Jason Wright has many years experience as a senior manager, trainer and coach. He has managed teams of differing sizes and disciplines in various parts of the UK, and currently leads a team of over 300 staff in the financial sector. He is the author of "Making Sense of Performance Management", a book that offers guidance on the best way to create a high-performance environment in any business.
Through engaging keynotes, interactive workshops and inspired consulting,Mike Wittenstein helps clients and audiences create memorable, profitable customer experiences.
Mike is known for his chameleon-like ability to align with each client’s culture and is adept at working with all levels of an organization. They rely on him to think way “outside the box” and discover breakthrough solutions that are easy to understand and implement.
For more than two decades, Mike has worked on the front line leading change and innovation initiatives for hundreds of hospitality, retail and service firms like Holiday Inn, McDonald’s, Best Buy and Conner Partners. Fluent in four languages, he skilfully translates an organization’s intent into a plan everyone can endorse. Mike’s keen observational skills and articulate feedback give clients the equivalent of a front-row seat at their own company’s experience.
Mike earned his MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. As an e-Visionary at IBM, he launched the company's first global experience design consulting practice. Mike was the co-founder and CEO of Galileo, a technology communications company nationally recognized for innovation and creativity. He is the author of the upcoming book, "Go Away! How to Stop Company Processes from Dictating Your Customer's Experience." Mike's strategy studio is Storyminers, where companies find and become their story.
Mike Wittenstein helps his clients beat their competitors by differentiating their brands with memorable and profitable customer experiences. As an interactive agency leader, e-Visionary at IBM, interim CXO, and now as a speaker, Mike has guided hundreds of companies to adjust their front-line experience for bottom-line results. He is the go-to guy on aligning management, marketing, people, and technology to deliver great customer and employee experiences. http://www.mikewittenstein.com
In 10 years, Zappos.com has grown from a startup to a business that had more than $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2008. It is known for its focus on "Wow" customer service and in 2009 has been recognized on Fortune's Best 100 Companies to Work For List, Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies and Business Week's Top 25 Customer Service Champs. In this session, you will learn how a culture was built based on committable core values and how it continues to evolve to stay relevant to its employees and customers.
During this closing keynote, you will learn how to:
* Define your company's core values
* The power of customer service and word-of-mouth marketing
* Why your culture and your brand are two sides of the same coin
* How to hire for culture fit
* How to train and retain employees in your culture
Moira Clark is Professor of Strategic Marketing at Henley Business School as well as Director of Enterprise and Applied Research and Director of The Henley Centre for Customer Management. She also serves as a consultant to a number of leading UK and European companies. Her major area of research and consulting is in Customer Management, Social Networking, Customer Retention and Internal Marketing. She has worked extensively in the area of culture and climate, its impact on retention and loyalty and the critical linkages between employee behaviour and customer retention. She has published widely on this subject and is co-author of Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage, Winning and Keeping Customers and Relationship Marketing: Strategy and Implementation.
Moira is also a judge for the prestigious Sunday Times Customer Experience Awards. Her book 'Business Success through Service Excellence' examines the crucial factors needed to achieve and maintain service excellence. She is a frequent keynote speaker at many public and in- company seminars and conferences around the world. Moira joined Henley from Cranfield School of Management in 2005. Prior to her academic career, Moira was an international marketing consultant based in Munich where she was involved with a wide range of industries including service industries, consumer and industrial goods manufacturers. She has also worked as a marketing director for an international health food manufacturer and as a marketing manager for the toiletries subsidiary of Dunhill International
Osman Khan, has over a decade of experience working with companies to improve their business performance. His main areas of expertise are in Customer Experience Management, Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction, Emotional Attachment and Strategic Marketing. He has worked with numerous companies across the globe as a consultant, trainer, researcher and as a member of the marketing team.
His past experience include working as a Marketing Director at MagicEast, a high-tech IT firm, consulting for multinational mobile operators from Europe and the Middle East, as well as helping firms within the UK in improving customer loyalty, increasing sales, and reassessing strategic marketing goals.
Osman has an MBA, and a PhD in Marketing (Bradford). Currently he is working as a Senior Lecturer at the Royal Docks Business School, at UEL. He has recently published three books on CEM, and Customer Loyalty at the European Centre for Best Practice Management. Moreover, he is actively engaged in conducting research and consulting work in the areas of CEM and Emotional Loyalty Management.
The focus of Abigail’s role as Customer & Partner Experience director is about listening to and understanding the needs and feedback of Microsoft’s customers and partners and ensuring that Microsoft’s strategies continuously take account of this intelligence.
