative, but the topics covered will be chosen by you and your peers at the event.
Your Systems are Down – What’s Next? Turn business disruptions into a space for QA and training to shine. What can you have up your sleeve that creates value for the contact center when systems are down? Come to this session to share your ideas about how to overcome technical challenges.
11:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. – Closing General Session
Become A Catalyst for Change Post-QATC. You are undoubtedly returning home with a head full of ideas following your experience at QATC. But, will you put those ideas into action and ensure that you don’t lose the excitement that you felt at the conference? In this closing session, Justin Robbins will share how to build momentum coming out of QATC and engage your team back at the office in exploring and implementing new ideas to improve quality and training. This will be a high-energy ending to our time together that will ensure you’re set up to succeed post-QATC. – Speaker: Justin Robbins, MetricSherpa
12:00 p.m. – 2024 QATC ends