Host

David Hadobas, President of CCNG (Contact Center Network Group)

David is responsible for building the premier member network for contact center, customer care and customer service professionals looking to share and create unique content based on peer experience and perspectives.

Speakers

Michele Rowan, Former VP of Performance Management at Hilton Hotels and President of Customer Contact Strategies

As VP of Performance Management for Hilton Hotels, Michele implemented the remote agent strategy that produced 1000+ home agents in both the US and Europe in just 18 months. Now as President of Customer Contact Strategies Michele has worked with over 150 companies in home agent strategy design and deployment.

Lynn A. O’Neill, Assistant Vice President of Project Management, New York Life Ins. Co.

Lynn is the Assistant Vice President- Customer Experience at New York Life Insurance Company in Tampa, Florida. Lynn’s 30 years Insurance Industry experience focuses specifically within the Contact Center Environment. She lead the New York Life Contact Center in becoming certified as a “Center of Excellence” from the BenchmarkPortal Center for the last five consecutive years. New York Life received 2007 “Call Center of the Year” award from IQPC. Lynn won a gold medal at the 2008 Call Center World America’s and silver medal at the World Competition.

Steve Riddell, Vice President and Chief Operations Officer, Blinds.com

Blinds.com is the largest seller of blinds an window coverings on the internet in both the U.S. and Canada and the largest internet based organization in Houston, Texas. With the economy sputtering and organizations facing layoffs and downsizing, Steve successfully led his team to achieve double digit performance improvement and close rates, doubled Blinds.com size, and achieved award winning results.

Todd Hixson, Operations Manager, Intuit

Todd Hixson is the Operations Manager for Intuit’s Accountant Professional Division. The Accounting Professional Division provides products and support for the professional accounting community across the US. Todd has been in contact center operations/management for 10 years, working for Travelocity prior to joining Intuit. He has been an out-sourcer, and in-sourcer and an us-sourcer with a belief in efficiencies realized using creative scheduling, performance based “right for me” shift bidding, and pushing limits with optimization. During Todd’s career, he has driven back-office utilization of work force management practice, multiple channel skill based operations practices, and cross functional understanding via “a day in the life of operations” workshops.

Annette Baker, Vice President of Operations, Telvista

Annette is the VP of Operations, driving operational excellence for Telvista’s US based contact centers. She oversees the operations, training, workforce management, and statistics teams to ensure client expectations for quality and productivity are met. Annette started her career in the contact center industry as a customer service representative for a small software publisher, followed by several operations and account management roles for inbound and outbound programs supporting a variety of industries. Annette joined Telvista in 2000 as a Call Center Manager, became Dallas Site Director in 2005, and VP of Operations in 2008. She has a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Marketing from the University of North Texas. Annette recently received her Net Promoter Associate Certification and is also a COPC Registered Coordinator.

Connie Smith, President, SpotOn Enterprises

Connie Smith is an experienced contact center subject matter expert and accomplished speaker with 20 years operations and consulting experience related to the people, process and technology aspects of running and optimizing global contact centers.

Amas Tenumah, Vice President of Operations, Telefora

Amas is a customer experience fanatic, and a self-described “contact center geek” specializing in contact center operations, & customer experience strategy for a “twitter-first” century. He has spent the last decade managing contact center operations for companies like Coca-Cola, Convergys Corporation and currently in his role as Vice President of Operations for Teleflora. Amas brings a unique perspective to the world of customer experience that he shares regularly at industry events and publications. He is also a proud dad, an avid Yankee fan who enjoys playing competitive soccer when home in Oklahoma City.