Prior to this role Abigail was responsible for Partner strategy across the EMEA region for the Information Worker Business Group within Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft in 2004 her experiences include working for; an international marketing consultancy, a Microsoft Partner organisation and a UK Financial Services organisation. Her background includes roles across marketing, sales, consulting and customer services. Abigail completed her MBA in 2004 and has worked in the Middle East as well as the UK.
She is also a non-executive Director of the British Quality Foundation
Bev is responsible for driving operational best practice through the contact centre operations. Her key focus is on driving operational improvements and the introduction of new initiatives that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Bev has had a varied career with British Gas, spanning 11 years including Operations Manager roles, strategic project roles and more recently the Site Support role. This role sat across the 1200 seat operation and managed a number of key activities such as Recruitment, Retention, Health & Safety and Environment, and the Employee Engagement strategy.
Bev holds a LLB Hons Law Degree and LPC solicitor's exams qualification.
Bev is married with one daughter and lives in South Wales.
Dr Valerie Bram is Director of T2 (UK) Ltd, an international consultancy company in London.
For the past 20 years, she has been heavily involved in Psycho-Linguistic projects for both the public and private sectors, specifically: banking and financial services, manufactures, utilities and the transport and leisure industry.
She has also worked for the British Government Know-How Fund, EU Phare / Tacis Aid programmes and the Government of Trinidad and Tobago.
Her professional activities have taken her to Africa, Asia, Canada, Eastern & Central Europe, the Caribbean and the USA.
Naomi is a senior director at Satmetrix. She leads the consulting offering for Satmetrix clients in EMEA. Naomi has 13 years’ experience in advising blue chip companies on how to become more customer centric and drive value from better customer relationships. Prior to joining Satmetrix, Naomi established and led Accenture’s loyalty consulting practice and is a published thought leader and conference speaker. Naomi has overseen a diverse range of business improvement programmes ranging from embedding strategic segmentation to establishing a single view of customer as a foundation for understanding and improving the customer experience. She holds a Bachelor of Science (Hons) degree in Computer Sciences from the University of Ulster.
Helen Trim is the COO at FreshNetworks, a social media agency that helps businesses use social media and online communities to achieve their strategic goals.
In 15 years, she’s launched over 100 communities for companies including Virgin Media, BT, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Helen earned her experience in two ways, digital and real-world with companies like Sun Microsystems and United News and Media. As the founder of Chord9, she has experienced first hand the ins and outs of investing in and getting the most out of employees. On a personal note, Helen is a keen runner and has avid interest in theatre and film.
Responsible for driving a programme of continuous measurement and improvement under the Customer 1st banner. Recruited into Shop Direct Group (SDG) 4 years ago to assist in the deployment of Six Sigma and Lean methodologies, Ian is a certified Master Black Belt. Prior to joining SDG, Ian's was involvement in business improvement spans a ten year period at Brakes Foodservice, Liberata, GE Reinsurance and GE Commercial Finance.
Responsible for Shop Direct Contact Centres. Previously holding a number of different operational management and six sigma roles at O2, Zurich Financial Services and GE Capital, Chris has responsibility for improving the customer experience at SDG across 7 contact centres employing over 3000 advisors.
Alan has built audience and engagement in tourism for over ten years and held a senior management position at Dundee Science Centre for five years.
With responsibility for all Leisure, Corporate, Commercial and Education marketing at both Dundee Science Centre and Stratosphere Science Centre in Aberdeen Alan’s social media and PR work represent the front end of the visitor experience. Alan is also an Associate Member of Chartered Institute of Marketing and an active Committee Member of the Tayside Branch.
After taking a degree in Modern Languages at Oxford, John Bunyard decided to become one of the 'hidden persuaders' in the advertising industry. Despite persisting for 15 years, he never really got it. Apart from appearing a generally inefficient way of selling things, it used to consist in selecting slightly misleading product 'truths' in an attempt to persuade, and nowadays aims to create these things called 'brands' that by definition are at one step from reality. This basically mendacious approach seemed to him to be at odds with human nature: even if adept liars, we dislike being lied to. In 1992, he proposed an alternative model based on the principle of telling the absolute truth and, critically, getting people to verify it for themselves. The tool he used to do this on a large scale, called 'FAST marketing', was hugely successful and yielded reams of comparative evidence. This in turn brought him into contact with plenty of neuroscientific literature and expertise that bears out the importance of demonstrable honesty. In 2005 he co-founded the Newcomen Group of scientists and business professionals that aims to explore such ideas and propagate their use in business and public life.
