From: Stephen Ferber

The Professional Association for Customer Engagement (PACE), formerly the American Teleservices Association (ATA), has made some key changes to the organization as it looks to the future and how it can best serve the contact center industry as well as its current and prospective members. You can read about the specific changes in a letter sent out recently by Michael Rauscher, Chair, PACE National Board of Directors.

I would like to share with you, from my perspective, why I chose to accept appointment to the PACE National Board of Directors this past October, 2014.

According to part of the PACE “Mission Statement” on their website, the association changed its name from the ATA to PACE in 2012 “because the industry paradigm was shifting” and PACE had “identified 6 mega-trends that have continued to shape our industry landscape: 1) maturing technology, 2) global customer engagement, 3) multi-channel strategies, 4) consumer privacy and protection, 5) mobile integration, and 6) big data/analytics.”

I initially became active with the association in the late 1990’s during my tenure as EVP & General Counsel of PRC, Precision Response Corporation, a large and rapidly growing outsourcer performing customer service, technical support and sales services on behalf of its clients. For me, the ATA was an important association to support because of its strong commitment to contact center advocacy at the Federal and State levels as well as its proactivity with respect to helping companies adapt innovative and compliant best practices that would balance a tumultuous, ever-changing and more scrutinizing legislative environment. And, when I co-founded Golden Gate BPO Solutions in 2006, we stayed actively involved for the same reasons. Of course, we also very much enjoyed the peer to peer networking, knowledge-share and friendships that took place at the Annual Convention, Washington Summit and the regional Chapter events.

However, we always considered the ATA to be of prime importance for only one piece of the Customer Relationship Management cycle, and that was traditional phone-based sales. Over the course of the years, the ATA did stay relevant legislatively and content-wise as our membership stayed lock in step with consumers’ growing demand to be engaged via other communication channels, such as email, chat, social media, web and text. But, with such a loyal and tenured membership having strong roots in the sales channel, the association began to embark upon a mission of change in 2012 as “PACE” with the goal of bringing more thought leadership and diversity to our membership.

Change is never easy and PACE sure has endured a lot of change over the past few years.   We now have the opportunity to “implement” change with the support of a focused group of committed management who are determined to make it happen. We are less than 3 years in to this new mission.   Anyone and everyone in our industry involved in multichannel customer engagement has a unique and extraordinary opportunity to directly impact and shape the PACE community of the future.

My hope for PACE is a much larger community of customer engagement professionals who are able to deliver to one another a healthy balance of innovation and thought leadership along with a strong commitment to government advocacy and support of our ever-changing industry.

We have the PACE Convention and Expo coming up April 19-22, 2015 in Atlanta, GA. This annual event is important to PACE and one way that offers all of us a great opportunity to contribute to its growth, make a difference and help shape, and re-shape, this association and community. Learn more about the PACE Convention and Expo here

(view the message from Michael Rauscher here)