Founder - SalesForce

Kevin built the most successful, outsourced sales and customer service business in Australia and NZ through a passionate approach to staff engagement and creating a culture for high performance. His lifetime of experience, and strong personal convictions about stimulating work environments and empowering cultures, have resulted in SalesForce being voted 'Best Employer in Australia and New Zealand' in three consecutive Hewitt surveys. A thoroughly dynamic, entertaining and impactful speaker, trainer and presenter.

About Kevin Panozza

 Kevin’s lifetime of experience, and his strong personal convictions about stimulating work environments and empowering cultures, have resulted in SalesForce being voted ‘Best Employer in Australia and New Zealand’ in the Hewitt Bi-annual survey 2004, 2005 and 2007 – this is the first time any Australian company has been honoured with three consecutive awards. SalesForce was recognised in 2007 amongst the top half dozen employers in Asia.

During his time as Managing Director Kevin established a team that has achieved very strong revenue growth in a small, very competitive market, consistent profit growth, organisational stability, and a global reputation for deploying emerging technologies, and new selling and customer services techniques.

In 2005 SalesForce was acquired by Salmat, an ASX 200 company, and Kevin was appointed SalesForce Chief Executive Officer.

Overview

SalesForce provides more than 60 national and international companies, typically the leading brand in each market vertical, with selling and customer service solutions.

SalesForce contact centres provide these organisations transparent phone, SMS, fax, e-mail and on-line communication channels with their markets – along with a face-to-face selling resource now numbering more than 1,000 contractor sales specialists nationally.

Kevin's presentation entertains and inspires exploring-

• Key ideas that drive SalesForce
• Challenges that all businesses will recognise, particularly those with large customer-facing requirements,
• The importance of achieving high Hewitt scores and why SalesForce has been on the Hewitt top 10 employers list for  seven years in a row
• The commercial reality of the Hewitt Award.

Unquestionably one of the most informative segments of the presentation is when Kevin explains how SalesForce circumvents and overcomes some of the key causes of ‘workplace blues’ including uniformity, oppression, isolation, uncertainty, boredom, monotony, caller hostility, rejection, career stagnation and work/life balance.

Presentation Synopsis - 'The 8 Enemies of Engagement'

Each day around the world companies invest millions on brand promises that create varying levels of customer expectation – ‘Buy from us and the world is yours!’ At the same time companies keen to attract first-rate employees are creating expectations about career opportunities within their enterprise; many career aspirants will find themselves in customer-facing roles, and in each moment in which customer and employee interact, expectations are shattered or satisfied.

Much of SalesForce’s success over fourteen years, during which time call centre seats have grown from 20 to more than a combined 5,000 in Australia and New Zealand, is due to the continued focus by managers on the quality and outcome of each individual customer conversation, and the realisation that in each minute of conversation, commercial success hangs in the balance.

Obviously training and the provision of relevant knowledge is important in agent preparation – but how an agent feels also has significant bearing on whether customer expectations are met or not. The fragility of each customer interaction cannot be overstated and it is only in recent times that culture and staff engagement have been recognised as being as crucial to successful conversation outcomes as agent training and knowledge.

Today there is global focus on attrition – and on the contribution that high employee engagement makes to the vital task of retaining high quality people.

Over several years, in more than fifty major presentations, audiences have heard Kevin’s message about the eight enemies of staff engagement – those factors that cause low engagement and poor performance.

Learn how SalesForce has identified these villains, how they have developed powerful defences against these enemies and the strategies SalesForce implements to defeat them.

Transforming Customer Experience in the New Marketplace

The New Marketplace - as described by Kevin in his multi-media rich presentation - may be more than a challenge for unwary Enterprise.

Customers, as unpredictable as ‘Aliens’ will demand their right to hold conversations with companies they choose to do business with.

The New Marketplace, dominated by the Internet, a proliferation of intelligent mobile devices and customers weary of being forced to compromise, will require companies to focus on Connection and Content.

Connection is the way a company allows customers to connect and Content is what a company has to say and the manner in which it is said.

Learn about world-first Customer Contact applications that allow Connection – anywhere, anytime and anyhow.

Discover the amazing link between employee engagement and customer experience. Meet and beware - the 8 Enemies of Engagement.

The ideas around Transforming Customer Experience as presented by Kevin are evolving as quickly as the marketplace in which they are being applied.

Testimonials

Kevin's session was engaging, energetic and very informative. The feedback I have received from our employees was exceptionally positive regarding the content, relevance and quality of the presentation. Whilst the call centre industry is very different to banking the principles regarding culture and engagement are the same and as such, our team walked away with new ideas and approaches around how we can improve our environment and the way we do things. Kevin managed to deliver the message using fun and humour!! It was a great session enjoyed by all and a terrific way of kicking off our conference.
NabCapital

Kevin's presentation was excellent, entertaining and very relevant. A Resfreshing look at engagement.
PepsiCo