A marketer with over 16 years experience in the retail sector, Mark’s career started when he set-up his own PR agency at the age of 18. He then moved into the hotel sector, helping to create the Corus hotel brand. Mark then moved to Hilton Hotels where he became their youngest Regional Marketing Director where he developed partnerships with British Airways, House of Fraser and Virgin Trains to name but a few. He was then head-hunted to become the Marketing Director of 640 hotels and pubs under the Swallow brand, growing their internet business from £2m to £6m in 12 months. He then moved to Virgin Active where he overhauled the marketing operation to increase online sales by 23% and overall sales by 14%. He was then head-hunted to drive the commercial activities of Nationwide Autocentre, with responsibility for customer acquisition and retention, new products, partnerships and channel management, contributing to a 10% increase in profit in his first year.
Gary Schwartz, SVP Marketing at Confirmit, has over 20 years experience in marketing, creating product, and promoting brands in the medical imaging and enterprise software industries. His fundamental understanding of the technology together with his customer-facing experience has enabled Schwartz to act as a bridge between the development of a product and its marketing and promotion.
At Confirmit, Schwartz is responsible for all Marketing activities, ultimately increasing the generation of profitable leads to the business. Specific areas of focus include all Confirmit.com web properties, email campaigns, PR activity and Product Marketing. Schwartz is leading the business into social media marketing.
Prior to Confirmit, Schwartz was Managing Director of Informative UK, in which he led his team to sell and deploy projects for the BBC, Royal Mail, Egg, Lockheed Martin and Mars.
Previously he was co-Founder and VP Marketing for bluparc, a software vendor that developed real-time CRM technology, and Global Finance Product Manager for Strategy.com, a subsidiary of MicroStrategy, where he managed bids of over $5M to banks and brokerages throughout Europe. He has also served as Strategic Planning Manager for 4CAST, a provider of market analysis to currency traders, and as Product Manager for Toshiba America Medical Systems.
I have over 20 years experience in customer service management. I have crossed a range of business sectors over my career, from contracting, manufacturing, outsourcing & consultancy, IT and Finance with businesses such as SCA, Amey, Galileo, Visa and Volkswagen.
My passion for customer service makes me an uncompromising operator. I abhor “job’s worth” or timid customer service where businesses hide behind processes and rules. I am motivated to be the best, to break new ground and deliver exceptional results. I love change and transformation – the dynamics and thrill of designing and implementing a new idea, of changing an established norm or exciting a group of people to change their approach.
Currently, I am engaged on a journey with Volkswagen that brings together some of my core values and tests them in a traditional service environment where the end user customer engages through a third party partner; the dealership.
Sarah Hobday is a Senior Manager for Prudential UK & Europe and is a highly experienced consultant with specialist skills in customer value creation, customer experience management and strategy alignment.
For the past 8 years Sarah has worked across the Prudential in a variety of roles with the key driver being the need for the organisation to be more customer centric through driving value from better customer relationships.
Her past experience includes working in a variety of roles including marketing, sales and consulting at Cap Gemini in the UK, Europe and Asia. She has experience of working in a number of different sectors including Energy and Utilities, Life Sciences, Consumer Products and Retail Distribution.
Sarah is married with two young children and lives in Hampshire. She enjoys travelling having spent her working life and her growing up years in Asia. When she has a spare moment she enjoys swimming and nice wine.
Amanda Marko is Head of Customer Experience for Prudential UK & Europe and has specialised in customer experience management for over 7 years helping Prudential define and deliver it’s customer experience strategy, including substantial work on employee engagement.
Amanda has a first class honours degree in Business, Management and Marketing and has worked in the Financial Services industry for almost 14 years having previously worked with Lloyds TSB before joining Prudential in 1999.
In her spare time Amanda enjoys travel, playing tennis, keeping fit and supporting the Scotland Rugby Team.
Cilla McKay is the Head of Private Sector Consulting for LSN Learning and is a highly experienced consultant with specialist skills in Transformational leadership, engagement and communication. Her philosophy is that continuing development of the effectiveness of all sales, service and leadership teams is a key factor in delivering success. Her particular skill is in developing consultancy propositions to provide Leadership, marketing and sales teams with the skills and direction needed to achieve defined business goals and to measure a very tangible Return on Investment.
Cilla currently provides training and consultancy for both large corporate organisations and small specialist teams. This experience has been gained from the areas of financial services, commerce, local government, service and utilities. Cilla sees her skill as being able to gain a clear understanding of the Client’s current position and then working in conjunction with internal targets and strategies to develop ongoing first class performance and measurable results. She provides consulting support to enhance business processes and ensure that the people development programme reaches the required ROI.
