The Advantage of Real Training
by Bill Rose, SSPA Founder and Executive Director

Today, there are probably more information sources available than ever before for tech support managers. There are dozens of books, thousands of white papers, research reports, and benchmark analysis that you, as a tech support professional, can use to educate yourself. But there’s still a shortage of tech support management training. The problem with the self-study approach is that it isn’t interactive – you can’t ask questions or get clarification. It’s difficult to pick up any publication and find it perfectly targeted to you and your needs. In many cases, you probably have the need or desire to talk with the author or a knowledgeable professional to tell you how an issue or concept translates to your situation.

Say you pick up a book about managing non-technical call centers. There are probably some things in it that apply to running a technical support center but you might not make all the connections. It would be ideal if you could talk with the author, who might be familiar with both call centers and support centers while you read the book, to clarify some of those concepts and how they apply to your center.

The bottom line is this: There’s no substitute for interactive classroom training. In a classroom, you not only interact with the instructor, you also interface with peers.

So, where do you go to get interactive classroom training? You can come to us. For example, we offer Certified Support Management (CSM) training. I issue the certificates, which means that at the end of each class, I get to send out emails congratulating the students for becoming CSMs. That class is made up of five intense days of classroom training. I get a fair amount of feedback on the class and the majority of it is positive and comments on how much knowledge is gained. One student even said he felt like he got a graduate degree in support in the five days.

We also try to build some classroom training opportunities into our SSPA conferences. With the high-level keynotes and thought-provoking panel discussions, and informative breakout sessions, we also provide five three-hour workshops on the final day of the conference led by industry experts.

• Benchmarking Against the Best: A Showcase of STAR Award Winners
  
  
• Offshore Outsourcing: Getting it Right the First Time
  
  
• Managing Customer Demand in the New Service Experience
  
  
• Self-service Readiness Workshop
  
  
• Flawless Selection and Implementation of CRM Technology

You can get more details on the workshops from our conference agenda.

Most of these workshops are given by consultants. One reason for this is that consultants typically focus on doing one thing (OK, maybe two) for their clients. When anyone can focus on just one thing, they become very good at it. Typical support executives have many more things to focus on and it’s difficult to get really good at any one of them. For example, how often do you choose and implement a CRM tool? Once? Or maybe you have your IT department do it for you. How good can you get at that?

What our workshops offer is a mass of knowledge and expertise many of you need. Our workshops are designed to be interactive; they aren’t just another presentation at the end of the conference. These are hands-on workshops where you get a chance to address your issues, problems, and concerns and leave with real-world ideas to take with you and take action.

With the SSPA Conference @ Savannah content nearly finalized and the event close at hand, I’m turning some of my attention to our SSPA Conference @ San Diego, scheduled for April of next year. I’m starting to develop the concepts for that conference and if you have issues you need addressed, possibly in a workshop environment, I’d like to know so I can try to meet your needs. Send your requests to, bill.rose@thesspa.com and I’ll try to get it into the next conference.

Sincerely,


Bill Rose
SSPA Founder/Executive Director