Customer Experience Leadership team




 

John Carroll

Global Head of Synovate Customer Experience

John Carroll John E. Carroll III is the leader of Synovates $200+ million global customer experience business. He serves clients in the areas of customer experience strategy, innovation, and improvement. He works with top global brands in a wide variety of industries including in recently organizations such as Microsoft, HSBC, IHG, Anheuser Busch InBev and Corning.

While currently based in Chicago, John has gained extensive international business experience including over a decade of work in Europe, Asia and Africa. Prior to joining Synovate, John gained a broad range of experiences helping organizations resolve critical strategic issues while working at McKinsey & Company and Deloitte.

John earned an MBA with distinction from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and continues to act as an admissions interviewer for both schools.

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John Vidmar

Ph.D., Global Director, Solution Development, Synovate Customer Experience

John Vidmar As Global Director of Performance Tracking, and as Business Head Public Sector & Healthcare Research Services Practice in North America, John draws on 30 years of both academic and commercial research experience to guide clients and Synovators on complex design, analytic and best-practice challenges in tracking studies. In these roles, John has been involved in the design and execution of some of the largest surveys completed not only at Synovate but within the US Federal Government. His particular expertise is in integrating developing technologies to improve sampling frames, data collection and processing, and his latest ventures have involved integrating data across various sources. John was a key part of the developmental teams for a number of Synovate products, including the TeleNation Omnibus product, a continuous sampling and data collection methodology, the databasing of tens of millions of records for the ongoing Patient Satisfaction tracking studies, and NADA-24, the day-after sales or service product now realizing over 10,000 telephone completes per night. John also served on a committee for the US Census Bureau that provided review and counsel on all census operations, including data collection and processing procedures, to prepare for the 2000 Decennial Census.

John joined Synovate's Public Sector Group in 1989 as an account group manager with responsibility for Survey Operations; with progressive promotions, he took over the business direction of the group in 2004. Prior to Synovate, John was the Assistant Head of Data Analysis, Survey Research Laboratory, University of Illinois, with an appointment as a Lecturer in the Political Science Department. He also taught statistics and research methodology courses in Criminal Justice. John started his career with Market Facts, Inc., as a research analyst in the Public Sector Research Group.

John has a B.A. from Cleveland State University (Magna Cum Laude, Political Science & Sociology with a minor in Urban Planning and English), M.A. from the University of Chicago (Political Science), and Ph.D. (Public Policy Analysis) from the University of Illinois.

Curiosity is a hallmark of John's personality. He has always been curious about how we know what we know and how we assign value to the things we care about. Secretly, he is a very good carpenter and probably one of the few people at Synovate who can operate a metal lathe and a Bridgeport milling machine. (In fact, he was first exposed to confidence intervals and tolerance levels making cutting tools used to produce cars.) John can often be found cruising on top of a motorcycle on back roads. Stranded on a desert island, John would want—what else?—a multi-function Swiss Army knife.

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Rob Huijboom

Global Director, Business Development for ViewsCast

Rob Huijboom Rob is recognized as a ViewsCast thought-leader and an expert in telecommunications and technical integration of ViewsCast in call centres. In his current role, he works across the world to provide guidance to clients and Synovators on the best use of ViewsCast and new applications. To this, he brings deep experience in both real time customer experience monitoring and applied analytics. With clients across all industries, he has experienced almost everything that can be lived in the world of monitoring customers at the customer touch points.

Rob Huijboom is an entrepreneurial character with over 20 years of telecommunication and marketing experience. After earning his business studies degrees, his career started at Royal KPN (incumbent telecom in the Netherlands). Sales, research and multi channel strategies were always blended into one challenge during this period. After his last three years as the national director of BtB sales and channel management in the SME market, he left Royal KPN in 2002 to become an entrepreneur again— and Rob founded two new companies early 2003. One of these companies launched the European practice for ViewsCast and is part of Synovate today.

Ever the researcher, Rob is curious about whether there would be any customer experiences to monitor in the afterlife. His secret talent is too secret to share... but he can handle the Dutch, German, French and English language. And if that is not good enough, he can fix virtually everything (as long as it is hardware). He likes to hang out on the water, in his boat with family and friends—or, if it's cold, you can find him in the mountains, preferably in the snow. If stranded on a desert island, he would first find his Blackberry and then immediately look for a whisky, a hammock and stuff to build a raft—because he cannot stay in one place too long.

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