Featuring Penny Davis, Senior Manager

The GPJ Contact Center based in Austin, TX, provides registration, housing and technology support to thousands of event attendees via telephone, email and chat technology. Supporting events like Dreamforce, Workday Rising and Adobe Max, it is a world class customer service center and our customer service representatives (CSRs) are some of the best in the business.  

As the Senior Manager of the Center, Penny Davis manages all operations. We spoke about the value of the center to clients that also include NetApp, Autodesk and Crowdstrike:

“We’ve come a long way in the past 8 years, from an add-on service to a valued business unit within GPJ. Our clients realized that contact center support can really make a positive difference to their customers’ experience during the registration process. We’ve built a reputation for ‘white glove’ customer service no matter the size or targeted market for the event.”

Fortunately for us and our clients, the contact center has been able to embrace the switch to digital events with ease.  Penny says: “For us, it was simply a matter of answering slightly different questions that we do for in-person events. Our systems are all cloud-based, so we had our CSRs take their laptops and start working from home by logging into a secure and separate VPN made specifically for us by our IT team. Utilizing our new Salesforce Service Cloud platform with Natterbox phone system, we were able to take on much higher attendee counts without the need for excessive numbers of representatives. One-click answers provided by ‘quick texts’ in the Service Cloud system allowed us to answer repetitive questions without typing long answers or searching/copying/pasting from a document.”

We asked Penny for a few examples of how we’ve been able to support requests outside of our normal purview. 

“Autodesk required support for 6 foreign languages and separate ‘open’ and ‘closed’ times for those particular lines. We were able to quickly build a complicated phone tree and schedule with Natterbox’s intuitive but powerful user interface.” 

“Adobe MAX had a predicted 150K attendees but came in at over 600K. We answered a thousand emails in a day using Service Cloud’s ‘quick text’ feature that we were able to adjust per Adobe’s requests in a minute instead of sending a chat or email to the CSRs, hoping they read it in time. We simply changed the automated verbiage they were sending.”

Penny’s future plans for the contact center include exploring the possibility of expanding ‘office’ locations globally within GPJ to be able to more easily offer foreign language services and 24 hour support. “I believe that hybrid experiences will be more prevalent in the coming years, as this allows our clients to reach a wider, global audience than can afford the travel time and expenses,” Penny continued.  

“We’re getting ready to take on changes and challenges that are coming our way!”

Many thanks to Penny and the Contact Center for their innovative and flexible solutions, and for the fun they bring to the agency (example below from Halloween, 2019).