Learning Objectives
This Webcast offers a specific focus on improving the performance of contact centers and enhancing customer service and loyalty. Gather best practices to drive the performance of your service chain and benchmark yourself with others in the industry. You will learn how to:
- Use forecasting to increase the profitability of contact centers.
- Optimize call centers and reduce costs, while improving customer satisfaction.
- Apply a metric analysis framework.
- Implement the cornerstones of a superior call center strategy – monitoring, alerting, predicting and optimizing.
- Reduce overall field service and warranty costs.
- Reap similar benefits that best-in-class organizations have achieved by using technology.
Program Content
With increasing global competition and changing customer dynamics, excellent service has become a critical differentiator. Organizations across multiple industries are looking at their service operations as sources of a stable, high-margin revenue flow that can mitigate marketplace fluctuations. But meeting new service level targets profitably requires creating accurate demand forecasts and optimizing staffing levels. Most organizations find creating accurate plans and forecasts and monitoring key metrics in or near real-time to be challenging, due in part to episodic demand patterns. The end results are high personnel costs and lower customer satisfaction ratings.
Join BetterManagement.com and SAS to hear what leading companies and their service organizations are doing to improve profitability and the performance of their service operations. Hear from industry experts and incumbents about the returns these organizations have achieved by applying advanced demand forecasting and operations optimization technologies in their service operations, including call centers.
The panelists will share best practices generated from numerous case studies and industry experience.
Participant Level of Understanding
This program is intended for participants with an interest in service operations management and overall service performance management.
Who Should Attend
Service managers, executives responsible for aftermarket or service support, and customer support managers who want to understand how to improve performance in the service chain, specifically focusing on how to increase profitability by minimizing inventory costs while improving customer service.
About Eric Arnum, Joe Costanzo and Michael Newkirk
Eric Arnum, Editor, Warranty Week
Eric Arnum is the Editor of Warranty Week, an online publication for the warranty professional. Launched in 2002, Warranty Week focuses on the manufacturing industry's aftermarket, with analyses of warranty costs, regulatory reporting, market value, and warranty product and management trends.
Warranty Week also hosts the Warranty Chain Management Conference, an annual event that gives warranty professionals the opportunity to meet and discuss warranty-related issues and develop warranty management as a recognized discipline.
Before launching Warranty Week, Arnum edited several newsletters in the telecom industry, and performed research and consulting projects for a wide range of clients in North America, South America and Europe.
Joe Costanzo, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Zencos
Joe Costanzo is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Zencos Consulting and is responsible for strategic technology and methodology direction for the company. Costanzo leads teams of highly qualified technology professionals in business intelligence architecture planning and service development projects, and establishes and maintains strategic vendor and partner relationships. He has served as a Senior Technical Architect for large-scale data warehousing and reporting implementations, using cutting-edge technologies. Additionally, Costanzo has designed and built business intelligence applications for FORTUNE 500 companies and facilitated workshops aimed at assisting clients in establishing business intelligence strategic plans and centers of excellence. His experience has allowed him to formulate and develop services aimed at integration of SAS® and third-party tools and best practices around business intelligence solutions integration.
Prior to starting Zencos Consulting, Costanzo worked for SAS. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, with degrees in business management and computer science. Costanzo and his wife Deborah have one daughter, Lily, and live in Emerald Isle, North Carolina.
Michael Newkirk, Manufacturing Industry Marketing Manager, SAS
As Manufacturing Industry Marketing Manager, Michael Newkirk is responsible for driving the development of industry-specific marketing strategies, messaging and positioning of SAS solutions to manufacturing-based companies and supply chain and service chain-based organizations that transverse various industries (i.e., manufacturers and retailers, etc.)
Prior to joining SAS, Newkirk has held a number of senior executive positions with experience in strategic planning, operations, marketing, product development and service lifecycle management, including a stint with a joint venture between FANUC and General Motors that has become the largest industrial robotics company in North America. He has more than 21 years of experience in North America, Asia Pacific and Europe, managing technical customer service, applications engineering, manufacturing, marketing and technical support staff for hardware and software systems used in a wide variety of manufacturing industries, including aerospace and defense, automotive, semiconductor and electronics. Newkirk has extensive experience in launching new products and developing and maintaining joint ventures with Korean, Japanese, Chinese and European partners.
Newkirk has been published in a number of technical and trade journals and is a recognized leader in manufacturing. He has held numerous positions in trade associations including President of the Surface Mount Equipment Association of IPC. Newkirk served on a congressionally funded National Institute of Sciences industry and academic study group to analyze the competitiveness of Japanese and American manufacturing engineering education. He holds a bachelor’s degree and master’s in business administration. Newkirk has been certified by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers since 1983 and is also a member of APICS, the association for operations management.
