Once again, a thank you for all who attended and interacted with us at Conversations. The event wouldn't have been the same without your participation. And what participation it was! "Traditionally" there has been some attrition in attendance on that Wednesday morning of the event, but this year all the Wednesday sessions appeared to be well attended. Thank you for everyone who stumbled out of bed to hear me talk about Automated Tech Support solutions at 8:30 in the morning!
The format of the final session with Wes and Steve was still being bandied about a few days beforehand, but I think the conversational "talk show" approach worked quite well. By late Wednesday morning everyone's had enough of talking-at-you presentations, and this allowed them to still get some points across about the business while inviting us into the discussion rather than becoming passive listeners. And once again I think the Amazing Race demonstration delivered.
A very common question asked by many has been, when and where can I get copies of the presentations? Those should be up on the main site within a few days, with a password required for download. That password will be sent out to all attendees. We also plan on repeating many of the Nuance sessions as webinars and local seminars over the next several months. "If you called in the middle, please stay on the line, these presentations will repeat." Hey -- don't wanna waste good content, now, do we? Side note -- the presentations will be PDF files with no sound or video clips. That cuts down on their size, makes them viewable regardless of what version of PPT you have, and avoids all the problems with embedded Powerpoint multimedia wackiness (which many presenters became all too familiar with when setting up their presentations on the room laptops.)
So... What's Next for Conversations? I can't answer that yet. Nuance is an ever-growing company. Will Conversations Mobile become its own destination event? Will we grow the event to an all-Nuance circus and combine it with other user conferences within the company? Will it remain in October or will we shift it to the springtime? I've heard each of these questions asked at least once by others within the company. If it were up to me, we'd keep it roughly the same size (about 800 people), keep it focused entirely on Care and customer interactions and contact centers, and move it to the mid-April timeframe where it doesn't get so close to holidays and fiscal years. (In case you're wondering, it's not up to me. And I certainly didn't ask our futurist for any predictions.)
This blog will certainly continue. I will be highlighting specific sessions and content that many found interesting, and I hope you will all get a chance to comment on them if you attended. This blog may merge into a larger blog family that we've recently established about The Entitled Consumer. So look forward to more here!
Well! Right now I can barely touch my hands together because my pecs hurt so much from the 5-person 120-lap marathon at Xtreme Indoor Karting. I had the fastest lap time on my team! (I also wiped out twice and pretty much doomed us to last place within the first few laps.) I heard rave reviews from several of the other Tuesday activities as well. A good time had by all, and more to come with our closing shindig coming up tonight.
More gratifying than the fun at the arcade/karting place were many of the comments I received from some attendees. In particular, I had a few people compliment us on the Foundations Technology track and the sessions exploring Robust Parsing, SpeakFreely, and their up and coming tools. Some people just parked in that technology room and never left, just soaking in all the information. The session on Analytics was packed full as well (thanks again, Zach). The other sessions were well attended too, and provided a great perspective on everything from mobile technology to speech attendants to ways to champion speech within your organizations. Good comments as well on yesterday's sessions -- Steve Springer's 5 Principles.
And finally, I just have to say how much I loved Peter Mahoney's "Top 10 Signs You've Hired the Wrong Futurist" bit just before Vlad's keynote session on what's next for Nuance technology. Bravo, Peter. Just goes to show everyone that we're always trying to make things better, and we know when we might have made a misstep. Plus it was damn funny, and a great way to kick off Vlad's speech. One more day tomorrow!
We're off and running with a great conference. To steal from TV Guide, here's a quick list of Cheers and Jeers:
Cheers for the industry forums -- all reports are that everyone who went really found these valuable. These sessions had very specific topics covered that were uniquely relevant to their industry. I ran the Utilities forum and it was a great, informal back-and-forth discussion between our two speakers and the others in the room.
Jeers for our keynote speaker, unfortunately. Brought in to talk about the "technofuture," unfortunately the buzz I heard from most attendees is that his message was a combination of dated and bizarre, like reading a book about the year 2000 problem. One person called his future of chip-implanted techno-humans "spooky." People got up to get coffee towards the end. Oof.
