Why you should listen to Nicola Millard on Dilbert and Droids:
Once described as “human caffeine” on Twitter, Dr Nicola Millard injects a positive, people-centred expresso shot to innovation and future strategy. Half social scientist, half technologist, all academic, she uses techniques from disciplines such as design thinking, psychology, anthropology, computing and business consulting to generate data, provocations and stories which can engage and create conversations from the board room, to the front line. No frothy coffee; just solid research.
In her long and varied career at BT – mostly based at Adastral Park in Ipswich, UK – Nicola has done a number of jobs, including futurology, research, usability, customer service, marketing, and business consulting. She was involved with a number of BT firsts, including the first application of artificial intelligence into BT’s call centres, BT’s initial experiments with home working, and helping to develop BT’s “net easy” score, a new way of measuring customer experience. She currently looks at innovation in both employee and customer experience.
Nicola got her PhD from Lancaster University in 2005 on motivational technologies in contact centres, and published her first book in 2009.
Nicola is an award winning presenter, with 2 TED talks and hundreds of conference panel, chair and keynote sessions under her belt. She occasionally pops up on radio and TV around the world, including appearances on ‘Woman’s Hour’, ‘Tech Tent’, ‘The Genius of Invention’ and ‘Back in Time for the Weekend’ for the BBC.
She is a judge on a number of award panels, including the Institute of Customer Service, the CCMA and the Association of Business Psychology. In 2019 she was listed as one of the top 10 UK CX Influencers by Customer Experience Magazine.
In her spare time, Nicola sings with various cabaret, jazz, country and blues combos and spends a lot of time in darkened rooms watching both movies and theatre. She is also a qualified judo coach and a keen swimmer.
Why You Should Listen to John Riordan on WFH – Where From Here (aka WTF!): John leads a variety of different customer support teams for Shopify, all of whom work from home, a business model he has been an evangelist for over the last 15 years in the US, UK and Ireland.
Why You Should Listen to Christina Pletnewski on Creating a Touchless Experience:
They say good things come in small packages. At 5 feet tall (in stilettos), Christina Pletnewski is a powerhouse marketer, leading new and innovative solutions around the end-to-end customer experience at Safelite AutoGlass. Given the average driver experiences a chip or a cracked windshield once every seven years, Christina knows the value of providing a positive, memorable experience. Behind every positive social media post and word of mouth recommendation is a finely tuned strategy that digs deep into the DNA of how customers want to do business in today’s world.
Christina was recently appointed Vice President, Customer Experience at Safelite to build and lead a team to create meaningful experiences for customers, associates and clients that drive business value. Christina joined Safelite Group in January of 2016 as the Vice President of Marketing leading TV creative and media, market research, B2B marketing, corporate communications, internal creative and ancillary products and services.
As a career marketer and customer advocate, Christina has worked for leading companies including Abott, Nestle and SC Johnson.
Christina earned her bachelor’s degree in business administration and her MBA at The Ohio State University.
Sourjo is a Customer Experience and Digital executive experienced in driving programs to transform the CX, drive innovation and create & execute on strategic change globally. He is focused on building stronger, more meaningful relationships with customers, make sure they have an awesome brand experience, and drive loyalty and re-purchase. He is currently Director of Program Management at Samsung Electronics America where he is leading key customer service initiatives to achieve best in class NPS and CSAT, and he will share how Samsung has been able to shift customer service away from being a cost focused business.
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, The Center for Workforce Excellence
Why should you listen to Trudy Bourgeois on Making Authentic Connections?
Described as a “truth teller”, Trudy Bourgeois is passionate about getting real on why more progress has not been made in advancing diversity, equality and inclusion. Trudy is a former senior sales and marketing executive who can help you to understand what it really means to position diversity, equality and inclusion as a business imperative. Drawing on the head, heart and hands model, Trudy will share disruptive strategies to move the needle and drive higher levels of accountability. If you are serious about a diversity, equality and inclusion breakthrough this session is a must attend for you.
Nate Brown is a perpetual student of the world’s greatest experiences and the people who create them. Having spent the first decade of this career managing a complex technical support environment for Occupational Health and eLearning software, Nate transitioned to Customer Experience 2015. He was dubbed the “CX Influencer of the Year” by CloudCherry in 2019, as well as being named a top CX thought leader by TruRating, Qminder, ProcedureFlow, LifeHelpNow, ICMI, and Exceeders. As a passion project, Nate recently created CX Accelerator, a first-class virtual community for Customer Experience professionals. Nate currently serves as the Chief Experience Officer for Officium Labs and can be found at a variety of conferences speaking and training on the CX topics he loves.
