MSDO 2022
Speaker Series
How to Create a Service-First Culture
Michael Kerr is a Canadian Hall of Fame speaker who travels the world researching, writing, and speaking about inspiring workplaces and organizations that leverage their humour resources to drive outrageous results.
Michael is the also author of 8 books, including The Jerk-Free Workplace: How You Can Take the Lead to Create Happier, More Inspiring Workplaces and The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank!
In his high-energy, humor-filled presentation, Michael will share inspiring ideas on how to build a more resilient, inspiring, service-first workplace!
Speakers Series – Fall 2022
Wednesday, September 14th
1 – 3 p.m. AT | 12 – 2 p.m. ET | 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. MT | 9 a.m. – 11 a.m. PT
Enhancing municipal customer service with the power of AI and ML – Sponsor Session
The public has become accustomed to convenient, easy-to-use, digital services in their daily lives. Municipalities are facing increasing pressures to deliver the same convenience as consumer experiences, though often under financial constraints and while using existing systems.
Municipalities are also seeing an increasing number of inquiries and requests, coming from various channels and sources, and often in multiple languages, which can make it difficult to respond to them in a timely and accurate manner.
Join this session to learn how government can enhance their customer service capabilities, facilitate digital equity and operational efficiencies with the power of AI & ML technologies to interact naturally with customers and assist agents. Learn also how you can unlock real-time insights that allow you to make faster decisions, automate the capture and validation of data, while keeping it secure, to exceed customer expectations providing a better overall experience.
How to Create a Service-First Culture
Michael Kerr is a Canadian Hall of Fame speaker who travels the world researching, writing, and speaking about inspiring workplaces and organizations that leverage their humour resources to drive outrageous results.
Michael is the also author of 8 books, including The Jerk-Free Workplace: How You Can Take the Lead to Create Happier, More Inspiring Workplaces and The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank!
In his high-energy, humor-filled presentation, Michael will share inspiring ideas on how to build a more resilient, inspiring, service-first workplace!
Wednesday, September 21st
1 – 3 p.m. AT | 12 – 2 p.m. ET | 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. MT | 9 a.m. – 11 a.m. PT
Delivering a Better Customer Experience to your Communities
Unity and Five9 will discuss improving the customer experience when your citizens are contacting the region or municipality thru contact centre solutions including virtual agent or automation.
Business First 2022 Results
The presentation will provide an overview of the results of Business First 2022, the latest study in the research series focussing on how Canadian businesses across the country experience government services. In line with the previous iterations, the study takes an in-depth look at such areas as service reputation, client experience and expectations, top priorities for improvement, and channel usage. In addition, the study closely examines the impact that COVID-19 has had on business owners and their perception of government performance vis-à-vis their needs in the time of the pandemic. The results provide a broad perspective on the overall direction in which business sentiments are heading and also offer specific insights and recommendations on how the quality of government-to-business services and, consequently, business perceptions of public sector performance could be improved.
The Human Side’s Sustainable Results System
Barry Davis, President of The Human Side, Human Resource Development, will be speaking about The Human Side’s Sustainable Results System and how he partners with his clients to ensure their customer service development is applied and sustained over time.
Barry will be sharing a case study of his Customer Experience Excellence program delivery with The City of Regina.
MyDurham311 Smart Home Service Device
Learn how Durham Region has made Regional services more accessible to the public by launching a first-of-its-kind voice service in Canada, bringing Regional services to smart home devices. My Durham 311Smart Home Service makes it even easier to find details about Regional programs and services by simply asking Google or Alexa. Providing services through smart home devices allows customers to self-serve, making accessing information easier, more efficient and hands free. This allows customers to engage with the Region on a device and at the time that is convenient for them and will eventually result in cost savings to the Region’s contact centre.
Our 2022 Speakers
The MSDO Board of Directors is excited to once again present a diverse range of speakers.
Michael Kerr
Michael Kerr is a Canadian Hall of Fame speaker who travels the world researching, writing, and speaking about inspiring workplaces and organizations that leverage their humour resources to drive outrageous results.
Michael is the also author of 8 books, including The Jerk-Free Workplace: How You Can Take the Lead to Create Happier, More Inspiring Workplaces and The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank!
In his high-energy, humor-filled presentation, Michael will share inspiring ideas on how to build a more resilient, inspiring, service-first workplace!
Michal Dziong
Director, Research, Institute for Citizen-Centred Service (ICCS)
Michal Dziong is the Director of Research at the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service (ICCS) and has been with the Institute since 2007. He is responsible for managing national research studies that include Citizens First and Business First, as well as the Common Measurements Tool (CMT) and Citizen First Analytics portfolio. Michal’s role is to oversee all aspects of ICCS research and work with a broad range of stakeholders representing the public and non-profit sectors, as well as consultants and members of the academic community.
Barry Davis
President, The Human Side, Human Resource Development
Barry has partnered with municipal, provincial and crown corporation organizations to enhance their customer service experience. He specializes in the human interactions that are at the core of all healthy customer relationships. Barry works with his clients to implement The Human Side’s Sustainable Results System with thousands of service professionals.
Kalyan Chakravarthy
Chief Information Officer
Region of Durham
Kalyan Chakravarthy(KC) is Chief Information Officer for the Regional Municipality of Durham. In this position he is responsible for establishing and implementing a long-term technology strategy for the Region. KC has over 20 years of experience in private, public and not-for-profit sectors. He worked with GE, IBM, Toronto International Film Festival & AGCO before joining the region of Durham. He graduated his MBA from Smith School of Business and did a certificate course on Artificial Intelligence from MIT. Currently he also teaches Data Analytics and AI courses at Durham College.
Shaun Mitchell
Customer Engineer – Public Sector Canada, Google Cloud
Shaun Mitchell is currently a Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, his focus is on helping Canadian Public Sector customers utilize Google Cloud technologies. Shaun specializes in Application Modernization, DevOps and he has a background in Modern Data Warehousing.
Before joining Google, Shaun held a number of leadership roles such as a Managing Director of Cloud / Digital Architecture and Director of IT Operations mostly in Canada’s Financial (banking / insurance) Sector. A part of these roles Shaun spent many years developing teams to adopt modern cloud architecture practices and processes, including modern cloud native DevOps practices.
Before getting into senior leadership roles Shaun spent a number of years leading a team building out an organization’s first Enterprise Data Warehouse and BI delivery team. Before that Shaun worked as a software engineer working across many various industries like; Telco, E-Commerce and insurance.
Outside of work, Shaun is an amateur woodworking enthusiast.
Amanda Miller-Lau
Account Executive,
Unity Connected Solutions
A highly energetic, experienced IT and telecommunications enterprise sales executive with an excellent sales record for success. A committed and dependable individual that thrives on fostering new client relationships. Develops long-term and mutually rewarding business partnerships with a sense of pride.
With 20+ years sales professional including 13 at Unity Connected. Amanda has a vast expertise in IT and Telecommunications including Unified Communications (UCaaS, CCaaS), IP Telephony, IoT, Security and best in class wireline and wireless Network based solutions.
Jeff Woodland
Director of Industry Marketing,
Five9
Jeff Woodland is the Director of Industry Marketing at Five9. He talks and writes about making conversations better between municipalities and their constituents. Jeff has an extensive background working for Silicon Valley innovators in CCaaS, AI, Cloud Integration, and Performance Management. In the beginning of his career, Jeff was in federal government working with state and local government from Pennsylvania.
Our 2022 Sponsors
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