Cheers for the Birds of a Feather tables, a new concept this year. Over 50 tables in the lunch area set aside with a host and specific topics, ranging from "robust parsing" to "VUI Design" to "Championing speech in your organization." It also allowed the industry forum discussions to spill over into lunch so that those people could continue benefitting from the folks in their industry.
Jeers for the weather. With intermittent thunderstorms and all-too-typical humidity, good lord, is it hot and sticky in Boca Raton!
Cheers for our speakers. From the seasoned veterans (hi Dottie!) to the first-time speakers (hi Viktoria!), they all did a great job presenting on a vast variety of topics. I want to extend a special thank you to the analysts who participated in this year's sessions as well; I think they really added an air of credibility -- you know, so it's not just us Nuance folks telling everyone what we think.
Oh, and finally... cheers for the neck massage tables, the ice cream break, and all the Nuance staff running around making this happen!
Come up and say hi if you run into me on the yacht cruise tonight.
Yup, here it is. Several months of planning come to a head starting this afternoon, as Conversations 2007 officially gets underway. If you're in the customer care or mobile industry and you're not attending, then you don't know what you're missing!
But to possibly help you out, I will be here writing bits and pieces about the event and the content as it's presented. I'll also give a few sneak previews for folks in attendance who still want to check out the blog in real time as the conference unfolds. We've been here at the Boca Resort for a few days now and it's really a great facility for hosting an event of this magnitude.
So what are my recommendations for sessions to attend? Having personally looked at almost every presentation that'll be given within the four Care tracks, I can tell you that they're all top notch. But I do have favorites. On Monday, make sure to drop in on the industry forums after the keynotes -- they promise to be a good blend of industry presenters, panel Q&A, and open discussion. After lunch, if you're not familiar with the Care 2.0 story, definitely stop in for Lynda's presentation on "Becoming Care 2.0 Ready." At 2:15, there's a great technical story of how adding robust parsing can lead to surprising jumps in accuracy, given by Real Tremblay of Nuance R&D. At 3:15, I'll be hard pressed to choose between Aetna's discussion of their SpeakFreely implementation and Fidelity's discussion of "Selling Your Solution Inside and Out." Finally, the 4:15 breakout sessions are all full of great content -- I'm personally a fan of NaturallySpeaking in Contact Centers since I've been involved in putting the solution together, but Steve Springer's Five Guiding Principles for Delivering Exceptional Phone Service is a must-see presentation for anyone involved in the design of IVR user interfaces. I'm also looking forward to Brian's closing keynote about social media and tapping the power of the connected consumer -- given that I'm writing a blog, you might see why.
Watch this space, and attendees feel free to comment on your favorite sessions here.
Much has been made about the emergence of social technologies, it's easy to shrug it off and say yeah, yeah, sure, and I bet North Korea will actually disable its nuclear facilities. And yet, I think we're all waking up to the power of these social networks and shared soapboxes. It's amazing how the Web is becoming a cross between a democracy and a meritocracy. If you make positive contributions, you will be recognized for it -- from Amazon to eBay, whether it be karma points, 4 out of 5 stars, or any point-based moderation system.
At this year's Conversations, we're splitting our our Monday evening general session into two separate events. For the Mobile side, Ojas Rege of Yahoo! is speaking about the impact of a billion cellphones on global mobile brands. On the Care side, Brian Haven of Forrester Research is speaking about social technologies in his session, "Tapping the Power of Connected Customers." Both talk about how we're entering a global community... one where you can project your brand and your reputation across a huge audience of potential customers... and one where you can't hide from your mistakes or your bad service.
A final note: the agendas and speakers for this year's Conversations are set. If you're coming, now's a great time to plan out what breakouts you're going to attend. If you're thinking of coming, this is a great way to check out the topics and see why it's such a great event. Come on down to Boca Raton! It's a great ride. We won't leave you hanging.
I just finished editing all of the Care abstracts going into this year's Conversations program. I'm quite pleased with the lineup that we've scheduled -- everything from in-depth technical sessions on robust parsing and SpeakFreely deployments to higher level discussions of how to develop a speech strategy. I only wish I could be in all 32+ sessions at once, because I know I have a lot to glean from all of these!
