Join Us for Interactions Live!

Even six months ago, who could have predicted that across the planet, we’d be leaving in-person conferences behind—at least for now—and recreating them as virtual events?  And who would have believed that in the process, we’d discover interesting new possibilities for sharing the latest in call center cloud software solutions and industry trends, not to mention in how we engage with each other?

Interactions Live – you’re invited!
But here we are, excited to invite you to our first-ever virtual Interactions Live conference! This global happening—the industry’s biggest virtual customer experience event of the year—will be September 15 and 16. It’s open to all contact center professionals and is completely FREE of charge to all participants.

The central purpose of Interactions Live is perhaps our most important yet: to help contact center professionals navigate the realities of tomorrow.  To provide the latest insights into streamlining operations, working at home and staying profitable while continuing to provide exceptional customer experiences in a rapidly evolving world. If you’re reading this, you and your organization are facing new challenges. Successfully navigating them requires new levels of agility, flexibility and adaptability.  Everyone is treading in new territory.

At NICE, we’re here to help. Our products, services and support have always embodied vision, innovation and future-readiness. So we believe we’re uniquely prepared to support our industry at this moment—and to help you travel the path forward.

Why Interactions Live?
A better question: Why not?

• Interactions Live will be an easy, informative and enjoyable way to get up to speed on the most important issues facing your organization and contact center today.You’ll be learning current best practices. Engaging with peers and industry thought-leaders.Exploring new realities and experiences. Taking away practical information you can use now.
• You can attend from the comfort of your home office, your den or your bedroom. The main thing is that you join us and take the next important steps to your readiness for the future. (And the future is now, by the way!)
• It’s all FREE of charge.
• No travel, no cost—no reason at all not to attend!

What will you see and do at Interactions Live?
This two-day event will be presented using an interactive 3D platform and will include more than 30 sessions.  You’ll beparticipating in informative live sessions, exploring the virtual solutions showcase andmeeting with experts.  You’ll have access to advice, real-life examples, proven best practices, practical tips and much more!

Here are some of the highlights you can expect at Interactions Live:

What are you waiting for?
We Invite you to attend—and invite your colleagues, friends and co-workers, too.

REGISTER TODAY
That’s all there is to it—September will be here before you know it!

The journey to Interactions Live
We’ve drawn on different resources to produce an effective virtual event, one that in keeping with our Interactions traditions, will provide real and practical value to participants.  In today’s reality, conferences and gatherings present universal challenges—and who knows what the future holds? Regardless, if you find yourself producing a virtual event, as more and more organizations will, you may find value in some ideas that informed our thinking on the journey to Interactions Live.

Making the pivot
We were In the final planning stages for our annual user conference,  Interactions 2020. But the proverbial writing was on the wall as Q1 drew to a close.  We suddenly realized, like everyone else, that we were in a global pandemic, and large-scale gatherings were off the table—indefinitely.

What to do? Cancel? Postpone? After many, many thoughtful discussions with all manner of stakeholders, we ultimately concluded that we needed to pivot to something new—even if it meant marching into the unknown. The future—and specifically—the future of conferences—would be different but was largely a blank slate.  But this is where Interactions LIVE began to take shape.  Past Interactions have been transformational. This year, the conference would be transformed as well as transformational.  All the planning, every detail of the event would flow from this decision.

Changing our mindset
We learned how important it is to recognize upfront that you’re not “cutting and pasting” elements of an in-person conference onto a virtual landscape.  Because virtual events have their own dynamics and challenges, they need their own unique parameters and attributes.  A virtual event doesn’t mean just live-streaming what was originally to be an in-person event.

At the same time, we wanted to try to capture the essence of past Interactions events and apply it to the virtual event wherever we could.  Our advice: Don’t attempt to translate in-person elements too directly. Instead, we found that reframing them with a few key techniques helped us move forward to the best solutions. We applied these over and over again:

• Reimagine
• Repurpose
• Reboot
• Reprioritize
• Readjust

Setting goals and priorities
Much of the process of settling on speakers, selecting topics and developing content could be similar to past approaches or easily adapted. But experts in virtual events also offer a strong caveat:

Topics, content and priorities need to be driven by and viewed through the
lens of the times,  and especially, the rapidly evolving needs of organizations
and the individuals who inhabit them.

In that context, future readiness took on a new prominence and sense of urgency throughout our planning process, as a central theme and a thread woven throughout the event.

Priorities emerged that focused our thinking around these themes, as well as the requirements of a virtual event, such as:

• How do we capture the energy and power of legacy Interactions conferences?
• How do we deliver practical value that will help participants
  prepare for the day after COVID-19?
• How will it all play onscreen?
• How will we build in opportunities for meaningful interaction?
• How will we define success?
  
  

The user experience, above all
In-person events are powered to a large degree by the energy and interaction of presenters and participants, workshops and demonstrations—the exchange of information, the sharing of stories, the networking and meeting socially. 

But the user experience for a virtual event is, by definition, is vastly different.  So the fundamental challenge is this:  What key event components must be optimized to the virtual world to ensure a satisfying user experience?

The answer, as it turns out, is that there are endless details, large and small, that need to be optimized to a virtual format.  Our advice:  Do your homework. Consult—early and often—with virtual events pros.  One of our favorites, Intrado, publishes a variety of guides and white papers, packed with forward-thinking information on everything from speaker training to audience training—even a playbook for virtual events.

Looking ahead
What will tradeshows and conferences look like in the coming months and years? And how will value be defined for marketers, as attendees or exhibitors? In-person events may reappear one day and may coexist with virtual ones.  Hybrid events have begun to emerge as another appealing alternative.

Regardless, Interactions lives on, and we hope you’ll join us September  15 and 16 for our first virtual Interactions Live. Remember, it’s open to all contact center professionals and completely free of charge!
REGISTER TODAY