Synonymous with superior customer service, Mary Gober is an engaging personality who will fire you up as she helps you understand how her proven 'Gober Method'™ will change the world of customer service in your organisation. As an advisor to executives in the world’s leading organisations, and as a speaker, trainer and leading edge consultant, Mary Gober will openly share with you a professional lifetime of insights to generate more success for you, your people and your organisation to drive increased business results.
Royston Guest is an internationally renowned business strategist and speaker, specialising in growing businesses and unlocking people potential.
Driving sustainable business growth fast and unlocking the real potential of individuals, are Royston’s two professional missions in life.
His fresh, passionate, results driven style challenges the status quo of both companies and individuals alike. He leaves them inspired, motivated, and energised with ‘real world’ ideas, strategies, and methods to achieve their goals – offering genuine competitive edge, critical in today’s environment.
As well as being an accomplished advisor, consultant and executive coach, he is also an acclaimed conference speaker and regular writer.
Invited to over 76 events last year, he inspired some 21,000 people with his ‘fun with a serious intent’ approach sharing real life stories and practical, down-to-earth tips and techniques for increased success.
As well as writing a fortnightly ezine, read by people in 37 countries, he is the author of:
- Are Your Customers Slipping Silently out the Back Door of your Business? - Training ReDefined™ – How to unlock the REAL potential of your people. And… - The Book, CD & DVD Programme – How to Turn Your Customers into your Sales Force.
He established Pti Worldwide 6 years ago and works with his team to maximise the financial and personal growth that both businesses – their leaders and managers – and individuals can achieve.
This unrivalled approach, developed whilst working with over 1200 companies including 16% from the FTSE 100, gives his clients a unique edge.
Royston has made the most of his 20 year career to date gaining both a breadth but also importantly a depth of ‘hands on’ business experience.
He started out in the construction industry working for HBG (Higgs & Hill) and was soon head hunted by Balfour Beatty. Balfour recognised his broader business acumen when they appointed him as a trouble-shooter on multi-million pound construction projects at the tender age of 24 – working in both the UK and the USA.
On his return to the UK Royston joined Jarvis working in business development on major PFI projects.
His first taste of the complex challenges faced in mergers and acquisitions came at Jarvis, working on the integration of some of the rail companies following privatisation.
His fascination with the broader challenges faced by businesses led to his move across to sales and business development at Hoogovens, now part of the Corus group. Royston was part of a team specialising in the successful integration of acquisitions into the main group.
Ultimately, this fascination led him to set up Pti Worldwide – his primary vehicle to deliver his mission of driving sustainable business growth fast… and unlocking the real potential of individuals.
Together with his central marketing team based in Oxford (UK), over twenty marketing and retail development staff and a network of more than 50 agencies across the EMEA region, Markus has built marketing frameworks that allow powerful, consistent and efficient brand delivery in multi market environments. His work of aligning market complexities with organizational and marketing (infra)structure has resulted in exemplary cross-market brand building, demand creation and efficient marketing implementation capabilities for Harley-Davidson.
His previous roles and professional experiences span a range of automotive Marketing, Sales and Retail Network Development positions. He has lived and worked both within and outside of the United Kingdom and is fluent in five languages.
Markus started his career in architecture. But rather than designing houses, he has put his planning skills to work in the area of marketing. Markus has complemented his education in architecture early on with a federal degree in Marketing Planning & Communications (Switzerland), a degree in International Project Management from the University of Berkeley (USA) as well as an MBA form the SAID Business School, University of Oxford (UK).
Markus is Swiss at heart, but lives since 2006 in Oxford with his wife and three young children. He enjoys skiing, a glass of good wine and generally never finds as much time as he would like to spend riding his Harley-Davidson Iron 883.
Kip is president of Knight Vision Marketing, which partners with Fortune 500 as well as start-up businesses to provide strategic marketing consulting services. He serves as the Dean of the US Marketing College that works with the U.S. State Department and other key USG agencies to teach senior level government executives and diplomats how to apply modern marketing strategies and best practices to enhance America’s image abroad.
Kip is affiliated with the Cincinnati Consulting Consortium and works with them to teach Fortune 500 companies the latest thinking on various marketing topics such as Social Media in locations around the world. He’s on the Board of Advisors for Yottamark, a leader in providing effective product authentication and unit-level traceability, as well as the Board of Advisors for Diginome, a Silicon Valley start-up that’s revolutionizing the continuous auditing business.