One thing that I have noticed is that the way we talk about speech recognition in general has matured significantly -- certainly over the last decade, and especially the last few years. I guess we're out of that awkward teenager stage where everything is just so... *dramatic.* (Fewer exclamation points and "it's fantastically amazing!" pitches.) Still, I went through and personally zapped several words that have always bugged me when it comes to describing speech systems... they're lazy used-car-sales selling words, IMNSHO. They had infested a few abstracts and I felt it was my sworn duty as an engineer-turned-marketer to purge them from our speech vocabulary:
Simply. If I had a nickel for every time someone said you could do something "simply by speaking"... the truth is, it's hard to resist the allure of making the argument that we've been speaking since we were toddlers, so it's *gotta* be easier than typing/touchtone/menu navigation/what-have-you. But anyone who's gotten close to a speech system knows that there's nothing simple about speaking. There are out-of-grammars. Actual misrecognitions. Prompts to design (and redesign when unanticipated problems arise from ill-informed callers.) As any designer or user of a speech system knows, there are pitfalls aplenty. Speech has enough positive benefits and advantages over other interface options that we don't need to overpromise and underdeliver by calling it "simple."
Conversational speech. You'll also notice in this year's abstracts almost no mention of conversational speech from Nuance personnel. Yes, our goal is to make every speech interaction resemble a conversation, but it's a predictable conversation with rules and structure. True conversational speech involves lots of asides, excuse-me's, and maybe some noncommittal grunts for good measure. I personally think that the moniker "conversational speech" also invites uncomfortable expectations.
Finally, I would also like to say with pride that in these abstracts, nothing is ever leveraged, very few technologies are utilized, no technologies, products, or solutions are ever described as new and/or improved, and the few sessions that talk about best practices have the credibility to do so. Thank me later!
I wish I could also say that I had removed all references to the term natural language, but sadly, I've found it a necessary evil in the speech world right now, with some qualifiers. The problem is that saying you're going to talk about natural language is like saying you work with computers. It's a term that's so broad and enveloping that it runs the risk of becoming meaningless. First of all, what qualifies something as "natural language" -- is it having enough synonymous responses in the grammar to fake it? Is it having a full linguistic parser breaking down what someone is saying and ascribing it meaning? Is it being 'good enough' to guess at what someone is saying? Is it ignoring the filler words to make a decision about the next prompt? Once you get past that, there's the question of whether "natural" is a good thing! Most people tend to think so, until a caller is so natural that the system can't handle it... then of course the caller's to blame. There are a large number of sessions about natural language, and what I'll say here is that we've tried hard to make those sessions about a specific implementation of natural language, like robust parsing, or SpeakFreely, or call steering, so that you can determine how opening up what a caller can say may be used to your advantage.
A few years ago, Nuance (then ScanSoft) was very clearly a technology-focused company. Mind you, that's a very loaded statement that comes with some implicit baggage. What sort of judgment does one make when reading that? Let me put it in this perspective -- the way we approached customers in the sales cycle was very clearly along the lines of, "You need speech. Hey! We have speech. We got lots of speech. Whaddya want, you need speech recognition? Text-to-speech? Speaker verification? We got TONS of that stuff. We're the best at it, ya know. Look at all these features! Look at our staff! You tell me whatcha need, we'll build you whatever you want. When we're done, you won't even be able to *spell* the word 'touchtone.' " I'm oversimplifying and exaggerating for comic effect, of course, but the message is clear -- like many hi-tech companies, the selling strategy was to wield the product like a hammer looking for nails.
As you can imagine, there are lots of inherent problems with that approach -- or else why would I be mocking it so much? Sure, from a marketing perspective, it violates the principles of emphasizing benefits, not features. From a relationship perspective, you'd like to think that we are looking out for your interests (how can we help this client?) instead of ours (how can we sell this stuff we've got?) But the major disadvantage is the fact that most organizations don't necessarily know what they want, let alone what they need, to improve their customer service experience. It'd be like me asking you to pick out the parts for a rocket ship, or giving you an orchestra of instruments and telling you that you had everything you needed to compose a symphony. Unless you're already an expert in speech technology, you're not going to know the value of these components, let alone the best away to fit them together to solve your problems.
