Karen Lam, Director of Customer Support at Top Hat, outlines a context-driven leadership style grounded in storytelling. She traces her path from retail to EdTech, culminating in managing support and shaping customer dialogue at Top Hat.

“Every single company should have a Voice of the Customer program because it's the one way you're going to get a good pulse on not only your customers and your product, but also the pulse of the people who are behind the scenes and working for you and bringing that brand message and reputation forward.” – Karen Lam

Karen highlights the power of a disciplined Voice of the Customer program to move support from cost containment to growth. She identifies career progression and underused customer insight as core blockers, then shows how AI synthesizes surveys, reviews, and public chatter into clear narratives executives can act on. Karen recommends cross-functional cadence, measurable feedback loops, and storytelling that ties to revenue.

Kimberly Agin, Head of Business Performance and Enablement, Voice & Chat Automation/Contact Center at KeyBank, traces a career across financial services and explains why the contact center is a live window into client needs. She details how journey data and recorded conversations reveal rich behavioral insights. She pairs this with enterprise data for full context. She shows how these insights fuel product improvement.

“Whoever owns the data and knows the data is going to win the AI future.” – Kimberly Agin

This episode explores how Kimberly transforms contact centers by treating conversations as a core data asset and aligning them with enterprise strategy. She explains how unstructured voice and chat interactions can be paired with enterprise data to reveal behavioral insights, why governing access and building trusted data environments matter for AI, and how clean inputs ensure meaningful outputs. The discussion also highlights how cross-functional collaboration and data-led storytelling shift contact centers from operational cost centers to strategic growth engines.

Cynthia Patterson, Vice President of North American Customer Support at Antech Diagnostics, outlines a new customer support model that blends empathy with business metrics. She explains how aligning value propositions with customer experience creates both loyalty and executive buy-in. Cynthia discusses her team’s extraordinary results: 6% turnover, 93–98% CSAT, and decades of employee tenure. She demonstrates how to communicate the language of the C-suite while preserving the voice of the customer.

“Talking about value propositions in the shaping of a support model is critical to engaging the C-suite. You can’t go with a model that is completely contrary to the business model, so I always begin with the end in mind to align customer support with our company’s vision.” - Cynthia Patterson

This episode explores how Cynthia combines her clinical background with business principles to create a support model that resonates with both customers and executives. She explains how value propositions guide the design of support teams, why empathy and tenure matter in delivering consistent customer experiences, and how customer satisfaction directly links to contract renewals. The discussion also highlights the role of cross-functional collaboration and C-suite alignment in sustaining long-term customer relationships.