Paul Kowal
InstructorYears Experience: 19
Education: He received a BA from Amherst College and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Biography:
G.P. Paul Kowal is founder and President of Kowal & Associates, Inc., a leading customer service consulting firm whose mission since 1988 is “to improve the link between companies and their customers.” During the past 17 years, under Paul’s leadership, the firm has been helping clients of all sizes in a variety of industries to maximize the effectiveness of their multi-channel customer contact strategies. Kowal & Associates was one of the first consulting firms in the country to adopt the contact center as its focus. Kowal & Associates’ consulting specialties fall into three areas:
• outsourcing strategy and execution,
• call quality assessment and improvement, and
• interactive voice response systems.
Paul began the firm to help Fortune 100 companies develop an outsourcing strategy, identify and select outsourcing partners (both domestically and abroad) and manage their outsourced relationships. He developed this specialty well before call center outsourcing became the common business practice it is today, and was a pioneer in off-shore outsourcing, working with service bureaus in Canada, Jamaica, Ireland and Japan during the 1990s.
Ten years ago, Paul recognized the growing need in call centers to formalize the quality assessment process. He and his team began to design innovative quality programs, implementing them both locally in the contact center and remotely from third party sites. He also began to work with leading edge companies who had already established quality programs to refocus them more directly on improving customer satisfaction. Kowal & Associates’ quality activities include both consulting and actual third party monitoring on behalf of its clients.
Paul began his involvement with speech recognition in 1998, when the industry was in its infancy. As an early evangelist for the technology, he has been delivering seminars at industry conferences and writing articles for seven years, spreading the word about the business and financial successes of early adopters. His mission is to train managers in the basics, to enable them to investigate the technology further for their own organization. As the technology has become more widely established, Paul has begun to concentrate his focus on the interaction between the automated portion of a call and its eventual transfer to a “live” call center for completion.
Prior to founding Kowal & Associates, Paul founded a full-service database marketing agency, Boston Direct, which he built for two years before moving into consulting. He previously gained customer service, advertising and marketing experience at a telemarketing service bureau, two advertising agencies and a pioneering database marketing agency, as well as two consumer packaged goods firms. He has been the lead consultant to Fortune 100 companies regarding teleservices and customer service for a variety of well-known brands, and has designed and executed promotion and support strategies for the largest packaged goods product in the world. He has given seminars on teleservices throughout the country, and consulted in both Canada and Japan. His articles have appeared in numerous contact center and industry-specific journals and magazines, and he has been quoted in many publications, including the New York Times, USA Today, Entrepreneur magazine, and National Public Radio (NPR).
Paul is a member of several call center-related professional associations, including the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP), the International Customer Service Association (ICSA), the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP), and the American Teleservices Association (ATA). He belongs to the leading speech recognition developers’ association, AVIOS (the Applied Voice Input-Output Society).