This year at Conversations, the Business Solutions track is an attempt to provide a clearer view as to the kinds of solutions that work well in conjunction with the building blocks of speech technology -- what fits together with what? Some sessions are based on effective applications of speech, such as practical examples of speaker verification, call steering, and auto attendants in action. Some are examples of how complementary technologies can enhance a customer experience, such as sessions on multimodal care, outbound messaging, and guided self-service. And we've even got one session focused on one way to help agents be more productive -- after all, the customer experience doesn't end when the automation does.
Over the years, I've seen Nuance change its approach such that our first meetings with potential customers are less about "here are all the things that we sell" and more about "let's take a look at what your problems are, and see if we have any suggestions for how to fix them." We're not interested in ramming technology down a client's throat if it's not a fit for their needs. In other words, press 1 for yes and 2 for no is sometimes the right answer. As an engineer-turned-marketer, it gives me warm fuzzies to have seen the company change direction like this. And, without sounding too rah-rah-corporate, I'd like to think our approach benefits both our old and new customers even more.
Oh, that Niels Bohr. What a kidder. Who knew that a Danish quantum physicist could be so funny. He's the source of today's title, which serves as a great introduction for our announcement of this year's keynote speaker.
When we began our keynote speaker search, we considered everything from notorious celebrities ("Hey, she did those Sidekick commercials, right?") to political figures (maybe he could call his speech, An Inconvenient Misrecognition?) to well-meaning inspirational speakers that leave everyone feeling good about themselves. All of those might draw people to the conference. All of those might be rewarding in their own fashion. All of those are expensive, so we'd better be sure we've picked the right person to kick things off.
But we have a motif to maintain here -- focus, people, focus! This year's "What's Next" Conversation's theme is all about the future. Most of the content is geared towards the future we know we can predict, in the form of recent product releases, new applications of technology, and experiences shared by leaders and trend-setters in the industry. You know, stuff that has already happened... but like the old NBC reruns slogan, if you haven't seen it, it's NEW to YOU! Still, we wanted to reach a little further into the future, and really give folks a look into what the future could and should hold for them.
So then (cue drum roll) let me introduce... Dr. James Canton, our keynote speaker for this year's Conversations. Dr. Canton has been insightfully forecasting the impact of future trends and innovations on business, customers, and society for the past twenty-five years. He has served as a commentator on CNN and Financial News, where he earned the nickname, "the Digital Guru." He has written books such as Technofutures and The Extreme Future. He's so good I bet he predicted that I would borrow heavily from his written bio to fill out this paragraph of my blog post. Wow! I'm impressed already!
Seriously, though, the future is a beguiling topic. The conventional wisdom is that if you could predict the future, you'd be rich. Maybe that's why we're always trying to predict the future. What's the weather like tomorrow? Should I sell now or wait until the market recovers? Will it be a boy or a girl? What will this neighborhood be like in 10 years? And in our jobs, we face the same barrage of decisions that forces us to peer into the murky void known as (duhn-duhn-DAHHHHH) The Future. I'm very much looking forward to hearing what Dr. Canton has to say, and I've already got his books on my wish list.
But don't listen to me. I'm no expert. After all, "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." (Thank you again, Dr. Bohr!)
When we were kicking around ideas for this year's theme, the concept of "Satisfaction" came up time and time again. Customer Satisfaction, a.k.a. CSAT, is certainly more than a buzzword. Most contact centers pay at least lip service to CSAT. Many others actively track it with customer surveys and use it to judge the effectiveness of their service. Many self-service replacements or upgrades these days are not motivated by a desire to increase automation rates (or "containment" or "deflection"... you know, how can we stop the customer from talking to us?). Rather, they are motivated by a reprioritized emphasis on customer satisfaction (or "first call resolution"... you know, did we actually help people?)
