Bay Area CIO/IT Executives Meetups: Blog

Customers.. How to deal with them? Especially now - they come and comment on your products and services everywhere! And… ask service/support questions - EVERYWHERE:  on Twitter, Facebook, their own blogs, etc.. Is it possible for companies to provide reasonable support at a reasonable cost across all these new (and old) channels?

These and many other questions were discussed at a meetup for Silicon Valley executives this week.

Panel discussions were moderated by Esteban Kolsky - the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management.

Our panelists were:

Kira Wampler, Online Engagement Leader, Small Business Group, Intuit

From the beginning of her career, Kira Wampler has been passionately dedicated to customers. She had to given that her first job out of college was co-founder and president of her own company. She learned quickly that if you don’t serve your customers, you don’t eat! Nearly fifteen years later, Kira continues to bring her passion for customers to life at Intuit by driving community, social media and online engagement efforts that small business owners succeed. Prior to her current role, Kira helped launch Intuit’s community for budding entrepreneurs and developed Intuit’s Small Business Group’s policies, strategy and testing efforts around Word of Mouth Marketing. Kira received her MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and can be found on the social web on Twitter @kirasw.

Waladeen Norwood, Program Manger, Social Media, Consumer Support Organization

Waladeen Norwood recently joined HP in the Global Unassisted Support Organization as a Social Media Program Manger working on developing strategies for supporting consumers over new social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Before joining HP, Waladeen consulted for Broadjam.com, one of the largest Web 2.0 online communities for independent musicians. While completing his graduate studies, he helped Broadjam.com develop strategies to grow its song metadata business using wiki crowdsourcing methods.

Natalie Petouhoff, Senior Senior Analyst, Customer Service at Forrester Research

Natalie serves Business Process & Applications professionals, Customer Experience professionals, customer service and social media professionals as part of the business and process applications group at Forrester. As a leading expert, she is often quoted in the press and on television on how the top companies provide great experiences and retain loyal customers. She reviews customer service vendors and provides leaders with guidance on how to integrate social media applications and platforms into the contact center and the customer experience. Her research on customer service best practices via the FastForward Innovation Framework includes six areas around people, process, and technology, as well as integrating organizational change management as part of an initiative to reduce risk and ensure higher ROI for the investment. In addition, Natalie’s model on the ROI of social media is helping companies justify this as part of their enterprise technology and customer experience strategy.

Natalie has more than 20 years of leadership experience in management consulting and systems integration firms, including PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, Hitachi Consulting, and BenchmarkPortal. Her years of practical experience in industry were gained at companies like General Electric, Sony Pictures, General Motors, and Hughes Electronics. Natalie is also the author of four books:

•Reinventing Your Contact Center: Managers Guide To Managing Multi-Channel Contact Centers
•Integrating Your People with Process and CRM Technology: Change Management That Provides An ROI
•CRM: The Bottom Line to Optimizing Your ROI
•Recruiting and Retaining Call Center Employees
Natalie’s articles appear in BusinessWeek, CRM Magazine, Customer Interactions Solutions, CustomerThink.com, Fast Company, The New York Times, and Peppers and Rogers 1-to-1 Magazine.

As accomplished public speaker, Natalie is a keynote speaker at events including, Destination CRM Evolution Conference, ICMI Conference, Call Center 2.0, Shared Insights Self-Service Conference, SOCAP, and Pepperdine’s Business Forum.

Here is a video recording of the first hour of this panel:

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