Welcome and Introductions

Al Hahn, Executive Director, ASP
Dennis Smeltzer, President, TSANet
Paul Esch Strategy & Business Development, TSANet
Eric Harrington, COO, TeamSupport

Customer Success + Support: A Natural Partnership

In the software as a subscription era, staying in close touch with your customers and thoroughly understanding their needs isn’t an option. It’s a bedrock requirement if you want to stay in business over the long term. What information do you need to have in order to maintain a healthy connection? Who will gather it, and who will do the ongoing analysis that will enable your company to succeed?

In virtually any software company, the team that far and away has the most interaction with the customers is Support. As a potential source of insight into the customer base, there is no better channel — but it needs to be effectively focused. Here is where the partnership with the Customer Success group needs to begin, and expand from there into a cohesive long term strategy for winning.
Mikael Blaisdell, Founder & Executive Director, The Customer Success Association, Publisher of Customer Success Central
Followed by live Q & A

Ask Me Anything

David Kay is one of the foremost consultants on support today. He has helped scores of companies implement KCS, create great self-support websites and improve their customer support. In this session he will take questions on virtually anything related to support live from our attendees.
David Kay, Principal, DBKay & Associates

Customer Self-Service – Helping Customers Succeed

Customer Success + Support are rolled together when we are able to help our customers help themselves.  We will examine some of the keys to customer self-service as well as the pitfalls, and discuss how customer self-service can be one of the most important aspects of customer success.

Dave Muirhead, Sr. Director of Customer Support Services at Oracle
Followed by Al Hahn with live interview and Q&A

TSANet Panel: Simplify your Technology Partner Support Management process

Listen to top support executives as they discuss how they manage Technology partnership programs to pass customers from one vendor to another smoothly utilizing the benefits of the TSANet infrastructure. Establishing a support collaboration path with partners results in greater customer success, satisfaction and an overall better experience. Dennis Smeltzer, Moderator; John Boggs, NetApp; Sri Krishnaswamy, Nutanix; Ted Williams, Red Hat; Rene Karel, VMware.

Welcome and Review of First Day

Al Hahn, Executive Director, ASP

After Customer Success; Digital Transformation

Enterprises are still largely siloed in their approach to dealing with prospects and customers. Today, most have built a self-service experience for their customers that is focused on logging support cases and searching the knowledgebase, but in 2020, is this enough?

We continue to move towards personalization; the ability to personalize each interaction an individual has with your company, at every step of their journey is becoming more and more important. We have all heard the digital transformation buzzword over the past decade and at the heart of Digital Transformation is a fundamental shift towards the customer experience as the most important driver of business value.
Jennifer Macintosh, VP, Customer Experience, MindBridge
Followed by live Q&A

Customer Success + Support in the Indirect Channel: It’s Complicated

Managing the boundaries between Support and Customer Success can be challenging in a single organization let alone more than 400 third party organizations. Companies working to engage customers and ensure their success through a reseller channel need to build strong foundations that can adapt to work with varied and often imperfect data to make key decisions. Join us to learn how Dassault Systemes SolidWorks has evolved their process of identifying customers potentially at risk and targeting the right resources at the right time to address issues that put recurring revenue at risk.
Ian Baxter, VP Worldwide Technical Services, SOLIDWORKS
Frank Aloia III, Director SOLIDWORKS Customer Success & Enterprise Services
Followed by live Q&A

Ask Me Anything

Francoise Tourniaire is a premier consultant in the support space. She has authored several books, including The Art of Support. She consults on all things support including many award winning support websites. This is your chance to ask her any support related question.
Francoise Tourniaire, Founder & Owner, FTWorks
Followed by live Q&A

Rethinking Support & Customer Success

Republic Wireless has taken an unconventional approach to support for their members in the sense they don’t have a traditional 1-800 number or call center, yet they are able to consistently receive high customer satisfaction scores and measures of customer success in an industry where that is the exception instead of the norm. Ben will explain the reasons and complexities behind their strategy, how they’ve kept customer success as a focal point throughout their decision making and business adjustments, as well as how they define this success.
Ben Garris, Manager of Online Support & Customer Experience at Republic Wireless
Followed by live Q&A