So I was ready to go whole hog on this one. We'll do a whole Rolling Stones thing, with Satisfaction as the theme -- they're global, right? Global is good! Maybe we can get the rights to the song! Maybe we'll have some local band covering it at one of the evening events! I wanted Mick Jagger impersonators greeting folks on Sunday night. I wanted the Rolling Stones lips in the Conversations logo (hey, lips are speech, right?) I wanted the famous "na-na-NAAAAH neh NEH-nehhhh.... nah! nah!" riff playing between sessions. I wanted a video of Keith Richards mumbling about how speech recognition has finally figured out how to understand what he was saying, with a scrolling caption transcribing: "You can't go wrong with Nuance speech technology," etc., etc. Thankfully, I'm in charge of the content, and not the theming, and so saner minds prevailed. We'll just have to gather some moss on our own.
In its place, our nod to CSAT this year is a breakout sessions track called "Compelling Experiences." It's the spiritual successor to last year's "Caller Experience" track, focused on ways to improve your customer satisfaction. I'm personally looking forward to a session titled "The Five Guiding Principles for Delivering Exceptional Phone Service" by our own Steve Springer. All eight sessions focus either on ways to improve the customer interface, or ways to better understand how customers are interacting with your service. The goal is to define and deliver positive service experiences for your customers with a look at best practices in interface design and performance measurement.
In the end, customer satisfaction is not measured by theoretical greats like the best user interface or the highest automation rates. It's directly correlated to the perception of good service. And that is directly related to how much you actually care about your care. If you treat customers like incoming pests that need to be warded off from your call center, then don't be surprised when people complain about your automated system, right? This message is at the heart of this track, and really at the heart of the whole conference. A Care 2.0 world means satisfying the increased expectations and demands of a savvy customer base who are used to getting some satisfaction when they call in. "Your call is very important to us" doesn't cut it any more!
When we first started coming up with ideas for session topics for this year's Conversations, an interesting possibility began to emerge. You see, in past Conversations, we've tended to have two technical tracks and two business tracks -- we even went so far as to come up with original, inventive names such as "Technical Track 1" and "Business Track 2." Gripping, aren't they? But far be it for me to pooh-pooh those names, because they aptly described Nuance (then Scansoft's) role in the world. We make tech. You have business. You take tech and put it in business. We happy. Ooga booga.
These days, however, Nuance fancies itself as more than just a technology provider. Been there! Done that! Now we have *solutions*. Now we do *consulting*. Now we're taking all the experience we've built up over thousands of deployments and are using it to help our customers come up with rollout strategies and launch roadmaps and the like. That's right! We've gone... Executive. *insert oohs and aahs*. All kidding aside, though, it's true. We are no longer merely a technology provider. We have a lot to offer companies that realize it's about more than getting a few percentage points on their automation rates.
So what was that interesting possibility that I alluded to, you ask? The possibility of an executive track at Conversations. No, I don't know what that means either. Okay, well, I have an idea, but so did everyone else on the planning committee. With so many broad, high-level, strategic topics... things like championing speech in your organization, justifying the ROI, developing a speech strategy... and othersr we wanted to cover like trends in mobility, or the impact of Care 2.0 on contact centers... it seemed like we were reaching up the corporate ladder to an audience of C-level officers and other company strategists and visionaries. The kind of people who don't want to know about whether the technology complies with MRCP 2.0 standards or supports EMMA. The kind who step back and say What's the Big Picture? You know... "Executives."
So, would an executive track be well-attended? Traditionally we entertain a fair number of C-level execs at Conversations, but not enough to fill an entire session. Besides, wouldn't they be off doing... uhh... "executive" things? Meeting with Paul Ricci and Steve Chambers? Walking into the lobby to take Very Important Calls? Hob-knobbing with other executive types? Going to the pool to get away from us peons? Then again, others argued, doesn't everyone want to be an executive? We wouldn't limit attendance to the executive track, so every VP, Director, or well-meaning Project Lead could feel Very Important by passing over those technology tracks ("they're just so... junior! Pshaw!") and instead attending the ones billed as high-level informational and strategy sessions. Would enough attendees, in fact, be too executive for their shirts? So executive it hurts?