What inspires you?
Innovation, Driven Individuals, and Entrepreneurial Spirit.
For the last decade my professional experience has been in the Contact Center world, servicing businesses and consumers through cloud-based SaaS products. I enjoy working with large Global Customer Service teams to increase and leverage the following areas of business; leadership, customer experience, customer success, operations, technology, customer service, recruiting, and people development.
Author of the Contact Center book – Enable Better Service: A Customer Service Contact Center Story of Breaking Away from the Norm Through Creativity, Technology and Innovation.
Jerry Leisure has been a customer service professional and leader for over 22+ years, leading large teams at established companies such as Microsoft, Monster, Symantec, and Autodesk, as well as startups like Postmates, Kabam, and Forte Labs. A thought leader in the industry, Jerry can often be found speaking at CX conferences, participating in podcasts, and writing about his passion—the future of customer service and the CS marketplace.
Jerry firmly believes customers are the heart of every company and that the longevity of a company is directly tied to its customer success. His leadership and consulting ethos is built upon five key business principles: people do business with people, loyal and engaged customers build the company, communication makes things happen, adoption and usage deliver real value, and increasing customers success is a company’s lifeblood.
Jerry is currently serving as the CEO and Co-Founder of Officium Labs, a startup company focused on creating a global network of top CX talent, that helps companies maximize revenue through best-in-class customer experience. He founded Officium in 2019, with his Co-Founder Scott McCabe, on the concept of a decentralized network of people and currencies, creating a remote workforce model that improves work/life balance and shifts wealth from large cities to new communities around the world. This ends up helping companies realize the value of a flexible, On-Demand, best-in-class global workforce, which in turn enables the customer service and experience teams to turn from cost to profit centers.
Jerry is based in Palo Alto, California with his wife Kristen. They both enjoy traveling immensely and have lived in more than 30 places and visited 20+ countries. During COVID they are enjoying backyard movies and daily walks around the bay area.
Why You Should Listen to Nastaciea Robert on Not All Superheroes Wear Uniforms, They Wear Headsets Too:
Nastaciea Robert has served in healthcare for 20+ years contributing eight of these years to leadership accelerating business strategies within the healthcare system access model. This includes connecting the patient to the right provider, at the right time and location!
Why You Should Listen to Stacy Sherman on an Exceptionally Human Solution for Customer Satisfaction:
What makes Stacy credible is that she is a strategist and practitioner, leading customer experience and employee engagement every day. She’s the CX Director at a Global Corporation, Schindler Elevator, and previously led CX at Verizon. In her spare time, she is also blogging, writing for Forbes, mentoring people about DoingCXRight® , and writing her next book.
Stacy Sherman is a Customer Experience (CX) Strategist, Practitioner, and Digital Marketer. She’s known for HUMANIZING business and differentiating brands beyond price. Stacy doesn’t just talk about it. She’s DOING it…making an impact as Director of CX and Employee Engagement at Schindler Elevator Corporation, previously led CX at Verizon. When Stacy’s not at work, she’s writing for Forbes, blogging, speaking, and co-writing two CX International books launching soon.
Stacy is on a mission to help connect people and inspire great authentic customer experiences fueled by motivated, INCLUDED, happy employees. It’s the reason she started DoingCXRight®, which is a journey based framework that maximizes satisfaction through a practical approach. It entails both HEART & SCIENCE — combining proven methodologies to create real brand affinity, loyalty, and a competitive edge that delivers results.
Director, Sales & Customer Care Operations, Harry & David
With 12 years of CX and Operations experience with companies like the Ritz-Carlton, the Milwaukee Bucks, and Peloton; Andrea Zahn has helped organizations not only manage through but excel during challenging times like market crashes and global pandemics. As the current Global VP of Member Experience and GM of Studios at Peloton, Andrea is reshaping the way the studios operate, create, and deliver content in these unprecedented times. Andrea focuses her work and attention towards only two things; her consumer and her team.
Chief Operating Officer, Retail Annuities, New York Life
Simon helps under-represented groups to find careers in technology and prepares service reps to get ready for the future of work. He is an expert in contact centers, agent productivity, soft skills, upskilling agents, career pathing, and more.
Max is passionate about helping companies better serve their customers and has spent most of his career in the Contact Center space focusing on the customer experience. He has worked in a variety of roles including Product Marketing and Management, Sales and Professional Services. He has worked for Genesys, IBM, 8×8 and other companies. In his role as Product Marketing at RingCentral, Max focuses on helping companies build Collaborative Contact Centers.
