Customers today have never had so many options when choosing how they interact with their wireless carrier, telecom provider, cable operator or internet company. The number of customer touchpoints has ballooned and what has been speculated and talked about in the industry for several years - multi-channel customer service - is now a reality.
Today, most of these sales and service companies support multi-channel communication, and most of it occurs in their contact center operations. While this has resulted in more satisfied customers, many communications companies find it difficult to manage a successful multi-channel operation due to shortcomings in cross-channel capabilities.
Join Daniel Hong, Ovum's Lead Analyst for Customer Interaction and John Connors, Technical Director at eGain, as they discuss the best practices in implementing a successful cross-channel strategy in today's highly competitive telecoms industry.
John Connors has responsibility for the technical relationship with eGain's large accounts. Sitting between the customer and product development teams, John ensures that eGain's products are meeting the current and future needs of the marketplace. With a degree in physics and computer science from Brunel University, UK, John started his career with BP Research before moving to Bull Information Systems as an AI specialist. In almost two decades of tenure with eGain, John has had pretty much every job in the company - deployment consultant, consultancy manager, presales manager and now technical director.
Daniel Hong is part of Ovum Telecom's Enterprise team where he heads the global customer interaction (CI) research and consulting practice. As the program manager and lead analyst for CI, Hong is responsible for the strategic direction of contact center and self-service technology research. He has been quoted numerous times in Business 2.0, DestinationCRM, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and NPR, and regularly contributes articles to Speech Technology Magazine and other publications. Hong has authored numerous reports, benchmark studies, and articles that examine the issues, trends, opportunities, and trajectories of the CI market. Over the years, he has acted as advisor and consultant to Fortune 500 companies and he has written many industry papers on hosted technologies, speech self-service applications and routing, process optimization, open standards, and enterprise IP solutions. Before joining Ovum Hong was a Research Associate at the Columbia Business School's Institute for Tele-Information, where he spearheaded the institute's technology research initiatives for the published work Media Ownership and Concentration in America. In the past, Hong has also worked for embedded RTOS software, telecommunications and semiconductor companies in research, business development, marketing and strategic planning roles. Hong holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Sciences from the University of California at Irvine.
