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Paul Kline

Senior ExpertDallas

Focuses exclusively on customer-care operations across all industries—from financial services to hospitality to healthcare—for both business-to-business and business-to-customer organizations

Paul has deep expertise in contact-center operations, driving high-impact change and building capabilities across a variety of industries and organizations. He has assisted hundreds of organizations in improving customer-care operations in every sector from financial to healthcare to hospitality.

Prior to joining McKinsey, Paul held senior positions in customer care across numerous industries, including senior contact-center management roles at automotive, hotel, and financial companies.

Examples of his recent client experience include the following:

  • delivering a multiyear road map for a major industrial-supply company to rationalize its center footprint, reduce cost, and increase contact resolution
  • leading a successful help-desk process-optimization-evaluation effort at a major IT-outsourcing provider, which generated a cost reduction of over 20 percent
  • providing guidance to a financial-services company in charting a 5-year customer-care strategy, which delivered a road map to drive cost reductions and higher customer satisfaction

In his role as director of contact-center operations at a global automotive company, Paul was responsible for all operations, including workforce management, quality, training, knowledge management, and site performance (both onshore and offshore). He led an effort to insource operations from a business-process outsourcing firm, which included a full redesign of operations processes.

As senior director of contact-center operations at hotel and leisure company, Paul was responsible for shared services across nine global centers. He directed global workforce management, online customer care (including external knowledge base, chat, email, and social media), customer-satisfaction measurement, IT, and tier-2 support.

In his role with a provider of connected vehicle and digital driver-assistance services, Paul was responsible for site management as well as workforce-management ownership across all four centers. While there, he redesigned the internal quality-measurement methodology, resulting in a statistical correlation with corresponding external CSAT.

Paul is Six Sigma Black Belt certified.

Published Work

Smarter call center coaching for the digital world,” McKinsey & Company, November 2018

Boosting contact center performance through employee engagement,” McKinsey & Company, March 2018

Navigating the uncertainty of potential ACA repeal and replace A preliminary analysis,” McKinsey & Company, December 2016

Past Experience

General Motors
Director, contact-center operations

Starwood Hotels and Resorts
Senior director, contact-center operations

Agero
Director, contact-center operations

Education

University of Michigan
MBA

Arizona State University
BS, political science