Kip started his career in marketing research at Burke Marketing Research in Cincinnati, Ohio and over the past 30 years has worked in over 80 countries around the world. He spent 10 years in Brand Management at Procter and Gamble in charge of various brands such as Ivory Soap and well as working on the development and launch of various new food and beverage brands such as Olestra.
He worked for 10 years in PepsiCo’s international restaurant division where he served in a variety of marketing and general management roles, including General Manager of North Latin America as well as head of marketing for KFC International. Kip also served as Chief Marketing Officer for Taco Bell based in Southern California.
From 2002 until 2008, Kip worked at eBay, the world’s largest e-commerce site. He was vice-president of marketing for eBay, North America. He was also responsible for managing eBay Canada, the leading e-commerce site in Canada. He was the first head of International Marketing as well as serving as Regional Vice President for eBay International for Latin America, Australia and Taiwan.
Kip has been a featured speaker at numerous conferences, such as Business Week’s Global Brand Conference, the Association of National Advertisers Annual Conference, the Silicon Valley Technology Conference, the Global Innovation Summit in Dubai, The Economist Digital Forum, The American Marketing Association and HP’s Global Marketing Congress.
He’s actively involved as a Board member of C.E.O Women, a progressive non-profit in the Bay area dedicated to helping immigrant women start their own businesses.
He earned his B.S. degree from LSU in marketing and his MBA from the University of Cincinnati. He is married and has two sons.
Dean is an intellectual adventurer and scholar of the new world of work. He has an insatiable appetite for discovering how businesses can become more successful and increasingly contribute to society. His real gift is an ability to take complex information and present ideas in a way that makes them palatable. Dean acts as a translator between the scholarly world and the practical business world and is a sought after speaker and consultant. He is a co-founder of TomorrowToday International, a company that shows businesses how to succeed in the new world of work. He constantly engages with the world’s leading universities and business thought-leaders and at his laboratory Dean researches and analyses the evolving world of work sharing his insights with successful business leaders.
Dean has over 15 years financial services experience working in marketing, innovations and strategy departments for leading banks and insurance companies. By the age of thirty he was Head of Group Strategy for AXA’s insurance business in Southern Africa. Dean was also a consultant on the McKinsey led team managing the largest financial services merger in South African corporate history. Following the merger and completing an MBA from Henley Management College, Dean decided to do something typical of someone from his generation (Dean is a Generation Xer), he went off in search of a new adventure. He bought an around the world plane ticket and became an underwater photographer for a team researching Minke whales off the Great Barrier Reef and later undertook the gruelling task of cycling around Madagascar raising money for charity. In 2003 Dean moved to London and now lives in leafy village of Barnes.
Federico Cesconi is responsible for the development and implementation of customer and business insight best practices across Cablecom and UPC.
Cesconi started his activity in marketing analytics at one of Southern Switzerland's leading Internet Service Provider - Tinet SA - as Marketing Manager, being responsible for database marketing and data mining back in 1996.
He joined Cablecom Ticino in 2000 as Marketing Manager. In 2002 he moved into the headquarter in Zürich promoted as Head of Customer Information Management. He was appointed to his current position in September 2006.
In his actuual role he is responsible for both: business insights and the customer insights area. Cesconi and his team have won the North American Insight Award 2006 in Data Mining, the European Insight Award 2007, and the 1-to-1 Gartner Award 2008.
Federico Cesconi earned his PhD at the University of Milano. His Master in Business Administration at the University of Wales.
Paul Richmond leads the customer experience testing strategy for BT and also leads the BT Group test team. He graduated from the University of Nottingham with honours in science and management studies and joined BT in 1997 where he has had a variety of posts including network delivery, process design, and international service management. Paul was central to the rollout of the 21st Century Network as he managed the design, delivery and implementation of the intelligent core network. For the last year he has been focussing on BT customers’ experience and how this can be predicted to improve commercial decision making and service that our customers receive.
Lucy has been with BT for the last seven years and has established herself as an expert in Customer Experience and Experience Design. She tackled how to define and build customer experience prior to it becoming an established methodology, and first exercised this approach with the launch of BT Mobile’s MVNO network. She has gone on to work on “plug and play” initiatives in both business and consumer markets and is now playing a lead role in shaping the development of customer experience testing. She came to BT after 8 years Product Managing at first British Steel and then Vodafone UK.