ASP’s 2020 Overall Best Support Website Winner, NetApp

NetApp won the Overall Best Support Website in this years ASP Best Support Websites competition, our 22nd year. This is their third year in a row as a winner. Although there were many other award winning sites, they had the best site of all. How did they get there, Laura will share their journey and some tips from the top.
Laura Cunningham, Product Manager, NetApp Support Site, NetApp
Followed by live  Q&A

Lightning Round

During this time, anyone can present about anything regarding support. You can pose a question to your peers, make a short presentation about something you have done, are trying out, or are wondering about. Each presenter can present for a maximum of 10 minutes and take questions or get answers for 5 minutes more. You must reserve your slot by end of business day Oct. 7th.

New Company Wins Award for Best Achievement in ASP’s 2020 Best Support Website Competition

PowerSchool entered our competition for the first time this year. To our surprise they scored our top five and also received a Best Achievement award (tied with Republic Wireless). How did this upstart medium-sized company outscore many large companies and wind up in elite company with Ivanti, NetApp, Nutanix and Republic Wireless? Jbid will tell us some of their secrets to achieve such stellar performance
Jbid Kissel, Sr. Manager, PowerSchool Community, PowerSchool
Followed by live Q&A

Eric Harrington, COO, TeamSupport

Eric Harrington is COO of TeamSupport. Co-founding TeamSupport in 2008, Eric is one of three founders who helped build what is now a global mission-critical business solution for managing customer support. Prior to TeamSupport, Eric spent nearly a decade in the Broadcast Industry, leading global support and services for realtime On-Air playback systems.  A former U.S. Marine, Eric lives in Winter Garden, FL with his family.

Françoise Tourniaire, Founder & Owner FT Works

Françoise Tourniaire founded FT Works, a consultancy firm that helps technology companies create and improve their customer success and support operations. She is the co-founder of ChurnSquad, a firm that helps technology vendors increase adoption, decrease churn, and maximize expansion revenue.

Her expertise includes process design, designing support websites, soft skills training, and creating effective metrics and dashboards.

She is the author of The Art of Support, a guide to running customer success and support organizations, now in its second edition, Just Enough CRM, a business manager’s blueprint to selecting and implementing CRM systems, Collective Wisdom: Transforming Support through Knowledge, a handbook for enlightened knowledge management in support organizations, and Selling Value, a guide to creating, marketing, and selling support portfolios.

Ben Garris, Manager, Online Support & Customer Experience, Republic Wireless

Ben Garris is the Manager of Online Support and Customer Experience at Republic Wireless where he provides the vision and goals for the online and peer-to-peer support ecosystem while also improving the end-to-end customer experience from onboarding to retention. Ben has helped Republic Wireless be recognized as having one of the Ten Best Support Websites by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) two years in a row as well as consistently achieving one of the industry’s best customer satisfaction scores.

Prior to joining Republic Wireless, Ben served as a Communications and Training Specialist at ABB, Inc. where he led the redesign of an internal training and documentation portal in 15 languages, serving over 150,000+ employees in over 100 countries.

Jennifer MacIntosh, Customer Experience Industry Advisor & ASP Board Member

Jennifer MacIntosh has over 20 years experience working with high-tech and financial services companies helping them to establish, lead, and grow their Customer Experience and Success practices. Recognized as one of the Top 50 Women in Saas in 2018 Jennifer is an advocate for the customer who leads customer engagement, adoption, support and value realization of the MindBridge solution.

She is passionate about helping technology companies leverage self-service and reuse knowledge to improve the customer experience while managing their organizational costs. Prior to joining MindBridge, Jennifer built and led the Customer Success program at Coveo, a Canadian unicorn.  Prior to this, she was Founder and Principal Consultant of Okas Consulting, a global consulting practice. Jennifer has also held executive roles where she significantly improved the customer experience at Yahoo, Quest Software and Cognos (IBM). Jennifer has deep knowledge and expertise in Analytics, Customer Experience, Support, Self-Service, and Knowledge Management. She is a Prosci certified Change Manager and a KCS^v6 Practitioner, Trainer and active industry contributor. Jennifer resides in Ottawa with her family and in her spare time enjoys painting abstract art.

