LISTEN 2019 is "in the Books"

It’s hard to believe after all the planning and hard work by so many people here at CallMiner that “LISTEN 2019 Velocity to Vision” at Margaritaville Resort in Hollywood FL is finally “in the books.” This year’s annual user conference for customer engagement professionals was the largest yet with 413 attending the event, a whopping 35% increase over 2018’s attendance! LISTEN attendees had three full days of insight, networking, fun and inspiration with several new or expanded programs based on attendee feedback from previous LISTEN events.

This year’s conference featured dynamic keynote presentations, 36 breakout sessions designed for executives (our 1st fully dedicated Executive track), program owners and analysts (Fundamental, Advanced and Expert), and expansion to four workshop sessions. We also added new activities such as Trivia Night, our inaugural “Women in Analytics” networking hour, eight Industry Exchanges, AI Think Tank sessions and the ingenious 3rd iteration of our “The Escape Room Challenge.” And all this taking place in the beautiful Margaritaville 9th Floor Conference Center with many stimulating conversations happening in the colorful Partner Pavilion where our fabulous sponsors co-hosted our event.

Barb Chandler, CallMiner’s Sr. Marketing Event Manager and the veritable “Queen of LISTEN” once again put together a memorable event including an assortment of Day One attendees activities to choose from including golf, a boat cruise, a team building Cardboard Regatta exercise — and for those with a philanthropic bent, our volunteer activity took place at a Ft. Lauderdale food kitchen and thrift store that supports those the HIV/AIDS, where over 50 LISTEN attendees helped package food and prepare clothing for sale.

Keynotes and Activities

Days Two and Three saw three fantastic external keynote presentations by noted sports author Ross Bernstein, CX expert Micah Solomon and SVP of National Sales for Comcast, Marge Jackson, along with Executive Track Keynotes from Sitel’s Mike Small and Forrester’s Kate Leggett.  CallMiner’s VP of Marketing, Scott Kendrick kicked off the general session on this year’s theme of Velocity to Vision followed by our CEO Paul Bernard who shared with our audience a strategic view of CallMiner and our company’s philosophy of “Partnership for Change.”

At the conclusion of Paul’s segment he, along with CTO Jeff Gallino recognized CallMiner’s Partner of the Year, Sitel. CallMiner’s Founder, Jeff Gallino, VP of Product Management Bruce McMahon and VP of AI Rick Britt also delivered thought-provoking content in the conference’s general sessions. The general sessions also featured recognition of CallMiner Customer of the Year, SiriusXM, as well as three customer analysts who each won the prestigious LISTEN Award (Jeannette Matlock of Selene Finance, Shevelle Mitchell of CBN and Greg Vincente of Teleperformance).

The packed audience was also entertained by a special “Mood Ring” Video starring CallMiner’s “Not Nearly Ready for Primetime Players.” Day Two finished with an incredible Parrott Head Party at the Margaritaville Restaurant featuring the musical talents of Jimmy Stowe and Stoweaways followed by a spirited Karaoke session where CallMiner customers and employees showed off their performance chops.

Breaking Records

LISTEN 2019 also saw a record-breaking number of customer speaker submissions — once again illustrating the incredible, unselfish way in which CallMiner customer analysts, program owners, and executives showed their willingness to share thought leadership, best practices and valuable lessons learned from each other’s experiences. For the first time ever we literally had more speaker submissions than we had sessions within the breakout schedule, so in order to accommodate as many customer submissions as possible and in the very spirit that epitomizes LISTEN many customers agreed to share the stage with others presenting similarly themed topics. The result was a fantastic array of topics that won near universal praise based on mobile app and post event surveys from LISTEN attendees. Couple those sessions with customer opportunities to spend quality time with our industry leading AI and data scientists in AI Think Tank Sessions and the Partner Demo Track sessions where our cadre of complimentary partners provided overviews of the values associated with their products and services.

An event of this magnitude and level of success does not take place without extraordinary contributions from a number of individuals and teams starting with the aforementioned Ms. Chandler and our visionary marketing leader Scott Kendrick along with the artistic genius of our own graphic designer, Arian Fernandez de la Vega who designed the graphics and imagery that adorned our website, programs, conference themes and every brandable part of our event.

Thanks too to the balance of the Marketing team who provided exceptional support and logistics coordination, our Sales and Customer Success teams who helped promote and coordinate the participation of so many customers, the Solution Architects who provided many attendees with fantastic demonstration of our platform, our brilliant Business Analyst team who created and managed the fantastic Escape Room Challenge and supported many sessions, our AI and Data Scientist team who devised our AI Trivia Challenge and AI themed breakout sessions, the Application Engineering Team who lent technical expertise in many sessions, our Product Management group who supported our conference in so many ways, our incredible collaborative partner community who helped to not only underwrite the conference but provided invaluable contributions to the event content, our spirited Business Development team who provided logistics support, our IT Team and of course our Executive Leadership team who was behind and in front of this event every step away.

So, in the end what am I saying? Well “it takes a village” to put on an overwhelmingly successful conference experience like LISTEN 2019 and I sure am glad I live in the CallMiner village!