Author and futurist Michael Tchong will lead the 2019 Executive Summit held in conjunction with SOCAP International’s Customer Care Summit 2019 in Columbus Ohio, April 14-17. Tchong has launched four start-up companies in the fields of desktop publishing, customer relationship management, internet analytics and digital marketing.

Consumer response coupons can be a great method for manufacturers to enhance customer relations when challenges arise or to reward loyal consumers who have expressed their appreciation for excellent products or services. Consumers love them; manufacturers reinforce purchasing patterns and enhance their image. All this happens without incurring the costs of shipping products to a consumer.

Businesses house an enormous wealth of customer insights in the contact center. This information is no longer only accessible through phone call transcripts. Social media and asynchronous messaging have introduced a wide variety of support channels customers can turn to in addition to the phone. This evolution has resulted in a stream of customer feedback that pours into the contact center across a variety of channels. In a highly competitive environment, companies are challenged to organize these insights in ways that makes sense, and act on them effectively. With the voice of the customer at your fingertips, however, there is a massive opportunity to transform the contact center into a revitalized hub of customer insights that can add value throughout the entire organization.

Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate and committed to their work. Engagement has a direct impact on organizational profitability, correlating closely with productivity, efficiency, and reduced turnover. Like many managers, call center leadership, management and supervision have direct experience grappling with these issues and are familiar with the direct impact they have on the bottom line.

When managers score agents’ email quality in a “gotcha” fashion, or when they score agents on writing skills that haven’t been explained, taught, or coached, they can damage agents’ writing skills. Yes, it’s true. An ineffective or punitive email scorecard can make agents’ writing skills worse.

Most Customer Care leaders inherently know what customers want, we have a deep understanding of the needs of our users, and we care deeply about getting that information into the hands of decision makers. But retrieving meaningful data from thousands of user conversations is difficult. And when arguing with, say, sales, we must compete with cold, hard, revenue figures.