Q&A: Tom Hoogervorst, Director of Customer Support at Enghouse

Here is a quick Q&A with Tom Hoogervorst, Director of Customer Support at Enghouse Interactive.

Tell us about your history with Enghouse Interactive. How have you seen Enghouse evolve since you’ve been part of the team?

I joined the Enghouse family in July of 2015. During my tenure, there have been numerous acquisitions, along with the merging of the Channels and Americas support and services groups . Acquisitions bore change which drove many initiatives across new and existing product lines. This promoted numerous opportunities, including the sharing of resources, training and knowledge to strengthen/enhance our portfolio and offerings across our global footprint.

What is your favorite part of your job?

I take pride in the never ending focus on sustainment of a culture of caring. This basically means we are steadfast in our belief that we must balance our responsibility to our employees with our commitments to our customers.

A culture of caring must be a consistent mindset within Enghouse support and a hallmark of our success. Whether we are helping a customer resolve an issue, hiring a new employee or coaching a co-worker, we continue to raise our standards in exceeding customers and employee expectations. It is at the heart of how we introduce ourselves to each and every external customer, how we interact with our internal customers, and how we go the extra mile for everyone we serve.

As I browsed through some recent customer feedback, I saw many excellent examples of truly engaged support engineers who adhered to protocol while ensuring the customer experience was second to none. It is feedback like this that personifies our culture of care and offers a glimpse into what sets us apart as a company. It’s feedback like this that makes it all worthwhile!

What opportunities do you see for Enghouse/Customer Support?

The silver bullet of customer experience financial rewards is preventing recurrence of pervasive issues brought to our attention by customer feedback. Identifying and resolving patterns and root causes of value diminishers for the entire Enghouse customer base’s well-being is the primary objective. When we prevent recurrence of customers’ hurdles, we are empowering our current and future customers to keep rewarding us now and for the long term with their loyalty.

What’s on the horizon in the world of customer support?

We are in the process of deployment of a series of initiatives centered primarily around high touch customer experience and global expansion of our cross regional support. We will share more details as these initiatives unfold.

Tell us 3 fun facts about you!

Long ago in what seems like a different life-time, I played semi-pro basketball, primarily in Europe. While I truly loved what I was doing, my career ended prematurely with an injury while playing that required major reconstructive knee surgery.

I enjoy the freedom and adventure of boldly going where no man has gone before via off-road 4-wheel driving, in search of gems and semi-precious stones.  I’ve logged well over 100,00 off-road miles over the years.

I collect vintage baseball ball cards (over 20,000 cards from the late 1800’s thru the 1950’s. I also find and collect fine art primarily from on-line auctions.