In the end, we decided that, yes, an executive track was appropriate and necessary. But rather than cause a ruckus by calling it the Executive track (you know, with a fancy scripty font for the sign, and maybe a massage table outside the door), we simply called it what it was: Strategic Insights. This track features some great sessions presented by customers, by Nuance brass, and even some analysts, to set the stage for speech and the world of customer care. Whether you have that executive parking spot or not, I encourage you to check out the Strategic Insights sessions when the agenda goes up and see for yourself if you have a little executive in your blood.
For those of you who have been following this blog, or speech recognition in general, you may be interested in attending a web presentation that I'm giving on Tuesday at 11am PDT/2pm CDT, sponsored by the good folks at
ICMI (International Customer Management Institute) and
Call Center Magazine, now called Customer Management Insight. The webinar is called, "
Speech Mythbusters: Debunking 10 Common Myths about Voice Automation" and it's free to attend. I'm putting the finishing touches on the presentation this morning, and I think you'll like it -- I've definitely tried to keep it upbeat and interesting, and full of some real-life examples... instead of lecture-y and
Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? boring that sometimes you encounter on these free webinars. So don't hesitate to check it out.
It's always nice to receive validation that you're not just blowing smoke up people's... ahem, noses... A recent poll showed that there's some truth to my previous blog post about the iPhone lacking speech recognition.
Take a look at this nice evaluation of consumer satisfaction with the iPhone. Amid all the glowing feedback about the integration of phone, iPod, and web browsing, and the grumbling about the speed of AT&T's network and the lack of applications, is an interesting nugget: "When we asked about additional iPhone features they’d like to have, owners pointed to voice recognition (15%) as the number one thing missing from their iPhone, followed by personalizing features (13%) and GPS (13%)."
Of course, temper that with the fact that almost nine-in-ten owners said they'd recommend the phone to a colleague. One could argue that speech recognition is not yet a make-or-break feature for phones. Then again, you would have said that about most of the iPhone features until they were popularized and truly designed with the user in mind. Speech is at a similar point -- clunky implementations impress no one, while well-polished use of speech can take away the interface barriers that prevent people from using their phone's features more. And carriers love anything that increases ARPU... I'd buy more ring tones if I didn't have to wade through 7 menus to figure it out each time!
Hello all -- hope you didn't miss me too much during my brief summer vacation. Those of you outside of American politics in the 90's may not recognize the idiom from this blog's title, but sometimes I think it holds true for this year's Conversations conference. We marketers tend to wax eloquently about the benefits of our "solutions," instead of the features of our products. Hey, that's important. As I've mentioned before, customers don't want to buy the 3/4" drill bit, they just want a 3/4" hole. The worst product demos are the ones that spend time going into all sorts of bizarre menu options to show you more new features that you won't use. The biggest failing of most hi-tech companies is to spend too much time talking about how great their products are.
Okay, that's all very well and good... but it's important not to forget that some people *DO* care about the drill bit. Maybe they really want to make sure that the hole conforms to their specifications. Maybe they've got pressure from higher-ups to justify their plan for making that hole. Or you know what? Maybe they think drill bits are pretty cool and want to learn more about them. The "benefit" for these customers is knowing more about the features. Put another way, while some people think that SISR is what you use to cut PAPR, others need to know that we support the 2.2.3 GARBAGE special rule introduced in the W3C's first version of the Speech Recognition Grammar Specifications (SRGS). (Answer: Yes we do, with Nuance Recognizer v9.)
So I'm here to say that we haven't forgotten that "It's the Technology, Stupid." Despite all the advancements Nuance as a company has made in the areas of performance measurement, improving the caller experience, up-leveling the role of contact centers, and a solutions-based approach to problem-solving for our customers.... at its heart, Conversations is still about cool speech technology. And Nuance has a whole lot of it! So let me reassure all of you drill-bit-collectors out there, we still have a healthy dose of technology sessions in the Technology Foundations track. There's a session on our roadmap for speech developer tools. Another on migrating to Nuance Recognizer v9. Some case studies about successful application of technologies such as SpeakFreely. A session on refining your application by using a Champion-Challenger architecture.