Penny Reynolds, Co-Founder, The Call Center School

Penny Reynolds is one of the Co-Founders of The Call Center School where she heads up curriculum development.  She develops and teaches courses on a wide variety of call center topics, including workforce management, performance measurement, and call center leadership. Penny is a popular speaker at industry conferences and association meetings and a frequent contributor to industry trade publications. She is the author of several books, including Call Center Staffing: The Practical Guide to Workforce Management, Business School Essentials for Call Center Leaders, Call Center Supervision: The Complete Guide to Managing Frontline Staff, Power Phrasing, and The Power of One. She has also co-authored the five textbooks for University of Phoenix’s call center certification program. An honors graduate of Vanderbilt University, Penny was one of the first recipients of Call Center Magazine’s prestigious Call Center Pioneer award.

Mike Garner, Chief Customer Officer, Cicero

A Service and Sales Executive at Verizon and Afni, Mike Garner led over 7000 Agents to impressive results over his operations career. From 2001 through 2007, his teams earned over 40 Customer Service Awards, achieved double-digit productivity gains and garnered 2 National Sales Titles. Mike chairs the Call Center Advisory Board for the Outsourcing Institute. He attended Eckerd College in Florida and earned his MBA at SMU in Dallas, Texas. Mike resides in Lenexa, Kansas with his wife Kelley and their son Grant.

Neil Crane, Director of Product Strategy, Cicero

Mr. Crane's experience spans nearly 25 years of technology change during which he has experienced first-hand the problems of a centralized approach to enterprise computing, the draw-backs of distributed systems and the need for common-sense, value for money, process integration solutions. As an enterprise solution architect, Mr. Crane has designed and overseen the implementation of enterprise computing systems for Fortune 100 companies on the leading edge of technology adoption. Mr. Crane joined the company in 1996 to lead the professional services team in integration projects based on the then-new IBM MQSeries product and other emerging integration technologies. Previously he was with IBM UK where he worked first as a developer on the MQSeries product family and subsequently provided implementation planning services to the first MQSeries customers. Mr. Crane is co-author of the book "MSMQ from Scratch."

Patrick Botz, Vice President of Workforce Optimization, VPI

Patrick Botz serves as director of solutions marketing for VPI, a global provider of interaction recording, quality management and workforce optimization solutions for over 1,000 customers including 1-800-Flowers.com, AAA, CNN, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, IBM and Delta Airlines. Leveraging more than a decade of field experience as a CRM practitioner, he focuses on the mission-critical aspects of capturing customer intelligence and optimizing business processes and workforce performance. Patrick holds an MBA from Pepperdine University and a BSE in Engineering from Arizona State University. His work has been published in several contact center industry periodicals including Call Center Magazine, Business Management, CRM Magazine, Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Connections Magazine and ContactProfessional.

Jeff Furst, President and CEO, FurstPerson

Our first panelist is Jeff Furst - the founder and president of FurstPerson, a provider of job candidate assessment tests, web-based hiring systems and recruitment process outsourcing services for the contact center industry. Using his academic credentials as well as practical knowledge of the staffing industry, Jeff has envisioned, guided and grown FurstPerson to its unique position of offering clients the benefit of its prime focus on helping contact centers find, hire, and keep better employees. Jeff holds a B.A. in Economics from Northwestern University and an M.B.A. from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Erich Dietz, Director, Mindshare Technologies

Erich Dietz is a Sales Director for Mindshare Technologies. He has been with Mindshare since 2003 and is responsible for most of Mindshare’s largest and most complex client accounts. Erich has deployed successful customer feedback solutions for many of today’s most highly recognized brands, including Alltel Wireless, Capital One, Comcast, Pier 1 Imports, and Liz Claiborne. Prior to Mindshare, Erich spent years as a Senior Operations and Strategy Consultant with several global consulting firms. He holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Rutgers School of Engineering, and his mother describes him as one heck of a nice guy.

Bob Webb, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Pipkins

Bob Webb serves as Vice President of Sales for Pipkins, a leading supplier of workforce management software and services to the contact center industry. With over 15 years in the industry, he’s helped several customers dramatically improve their workforce forecasting and scheduling including 1-800-Flowers.com, Scholastic, British Telecom, FedEx, Victoria Secret, and many others.