Favourite quote: "Labour to keep alive...that little spark of celestial fire, conscience." George Washington
Career - Founder & Managing Director of Funky Business, the first Romanian based experiential marketing agency; the vision of the agency was inspired from her previous experience in London as well as from one of her favorite books, “Funky Business” by Kjell Nordstrom & Jonas Ridderstrale - www.fb.ro
- Business Development Director for one of the top five European Live Communication Agencies, HPICM London (currently Fitch Live) - http://www.fitchlive.com/
- Co-editor for Romania at Style-Vision, an European agency specialized in trend analysis - www.style-vision.com/megatrend/
- Producer and presenter of Jobbing television show (Romanian Public Television, 2006-2007) - http://www.glamstudio.ro/jobbing.htm
Education - Graduate of ESA - Business School of Grenoble, with 2 majors in International Trade and Management of Information Systems
- Former Second grant at the International Contest of the Institute of Human Studies USA in history, philosophy, politics and economics, "IHS Claude R. Lambe Fellowship
- Participation at the IHS International Seminar of Princeton, USA
Jill is Managing Director of Power Train (UK) Ltd. Power Train leads the way in delivering dynamic customer service performance programmes for frontline staff and their managers. Forget role-plays and training rooms. This is high impact and challenging. It's relevant and insightful. Above all it's proven to deliver results that stick.
Our 'ActNatural' programmes have achieved across-the-board success for market leading organisations such as Virgin Atlantic, Mercedes-Benz, Visa Europe, British Gas, O2 and Virgin Trains. We can do the same for you.
Jill has overall control of all client-facing activities: from initial contact, through sales negotiation, to assignment delivery. Her remit is to ensure that we deliver results and customer satisfaction every step of the way. Jill is a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
In 1991 Mike joined Mercedes-Benz UK Ltd as Group Training Manager, responsible for all wholesale and management training for Mercedes- Benz in the UK, organising major training initiatives in support of network development, organizational development and product launches. By 1996 he was promoted to Senior Manager Training Strategy and Controlling – Daimler-Benz AG, Stuttgart and was responsible for cross functional support and strategy for the Mercedes-Benz Marketing Academy, providing training support to the global Mercedes-Benz Sales and Service Network. Major projects included the integration of all central training departments and establishment of an internet supported global training network.
In 1998 Mike returned to Mercedes-Benz UK Ltd as General Manager for Training and Development and was responsible for all training and management development for both the wholesale and retail side of the UK business. Major projects included the implementation of Senior Management succession and development planning, re-development of the Training Centre, development and implementation of a training strategy to support multi-brand management.
In 2000 he was appointed as General Manager Human Resources – DaimlerChrysler UK, responsible for the combined functions of Personnel and Training and Development for all DC vehicle activities in the UK. Major projects included the development and implementation of a HR strategy to introduce best practices in the areas of client support, compensation and benefits, outsourcing and technology support. Later that year he was appointed General Manager After Sales Operations - DaimlerChrysler UK, responsible for After Sales operations support for all DC brands in the UK covering the areas of technical, warranty, customer service goodwill and operational best practice at retail. Major projects have included establishment of a new function; Operational Excellence, development and piloting of new After Sales concepts to support the new Mercedes-Benz Passenger Car network restructure and preparation for market launch of Smart and Mitsubishi Canter.
In 2002 he joined the DaimlerChrysler UK Board of Directors as Director After Sales. Following a restructure in January 2006, the After Sales Directorate became the Customer Services Group, with Mike as Managing Director. The directorate incorporates the groups Training and Customer Operations activities in addition to the existing After Sales business.
In April 2010, Mike was promoted to CEO&President Daimler Middle East & Levant.
With over 10 years in the online space, Nicola has comprehensive and long standing multi-discipline experience as a specialist in online channel management, technology and marketing.
Working for some large well known brands such as National Car Rental, Disney and Microsoft, Nicola is now at Telefonica O2 UK Ltd, most recently as Head of Cultural Transformation with responsibility the culture and values transformation to ensure the delivery of an agile methodology throughout the company.
Guy Stephens is a champion of the use of social media for customer services. He is a Senior Consultant at Foviance, where he is helping corporates define their social media customer services strategy. He was previously the Customer Knowledge Manager at The Carphone Warehouse, where he was responsible for setting up their use of social media to provide customer service. He is the Founder of the LinkedIn group - where social media meets customer service.