Mikael Blaisdell, Founder & Executive Director, The Customer Success Association

Mikael Blaisdell is a recognized leading voice on the strategy, process, people and technology of Customer Success. His ongoing research and leadership of the over 35,000 member worldwide Customer Success Community on LinkedIn provide a unique global view of the development of the Customer Success profession and market. As Founder and Executive Director of The Customer Success Association, and Publisher of Customer Success Central, Mikael’s vision and commentary about how companies can optimize customer relationships is read in over 160 countries around the world.

Paul Lyons, Vice President of Customer Experience & Engagement, Red Hat

Paul is the Vice President of Customer Experience & Engagement at Red Hat. Red Hat’s global CEE team manages the proactive & reactive engagements with our customers & partners via our team’s deep leadership in Technical Account Management, Customer Success, Global Support & Escalation Management.

Scott Froehlich, Sr. Director of Customer Experience & Engagement, Red Hat

Scott Froehlich is the Sr. Director of Customer Experience & Engagement at Red Hat. He is responsible for leading the combined global Customer Service, Customer Success, Escalation Management and Support Delivery organizations. As a leader of a business of almost 1000 individuals, Scott brings a clear understanding of the challenges our customers experience as well as the unique demands required to provide them a world class reactive, proactive and preemptive experience.

When Scott joined Red Hat in 2018, he brought over 20 years experience in the support and services businesses working across multiple industries and countries. He has a depth of experience that provides perspective across Telecommunications, IT, Data Storage and Software industries. Scott understands execution challenges of companies of all sizes due to his leadership background from Nortel, Netas, Genband, NetApp and Red Hat.

Scott holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech. Please reference Scott’s LinkedIn profile for more details.

Jerry Stalick,Vice President of Global Security Operations and Customer Success, F5

Jerry Stalick is the Vice President of Global Security Operations and Customer Success for the F5 Silverline Managed Service line of business. In over 12 years at F5 he has managed a variety of Support, Services, and Customer Success teams, including launching Silverline Managed Services. He has previously held operations and customer-facing roles in the Service Provider industry, including AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, Disney Mobile, and others.

Jerry combines a focus on the customer experience with a pragmatic, employee-centric management style. Jerry loves to travel for work and fun, is a great comfort-food cook, and knows a thing or two about wine. A long-time resident of Seattle with his family, Jerry has also lived in the UK and Australia.

Ian Baxter, Vice President Worldwide Technical Services, SOLIDWORKS

Ian Baxter is on a mission to increase customer satisfaction and reduce customer churn. He brings over 30 years of customer service and support experience in the software industry. As Vice President of Worldwide Technical Services for Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks he is responsible for technical support, customer success, education services and certification. Ian has extensive experience in provision of services through Value Added Resellers (VARs), and will address the challenges of delivering customer success through an indirect channel.

Frank Aloia III – Director Customer Success and Enterprise Services, SOLIDWORKS

Frank is passionate about making people successful with their use of engineering software. Frank began his career as a Design Engineer in the auto industry. Twenty years ago he transitioned to the software industry, focusing on Support and Services. In both roles, Frank’s passion to understand and eliminate the barriers to customer success has been a driving force guiding all his actions.

Frank joined SOLIDWORKS eight years ago, and over the years he has led a 7x expansion of growth of the Enterprise Subscription Services (ESS) program. The success of program is indicated by a 95% renewal rate. In addition, Frank has led efforts to streamline the prioritization of all customer issues as they relate to software development, as well as an initiative to optimize communication and engagement with their value-added reseller channel. His current focus is utilizing the lessons his team has learned with the ESS program to transition them into a scalable solution for more than 400 VARs to deliver.

Tom Sweeny, Founder & CEO, ServiceXRG

Thomas J. Sweeny is Founder and CEO of ServiceXRG. Mr. Sweeny is a researcher, writer and expert in IT Services, Support and Customer Success. He publishes extensively about service industry trends and best practices and helps leading companies retain customers and grow relationship value. Prior to founding ServiceXRG in 2004 he held the position of Research Director with Gartner Group, and established the research and consulting business unit for the Service and Support Professionals Association, now known as the TSIA. Mr. Sweeny currently serves on the Editorial Board of Software Executive Magazine and the Executive Advisory Board of the Association of Support Professionals.

