inContact’s education services, which is part of our professional services organization, is offering 25% off their instructor led education packages if booked by March 31, 2012. Need help with Studio scripting? Want additional training on reporting or do you have other training needs? Select from webinar sessions, live instructor-led training at our Salt Lake headquarters, or have an instructor come to your contact center.

Our training sessions are for your private learning and catered to meet your needs. Customers that go through our two-day Studio training are able to make custom changes to their scripts quicker and save money by not having to engage inContact’s Professional Services. We have also found those customers are able to troubleshoot and resolve issues without having to work with technical support.   Read more»

I have a good friend who runs the social media monitoring for his company. Over the holidays there was an incident at one of his company’s locations that caused a huge stir and 1000+ tweets, Facebook posts, etc. by customers, their friends, and others. The company handled the customer’s issue, one they had never come across before, the best way they could at the time. After analyzing the 1000+ social posts, they found a mixed response from the customers; some agreeing with the company and others siding with the customer’s issue.   Read more»

I just went camping with a group of friends for the weekend in the Unita National Forest, which is a beautiful mountain range east of Salt Lake City.

On Saturday a few of us went on a hike to Heart Lake. This hike started on the top of a ridge and went down a steep hill and circled back using the road that wrapped back up on the west side of the valley. My friend Noah enjoys camping, but is not as much of a fan of hiking as the rest of us.  And he was definitely not at all thrilled about the steepness of the decent.   Read more»

I was recently at a customer site when they went live and had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with their seasoned agents and train them on their new cloud-based contact center software.

What stuck with me most was that these agents wanted to know more than just how to handle their calls and emails coming in; they wanted to understand how the system worked and why this new contact handling system was better than their old one and what they needed to know to enhance their performance.   Read more»

If Web 2.0 technology consists of wikis, blogs, simulations, user-generated learning content, shared workspaces, virtual worlds, and simulations what is Web 3.0? As I wrote in my first blog in this series, Web 3.0 is the way of making the technologies of Web 2.0 work smarter.

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) recently published a study with three points they see for Web 3.0:   Read more»

I drive a vehicle that has been converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG). I bought this vehicle because I wanted a pickup truck but didn’t want to pollute the air with its “not so great” gas mileage and pay the high gas prices. CNG burns clean and is less than a third of the price of gas.

I'm considered an early adopter in this situation because the technology is new and sometimes inconvenient. Though early adopters jump on the band wagon, despite the potential bumps and hurtles, they often reap great benefits. When the concept of Web 2.0 came about in the learning and development field, the early adopters saw great success. A recent study by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), entitled Better, Smarter, Faster: How Web 3.0 Will Transform Learning in High Performance Organizations states, “The effort the companies on the cutting edge have put into adopting these new [Web 2.0] technologies for learning has paid off, in both learning effectiveness and market performance.”   Read more»

I was recently on my flight home from the annual American Society of Training and Development TechKnowledge 2011 (TK11) conference in San Jose, CA. I just couldn’t wait to blog about what I learned at the conference. Putting aside the fact that the weather was in the high 60s to low 70s – while Utah was single digits and the rest of the eastern side of the country digging out of one the worst snowstorms in several years – the conference was wonderful and powerful.   Read more»

It’s official: in 2011 it is now okay to put your "head in the cloud." This advice may be totally against what our teachers taught us since grade school, but trust me, it's for the best. There is a twist however -- I'm not referring to daydreaming.  I'm talking about the rising popularity of cloud computing and learning in the cloud!   Read more»

“The bronze medal felt like gold to me,” said Muffy Davis of her 1998 Paralympic win in the Nagono, Japan Winter Games. It was the last of four alpine skiing events she competed in after falling in all three previous runs, never making it to the bottom of the hill or even to the camera that showed competitors on the Jumbo Tron. Competing in the Olympics was a childhood dream of hers; a dream she thought was dashed when at age 16 she became a paraplegic after slamming her back into a tree while downhill training.   Read more»

I recently unexpectedly ripped up my kitchen floor. I didn't want to spend the money to have a professional come in and retile it. I had never tiled before, so I called a friend and talked to him. He had only done it only twice before, so he referred me to some websites where I watched videos, read comments of other viewers, read some blogs and I then, through social learning, felt confident enough to do it myself. And I did. I saved money in the process.   Read more»