Guy has worked in the online environment for over ten years, building up experience in online marketing, eCRM, SEO, ecommerce, email marketing, project management and social media. He is a strategic thinker who is passionate about championing the cause of the customer and how their needs can be met in an increasingly fragmented and cross-channel environment. Guy is an avid tweeter (@guy1067) and occasional blogger on http://beingguy1067.wordpress.com
Simon is a dedicated coach with a unique blend of experience, insight and studied expertise that gives clients consistently fantastic outcomes in their work with him. As the Head of Coaching at O2 for more than two and a half years, Simon held responsibility for their Customer Service Coaching Strategy, with a management reach across 260 coaches. From this experience, he has a high-level ability to motivate, help people change and sustain continuous development within the contact centre environment. Added to his on-the-ground expertise from years in contact centres relating to the telecoms and finance sector, Simon is best placed to help clients see what the issues are, which strategy is most beneficial and how they will get that plan implemented and sustainable.
As a qualified Professional Co-Active Coach and an Associate Certified Coach, Simon now runs his own consultancy business, ID Coaching, based in the North West. From one-to-one coaching to group workshops and conference speaking, Simon’s enthusiasm and curiosity about his clients are vital to his proven approach. His methods of challenging self-limiting beliefs and addressing patterns of behaviour - coupled with his warm, humorous manner – give his clients truly life-changing results.
Contact Simon
Tel: +44 (0)151 652 4055 Mob: +44 (0)7843 294 952 Find out more about ID Coaching at: www.id-coaching.co.uk
Carolyn is an inspirational speaker, trainer and consultant strategist on the customer experience and living the brand. Using her unique concept and strategy of 'Whole Organisation Marketing', she helps organisations to live and deliver their brand promises and improve the whole customer experience, referrals, reputation and relationships through all their people and everything they do. She works a great deal with teams to help them improve their performance, team and inter-team working, and the customer experience of them.
Prior to setting up her own company, Carolyn had 20 years’ experience in marketing, communications, customer experience and people development, 15 at a senior strategic level, working for medium to multi-national organisations including Apple Computer and Robert Maxwell Technologies, and with companies such as Selfridges, Harrods, IBM and JCB.
Carolyn presents to and works with small to global brands, delivering conference keynotes, running workshops and undertaking consultancy. She writes articles for national customer experience and HR publications, and has appeared on radio.
Amongst other things, Carolyn has lived and worked in Germany and speaks German. She is passionate about music, and used to be lead singer in a band for several years. She also admits to being a bit of an adrenalin junkie, with some unusual adventures under her belt, including white water rafting through the Grand Canyon, and gaining a reindeer driving licence in Lapland!
To find out more you can contact Carolyn on 07787 573539, visit her website at www.carolyndallaway.com, or email her at carolyn@carolyndallaway.com
David is the CEO of Mulberry Consulting, a specialist Consultancy advising clients worldwide on how to become more "Customer Intelligent". David has led the business from start up and (as well as a global client base) Mulberry House is now retained by SVP's and CEO's of some of the worlds largest organizations to advise on customer experience and customer centred change.
For over 20 years David has been involved in designing and deploying customer experience programs in large service organizations. His career started in a European "blue chip" foods business where he franchised the service interface involving over 4000 staff.
As a board level executive he was responsible for the most recognized brand in the UK (The Royal Mail) and led the design and deployment of a service experience specification for over 200,000 staff nationwide. Again as a member of the board he transformed SSL (an outsourced customer management business) and led it to #1 position in the UK by focusing on how to define and deliver the clients customer experience using outsourced staff.
He has personally led board level strategy and deployment engagements on customer centered change in the telco, financial services, auto, retail, publishing and technology sectors, (some recent clients include Citibank, Emirates Airlines, City & Guilds, Fiat, Reed Elsevier, British Council, Merrill Lynch to name only a few).
"David has a unique blend of leading this type of change himself in large organizations and also the consulting perspective from over 100 client engagements to practically advise what works and what doesn’t" - Nalini Indorf Kaplan SVP Global Customer Experience MasterCard
David has an MBA from the IBM Business School at Southampton University in the UK and post-grad study in Strategic Marketing at Harvard. A respected and accomplished speaker and writer on Customer Experience, David has been invited to speak at events worldwide, his current book (Customer Experience Transformation – A Senior Executives Guide) is due to be published in the winter ‘08.
H/O CE Testing - BT Group & Customer Experience Testing
Brian Buege is the Head of Testing for BT Openreach and BT Group. Brian joined BT in 2007 after serving in the capacity of CIO at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (USA). Throughout his career, he has held a wide variety of technical leadership positions such as: head of information systems security for a major airline, independent consultant specializing in the design and deployment of large-scale, converged, enterprise technology architectures, and director of network and computing operations for a large university. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science and has work-related or implementation experience in the Telecommunications, Financial Services, Transport, Healthcare, Defence, and Education sectors.
