UNC Charlotte's Ex Ed Talks are short-format presentations offering new and relevant insights and resources to the business community. Featured topics are highlighted under categories including Leadership, Communications, Strategy, and Finance. Contact us for additional topics available, or for more information at executive.education@uncc.edu.
Leadership Effectiveness
Communications
Innovation, Strategy, & Marketing
Finance
Data Science and Business Analytics
Recent research shows that the average cost of responding to a customer’s complaint in Twitter is $1, while the average cost of interacting with a customer through a traditional call center can be close to $6. Firms that use Twitter as a social care channel are also seeing a large 19% increase in customer satisfaction. Despite these benefits, there are also challenges – many of us have heard about instances when a firm’s response to a customer’s social media query caused a major backlash.
During this talk, participants will learn how Dr. Johar mined data and used data science methods to come up with a recommendation for using Twitter responses in a prescriptive sense (specifically, to improve digital customer care), rather than in a predictive way (e.g., to forecast customer sentiment). Managers will benefit from this case study as it helps them devise an optimal strategy to manage customer sentiment in social media. Presented by Monica Johar, Associate Professor of Management Information Systems.
Widely perceived as an emerging mode of sustainable transportation, mobility on-demand (MoD) systems utilize shared vehicles, parking spaces, and information technology to move citizens from point-to-point on demand, while also allowing cities to reclaim urban land. With the industry nearly doubling biannually, global fleets accounting for 104K (2014) and 14M (2017) cars and bikes respectively, and the first autonomous vehicles already cruising the streets of cities, MoD systems are one of the most rapidly growing sectors of urban transportation. Yet, the average shared vehicle in many systems rests idle each day for almost as much time as a private one, while dispatch costs, congestion, carbon emissions, and land occupation frequently exceed those generated through private ownership.
In this talk, using Boston’s bike sharing system as a case, Dr. Papanikolaou will demonstrate a data-driven system dynamics modeling approach that allows decision-makers to interactively explore scenarios in MoD systems, such as: by how much will traffic, fleet, or parking requirements change for a marginal change in dispatch (rebalancing) work?
Objective: Managers will benefit from this case study as it helps them better understand how systems analysis can improve planning, predict problems, and devise optimal operations strategies for MoD systems, particularly in anticipation of self-driving technologies. Participants will also view unique examples of data representation and visualization that help build compelling arguments. Presented by Dr. Dimitris Papanikolaou, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Software and Information Systems.