I'm looking forward to revealing the full agenda in the next few weeks as we finalize content and confirm speakers. I think you'll like what you see!
Okay, okay, let's tackle this one. You're telling your boss that you'd like to attend Conversations. You tell him about all the Nuance product managers you'll get to meet, how you're excited about some of the technology and business breakout sessions, how you've got a private meeting with some Nuance execs, and how you're looking forward to the industry forum so you can compare notes with some of your counterparts... and your boss takes one look at the site and says, wait, you're going away for three days to spend time at a resort in Florida?
Tell your boss: damn straight!
The truth is, no successful conference can be all work and no play -- your brain would turn to mush if you spent the entire time filling up on breakout sessions. You know that, and we know that, and unless he's got a particular management style, your boss knows that too. That's why we've gone to great lengths to once again choose a fantastic resort location for this year's Conversations. Even better, we've planned several flavors of events for Tuesday afternoon -- our event organizers, I'm told, have even gone through the *arduous task* of trying out several of the activities themselves. And hey -- you don't even have to be a golfer to enjoy them all.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't be afraid to enjoy yourself while you're learning how to save your company millions of dollars.
Did you catch the double entendre in the subject? To tell you what's next for our Conversations planning, I must tell you that "What's Next" is the end result of our planning committee's work on choosing a theme for the event. The goal was to choose something that
1) was consistent with the purpose of Conversations (a forward-looking, educational event);
2) reinforced the positioning of our Care and Mobile businesses; and
3) could be somehow inspirational for our attendees.
Oh, and extra credit if it could actually be used as a unifying theme to drive both the content and the creative for the conference, without sounding like a theme for a high school prom. You know. "Daring to Dream," and all that. Blecch.
"What's Next" fits the bill. First of all, it reflects the "brand" of the conference -- people come to learn the latest from Nuance, and find out how new solutions could be applied to their business. In essence, you come to find out "what's next" for your industry, for your organization, and for yourself as a likely leader of those Nuance-based initiatives in your group.
Secondly, reflecting the positioning of our Care and Mobile businesses. Tricky! The two businesses share this conference and have related technologies, but focus on decidedly different audiences. What could unify them? Well, each business has grown its set of solutions significantly since last year's Conversations event. For instance, we have already added several new applications to our mobile portfolio, not to mention the announced pending acquisition of companies like Tegic and Voice Signal. On the Care side, our expanding portfolio of offers includes several contact-center-focused solutions that do not revolve around the more traditional network speech technologies. Remember, it's no longer about "how can Nuance put speech in your contact center," it's about "how can Nuance help you get the best out of your customer interactions?" So this year's Conversations will include sessions speaking about everything from multimodal care solutions to outbound messaging reminders, from consulting offers to ways to improve agent efficiency -- all of which can, but don't have to, involve speech technology. Our Mobile and Care businesses, though growing in separate ways, are united nicely by this theme -- What's Next for mobility? What's Next for your contact center?
Finally there is the question of "inspirational." Perhaps a "Realize your potential" or "Unlock the power of speech" type theme might have been more inspirational... or at least aspirational, a quality often ascribed to last year's "Elevate your experience" theme. We think that by the time this year's conference is finished, "What's Next" will become an inspirational theme, as we challenge our attendees to take the knowledge that they've gathered from the event and look for ways to profit from it -- whether through cost savings or added revenue at their business, or through advancing their own personal careers. We are all setting goals. We are all (at best) satisfied with what we currently have, but looking for the next step -- in our lives, in our workplace, in our personal self. Though no one's promising the secret to happiness at Conversations, I'd like to think that a few days in the presence of your colleagues and hearing about ways to make your life easier at work will improve your mood considerably!
We've assembled the first of a series of weekly emails promoting Conversations and are sending it to attendees this week -- in fact, that may be how you found this blog entry. It's notable that we don't mention speech specifically in this introductory email. Just another reminder that while speech is a very important part of our business.... it may not necessarily be What's Next for you. So... *ahem ahem*.... "Join us to explore What's Next at Conversations 2007!" *said in my best booming announcer's voice*