SSPA Debuts Pre-Conference Training Day
To add even more value to our Best Practices Conference & Expo, the SSPA will introduce SSPA Training Day. These training courses aren’t for the faint of heart. They provide six hours of intensive training on a specific issue. This year’s training sessions are tentatively titled:

Developing the Right Support Model – This session dives deep into the differences between running your support center as a profit center or a cost center, how to effectively evaluate your organization’s needs, and how to efficiently staff your center based on the model, and how to manage change.

Outsourcing your Support Offshore – Devoted to helping you realistically evaluate, plan, and migrate support functions offshore. This session provides practical examples based on customer experiences. Understand the ins and outs of going offshore.

Pricing, Packaging, and Marketing Your Support Services – Customer pressure on support pushes these issues to the top of the list. To help maintain your revenue and margins, you have to do a better job of selling the value of support and services to your customers. This session helps you devise strategies and implement plans to do that and take advantage of new opportunities.

Measuring Support Performance and Benchmarks – As the support industry evolves, new benchmarks and metrics are necessary to truly evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of support delivered. Customer satisfaction takes a back seat to customer loyalty. As break-fix becomes less of an issue, support becomes more akin to professional services. Understand how to evolve your performance metrics to keep pace.

Implement Web Self-Service – Self-service is one of the main levers vendors have to reduce the cost of support delivery, but only if users find what they need the first time and have a good experience. This session answers your questions about how to develop a knowledge management strategy to support self-service initiatives, how to promote self- service to customers, and much more.

SSPA Training Day sessions will be held on Sunday, March 20 from 10:00 to 5:00, prior to the SSPA Conference @ San Diego. If purchased as part of the conference package, members pay $395.00, non-members $595.00. They can also be purchased ala carte for $495.00 members, $695.00 non-members. Be sure to take advantage of these focused training sessions and increase the value of your SSPA Conference @ San Diego experience.

If you have questions about SSPA Training Day, or have issues you’d like to see addressed in any of the individual sessions, please contact SSPA Editor, David Kodama.

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