Global Head of Marketing & Communications - Aggreko Plc
Aggreko inspires confidence in their customers worldwide with their rental energy solutions. Part of the reason Aggreko is able to do this is their innovative use of Net Promoter® and customer feedback throughout their global company. Simon leads the Net Promoter strategy and initiative at Aggreko, and continues to evolve Aggreko's use of customer loyalty in all aspects of the business. Aggreko provides rental power generators and temperature control equipment to companies around the world. They help their customers increase profits by creating opportunities, solving problems and reducing risk using their unique network of global locations, equipment and technical services.
Peter was formerly MD Customer Operations of Virgin Media. He joined Comcast in 1995 as Sales & Marketing Director having previously held positions in Rentokil, Seagrams and Unilever. He was UK Sales Director at ntl and led the launch of Broadband which resulted in them becoming UK no. 1 provider. Upon joining ntl he pioneered focusing on gaining dominant market share from BT in cabled areas. His skill in building a sales machine whilst at the same time creating strategic product solutions resulted in ntl taking over 50% of BT’s customer base in cabled areas. Subsequently he also repeated the exercise when Broadband was launched in the UK as ntl became the largest Broadband provider in the UK.
In 2004 Peter became MD of COBI a newly formed division in ntl which was responsible for all aspects of customer operations with over 9,000 staff and an operating budget of £400m per annum. Peter managed the programme which consolidated over 30 separate contact centres operating on 11 different billing systems into 3 virtualised centres on one system. At the same time customer centricity and advocacy was adopted as a KPI within the business, resulting in ntl achieving the lowest recorded customer lapsed levels along with increased advocacy . During this time Peter reduced operating expense whilst simultaneously improving customer service and satisfaction levels.
Prior to leaving Virgin he was responsible for the merging of Telewest and ntl consumer operations into the Virgin group. During this time he was instrumental in the consolidation of UK cable into one single entity which created a $2 billion revenue business servicing over 5 million customers.
Since leaving Virgin Peter has an investment portfolio of businesses in a variety of sectors. Two years ago Peter formed The Growth Machine (TGM) a specialist consultancy which focuses on growing top line revenues for its clients. TGM develop strategic and tactical activity designed to increase leads, conversion, sales, revenue and customer advocacy across the whole spectrum of Sales & Marketing disciplines. They also conduct due diligence for a number of Private Equity companies.
Brian Koma is an accomplished research professional with deep domain knowledge of quantitative and qualitative research and technologies. He has pioneered new approaches that have enabled some of the world’s largest companies to improve customer loyalty and responsiveness through the innovative use of online feedback and social media. He is a frequent contributor to Vovici’s blog, and shares best practices with professionals across the industry through speaking engagements, white papers and web seminars.
An entrepreneur by background, Brian joined the company when Vovici acquired the market research firm he founded and operated for 10 years, Stratagem Marketing. Before Stratagem, Brian led the global marketing activities for Legent Corporation’s Enterprise Systems Management division, where he used innovative market research techniques to reposition more than 80 software products. He has also held management positions at The Genix Group and Burson-Marsteller.
Jeannie has a proven track record as a business builder and driver of change within a wide range of businesses. Jeannie was previously COO and then Managing Director of research consultancy, FreshMinds. Whilst MD, the agency won the Market Research Society 'Best Agency' award in 2006 & 2007 and the society’s 'Most innovative employer' award in 2006.
Prior to FreshMinds, Jeannie was a consultant at PA Consulting 1999-2003 where she worked on a number of assignments for a variety of organisations, including BP, Orange, BBC, the Department of Work and Pensions and London Underground.
Jeannie has a Masters in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh (where she was also awarded the James Watt medal for academic achievement).
With over 20 years in the industry and during 13 years at Convergys, David is one of Convergys’ leading evangelists in the area of Relationship Management. He is a regular speaker at industry and media events and spends a large percentage of his time working with major clients around the globe advising them on the best application of technology solutions, whilst maintaining a focus on Customer Experience. It is with this Customer Experience focus that companies can deliver real differentiators in today’s highly competitive marketplace.
ormer Director, Marketing Strategy Office - Sony Europe
Until very recently Tim was the head of the Marketing Strategy Office at Sony Europe with the mission to build organisational capacity in customer centric marketing. He led Sony’s Net Promoter Programme and remains passionate about using customer insight to drive both operational excellence and cultural change. After joining Sony in 1999, Tim initially worked in the area of marketing communications. His professional life began in advertising after graduating from Cambridge. He also has an MBA from the Open University. He is married with two teenage children who are, of course, far more technically competent than he is.
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