Asst. Prof Roh Sungjong

Please share your belief(s) in the subject matter(s) you are facilitating in a few sentences.

"Customer Loyalty” is about fundamental underlying mechanisms whereby customers make judgments and choices, in everyday life and in response to products and services. No matter how successful your products and services are at a given time, there will be attrition over time. The course is designed to inform strategic thinkers in organisations about optimal (and suboptimal) ways to create “sustainable” satisfaction and “sticky” experiences for their customers — beyond persuading them to make one-time purchases of services and products.

“Machine Learning for Digital Customer Insights” allows you to learn how to execute predictive analytics, using supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods, to gain insights about customers. It shows how to bridge the data science work and business decision-making by deploying the results of predictive analytics to interactive dashboards, using Shiny.

The two courses deal with differing knowledge, expertise, and skills. One thing they have in common is how we can learn from data (rather than from intuitions, beliefs and personal experiences), so as to enhance a firm and its customer relationships.

What inspires you to do what you do now?

What inspires me the most is to share my knowledge and expertise in problem-solving in the real world. As a business school professor, my research work is not meant only as a theoretical contribution; it should show how to solve pressing problems of society and organisations. Sharing knowledge and expertise with working professionals in Singapore, helping to solve their business problems, is intriguing and inspiring.

Please share a memorable experience/ takeaways you have had from our workshops

I have many fond memories over the years. When participants tell me that they are using what they learned from my courses in their business practices, it is truly gratifying. Some participants have attended several of the courses I have offered over the years, and it is great to see them return again and again. (One course that I’ve offered is Customer Loyalty, and it appears that I have some loyal participants.)

Another thing that comes to my mind is an occasion when my business school undergraduate student approached me and told me that his older brother had taken my workshop and enjoyed it. Yes, it is a small world; and it’s great that the brothers both enjoyed my classes. One of the greatest compliments I had from a participant was also memorable: “You should win the Nobel Prize in teaching!” Well, I feel humbled, yet it is memorable.

If you are not a facilitator, you will be…..

Since my college days, I have wanted to be a scholar. I didn’t think about any other career paths. I love what I’m doing—research, teaching, and services, as a college professor. But, in a subjunctive fashion, I guess that I could be in a field where I can work on problem-solving of any kind, as I have quite a range of interests in various areas of inquiry (for scientific questions or business problems). In the current labour market, perhaps joining a tech company as a data scientist could be one of those.