What inspires you?
Endless wonder and beauty of nature!
Tom Brennan is Principal Strategist for Customer Service Digital Transformation at ServiceNow. Prior to joining ServiceNow, Tom served as VP of Global Support Services for Avaya. He led Private Cloud/Managed Services Delivery and Digital Transformation, resulting in record levels of customer satisfaction, top performer retention, margin improvement, and an overall economic impact of greater than $700m.
Prior to Avaya, Tom held a variety of executive roles over 23 years at Oracle, including responsibilities for North America Support Delivery, Knowledge Management, and the integration of over 85 acquisitions by unifying the customer and support engineer experience on a single instance with standard global processes.
Tom also served many years on the Board of Directors for the Consortium for Service Innovation, nonprofit alliance of service and support organizations focused on innovation around customer engagement, productivity, and success.
Area Vice President of Global Self Service, RingCentral
Jeff Harling
Jeff Harling is Area Vice President of Global Self Service for RingCentral. In this role, he leads strategy and operations for RingCentral’s digital support experience, websites, Chat/Bot/AI, RingCentral user community and product ideas forums, social media channels, and knowledge base. Jeff’s background spreads across two decades leading self-service and customer experience for companies such as Avaya, Comcast, and Zendesk. He is a four-time JD Powers award winner and a member of the Technology Services World Star Award Hall of Fame for service delivery and content/knowledge management. Jeff holds a Master’s in Information Management from Regis University and resides in Denver, Colorado.
Lauren has over 13 years of experience in the contact center industry, specifically in innovating new and existing solution offerings at her companies by leveraging technologies such as – self-service, social, mobile, video, sms, AI, automation, and analytics. In 2020, Lauren was recognized by Gulfshore Business Magazine as Top 40 under 40. In 2016, Lauren received a Silver Stevie Award for Women in Business – Executive of the Year. Her accomplishments have also been featured on WDIV Local 4 News Detroit, CRM Magazine, CX Insights Magazine, Multichannel Merchant, Call Center Times, and many other industry publications.
As a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Aspect, Michael contributes directly to company strategy with a view to market trends and product strategy, focusing on enhanced customer experiences enabled through Omni-channel contact strategies and workforce optimization.
Michael has more than 30 years of experience in the customer service and contact center industries. Joining Aspect in April 1999, Michael brought more than 10 years of customer service, technical and sales training experience to the company, where he was initially the lead sales and technical channel partner trainer for the company’s contact management platform.
Mike is Vice President of Customers at Gladly. Before joining Gladly, Mike was an early member of the executive team at MobileIron, a pioneer in the enterprise mobility market, where he grew the Customer Success team from 2 to 125 members. With a strong technical background and over 20 years of hands-on implementation experience at companies including Vontu, Symantec, Connectify (acquired by Kana), Kana and Booz Allen Hamilton. Mike brings the right combination of leadership and experience to deliver a legendary customer experience.
Vice President, Global Head of Automation & Marketing, Jacada
As Global Head of Automation for Jacada, Scott leads the go-to-market strategy for their automation portfolio and works as a trusted advisor for companies actively pursuing customer service automation strategies. Scott is a passionate advocate of “Responsible RPA” having spent the last 15 years embedded in the process optimization and RPA space supporting over 100 intelligent automation assessments and implementations.
Why Should We Listen to Doug Miracle on Moving from Disruption to Transformation
Doug has been responsible for Contact Center Operations leading the charge to help his employers better understand The Customer Journey through multi-platform data aggregation and analysis for almost 20 years. For the past five years, he has been a part of Aceyus and now leads their Customer Success Organization, helping their customers achieve the greatest success through utilization of the Aceyus Platform and modules.
Why Should We Listen to Rommel Regino on Harnessing the Voice of the Customer to Drive Growth?
Rommel is hailed as one of the most influential operational leaders in the Philippine BPO industry today. He is currently managing 11,000 contact center employees across three continents and leads a diverse team of thought leaders and domain experts, helping global brands elevate their CX strategy. A champion of the industry, Rommel sits on the board of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) and leads in driving innovation and excellence.
As the Vice President of Technology at Cognigy, Derek delivers insights and understanding of Conversational AI and Chatbots as the next level of Automation. For the past 15 years, Derek has focused on bringing innovation to the enterprise, a place where it doesn’t easily fit. He uniquely combines a passion for technology with an honest dialog about its possibilities and limitations in real-world organizational contexts. Derek graduated with a PhD and JD from Stanford University and immediately entered the technology industry, working with startups from initial funding through public offerings and acquisition.