Omid Razavi, Ph.D. VP, Customer Success and Services at SupportLogic

Omid is a SaaS success and services leader with 20+ years of experience delivering value and business outcomes for customers. Prior to SupportLogic, Omid led Product Success for Customer Service Management (CSM) at ServiceNow where he worked closely with Customer Support and Contact Center leaders. Prior to that, he was VP of Customer Success at Outcome Chains, and VP of Customer Success and Growth at SAP, SuccessFactors. Omid is recognized as Top 100 Customer Success Strategists since 2014. He blogs and speaks at conferences and podcasts.

David Muirhead, Sr. Director of Customer Support Services, Oracle

David Muirhead is a Senior Director of Customer Support Services at Oracle.  He oversees both the Oracle customer support sites and the internal support delivery tools and systems used in the customer support lifecycle.  Dave has been involved with customer support and self-service at Oracle for over 15 years.  Previous to his time at Oracle, he has worked with various aspects of the Internet and customer support at Ziff-Davis, Software AG, and Texas Instruments

David Kay, Principal of DB Kay & Associates

David Kay is Principal of DB Kay & Associates, a consultancy focused on advising the Support and Success industries.  DB Kay helps organizations adopt KCS® best practices for knowledge management, intelligent swarming for agile collaboration, and AI / ML technologies.  David is co-author of Collective Wisdom: Transforming Support with Knowledge, and teaches the LinkedIn Learning course Customer Service using AI and Machine Learning

TeamSupport

TeamSupport was designed from the ground up by B2B support professionals, especially for mission-critical organizations where customer relationships are imperative. The TeamSupport enterprise solution offers an array of tools that make it simple for teams to work together, share information, and access their collective knowledge to solve customer challenges. TeamSupport makes it easier to support teams to resolve individual tickets while managing the overall customer relationship.

www.TeamSupport.com

Coveo

Coveo uses AI and intelligent search and recommendation technologies to personalize millions of digital experiences for customers, partners, dealers, and employees. The Coveo Experience Intelligence Platform stitches data and context, and uses AI to tailor every interaction along lifetime people journeys, making websites, commerce, contact centers, intranets, and digital properties and apps effortless, content-rich and effective. Coveo is also embedded in many leading business applications from vendors including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Sitecore, and Microsoft. Coveo partners with the world’s largest enterprise technology players and has more than 1,500 activations in mid- to large-sized global organizations across multiple industries.

www.Coveo.com

SupportLogic

SupportLogic is an “Intelligent Support Platform”™ built on AI and NLP to help organizations reduce customer escalations, prioritize work and drive operational efficiency.

www.supportlogic.io

FT Works

FT Works helps technology companies improve their customer success and support operations. We know how to design customer success programs, streamline support processes, rearchitect support websites, and train support and customer success teams on soft skills.

FT Works

ServiceXRG

ServiceXRG is a research and advisory firm specializing in support and customer success strategies to help clients retain customers and grow recurring revenue.

www.servicexrg.com

Service Strategies

Service Strategies helps companies continuously improve service quality. The world’s leading service providers have adopted Service Strategies’ Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards as their roadmap to service excellence and benchmark measure of success. In addition, thousands of service professionals around the world have enhanced their skills through participation in the company’s training and certification courses.

www.servicestrategies.com

DBKay & Associates

DB Kay & Associates helps support and success organizations adopt KCS, the industry best practice
for knowledge management,Intelligent Swarming for Agile collaboration, self-service, and self-success.
www.dbkay.com

SearchUnify

SearchUnify is a unified cognitive search platform that revolutionizes information discovery, fueled by an insight engine, and makes for a robust platform for AI-based apps like customer-facing and agent-assist chatbots. Its AI powers highly relevant and personalized search results for effective customer support and self-service by indexing disparate content repositories, making relevant content easily discoverable and providing advanced insights into user search behavior and content usability.