Customer Experience

  Christopher J. Zane, at age 46 is already a 29-year veteran of the retail bicycle industry and a sought after speaker. His story includes getting a state tax ID number at age twelve, buying an ailing bicycle shop at age sixteen, and owning Zane’s Cycles, the largest retail bicycle shop in Connecticut before reaching the age of 30. Today, with only one location, Zane’s Cycles is not only one of the five largest retail bicycle stores in the nation, it’s truly “world famous”. Zane’s unique approach to marketing includes strategies such as continual learning, the lifetime value of a customer, guerilla marketing, bootstrapping, community relations, cost controlled customer service and image branding.

Tom Sawyer calls himself a serial entrepreneur. He has a proven track record as a principal architect, leader, and strategist for successful business and technology ventures. Currently he is President and Managing Partner of RSW Partners, a hybrid marketing and business development consulting company located in Grand Junction, Colorado. At RSW Partners, Tom provides management consulting services specializing in business process reengineering, organizational development, product development, marketing strategies, technology implementation, and financial modeling. In addition he has authored “Pro Excel Financial Modeling Building Models for Technology Startups,” a detailed business strategy guide for entrepreneurs. He is also a named inventor on two technology patents. In his past professional life, he founded and sold an Internet data storage dot com, served as President of a regional Internet Service Provider where he negotiated the strategic sale of the company, and served as the founding President of Mover’s Suite Software, which is currently the largest enterprise software and consulting company in the moving industry.He served as Chief Technology Officer of a GPS/GIS centric engineering technology services company. Tom gained Fortune 100 senior management experience directing the Information Technology department for the Martin Marietta Space Launch Systems Titan IV missile program where he received the Outstanding Achievement Award for Information Technology Management. In addition to his business pursuits, Tom studies philosophy, economics and history to balance out his mania for old-fashioned capitalist enterprise. He also loves traveling the world, teaching meditation and sharing the excitement of the Wild West outdoors with his three young grandsons.

Although our 1st year anniversary was Mar 7th, we are only now finding a slot to fit Part 2 of our anniversary show into. We've just had so many amazing speakers who have much to provide to our listeners. Many businesses have made Customer Experience a tope agenda item. By presenting many of the world's greatest minds in this field, we hope to raise awareness for this evolving business model, perspective and mindset that is providing our business community with the key to long term sustainability and growth.  Please join Jim, Steve and I as we cover a few more highlights from this past year. We wish we could cover more but that 1/2 hour goes by so quickly! Thank you for a most enlightening year and we look forward to another exciting year ahead with you - our valued listeners.

  M. Bridget Duffy, M.D., is the Chief Executive Officer at ExperiaHealth, where her mission is to assist organizations in rapidly transforming the patient experience. Prior to founding ExperiaHealth, Dr. Duffy served as Chief Experience Officer of the Cleveland Clinic—the first senior position of its kind in the nation—leading the institution in improving patient experience as its top strategic priority.   She is a frequent speaker on the subject of why patient experience matters and how it impacts clinical outcomes.  Her work has earned her the Quantum Leap Award for taking the risk to spur internal change in her field and has led her to be featured in HealthLeaders magazine as one of “20 People Who Make Healthcare Better.” Dr. Duffy has been an innovator in health care throughout her 20 year career.  Her work has included creating one of the nation’s first Hospitalist programs.  She attended medical school at the University of Minnesota, and completed her residency in internal medicine at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  Tripp Babbitt is President of Bryce Harrison Inc. (aka Vanguard USA) and works with public and private service businesses.  He is an international speaker and columnist for IQPC and Quality Digest where he writes about the problems with management fads (TQM, Lean and Six Sigma), barriers to good customer service and the damage of industrialized, mass production service designs that increase costs. A proponent of W. Edwards Deming, Mr. Babbitt is a former president of the Indy Quality Productivity and Involvement Council at one time the largest Deming User’s Group.  In recent years he discovered the work of John Seddon (author of Freedom from Command and Control and Systems Thinking in the Public Sector) where he found a better way to make the work . . . work by using the Vanguard Method.  The Vanguard Method is a method of changing thinking about the design and management of work in service organizations.  This method requires working with management and workers by using interventions to change thinking and achieve unprecedented organizational improvement.  International clients have said that using the Vanguard Method is the most important change in thinking they have ever experienced in their working lives.

  Jeff Bowman, the A (Attitude) in The Marketing Pad provides high quality business coaching, planning, training and speaking in the areas of Sales, Marketing, Leadership, Interpersonal Communication, Conflict Management and limiting stress in the workplace. Jeff spent 20 years in the Corporate environment where he held various Executive Management positions such as National Training Manager and Customer Service Manager with Hilti Canada, National Sales Manager with Azerty Wholesale, National SAP Consultant Manager with Datahorse Inc and Director of Operations for LMI Inc.  In 2006 Jeff was honoured as the Small Business of the Year by the City of Mississauga. Jeff regularly contributes blogs for several organizations on sales, training and marketing.  He has been a business mentor for 9 years in the Summer Company Program through the Ministry of Economic Development. Jeff has been married for 28 years and has two boys aged 21 and 23 currently attending college. He has coached both hockey and lacrosse for 15 years. Jeff is a published author, blogger, professional speaker and humorist.

  Dawna has over 20 years experience as an inspired coach, adviser, speaker, partner, strategist, writer, and consultant providing insightful and forthright leadership to ensure goals are realized. She has a proven track record of developing and implementing creative business strategies that have resulted in sustained growth and rich customer experiences. Dawna is passionate about creating shared value and fostering meaningful change. 

Rob McDougall, president and co-founder of Upstream Works has been a catalyst for change within the Call Center industry for over 15 years. With Upstream Works, he developed a successful business model that provides technology solutions to many high profile customers. To ensure that Upstream Works continues to be an innovation leader, Rob plays an active role in promoting the company through company and First Contact Revolution and Business Interaction Management evangelism, articles and various speaking engagements. Rob is the author of many of Upstream Works' White Papers. Prior to the creation of Upstream Works, Rob held the role of R&D Director for TSB International/Telco Research, where he was responsible for product development and the tactical direction of InterLynx CT, which ultimately evolved into Upstream Works' Call Management Automation Server product. In his distinguished 25 year career, Rob also served as the Product Development Manager for Perle Systems Ltd. He graduated as an Electrical Engineer from the University of Western Ontario.

Kes Sampanthar is Director of Media Strategy at Cynergy Systems; a concept design and development agency. He has over 15 years in the industry and most recently came from Akamai where he held senior management positions in the media solutions group and was one of the founding members of the Akamai’s Creative Agency and Advertising Solutions group. He is a computer scientist and game designer with a research background in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. He is an award winning innovator and recognized strategic thinker to some of the companies in the Fortune 500. As an expert in media strategy, game design and innovation he is a sought after speaker and thought leader in the industry. His latest research into game design, neuroscience, behavioral economics and paleoanthropology has lead to his development of a ‘Motivational Design Framework’, that goes beyond Gamification to create engaging experiences for some of the largest brands; both enterprise and consumer.

A Big Huge Thank You to our listeners and to all our incredible guests who have contributed so much of their knowledge, their insights and their experience to help business become aware of Customer Experience, and how they can grow their businesses by shifting their organization/their perspective/their initiatives/their processes ……. essentially everything they do, around the customer. Your hosts, Jim Love, Steve Smith and Michelle Romanica will look back over their first year and talk about just a few of the many golden nuggets that have been left by these experts for all of us to benefit from.

Michael is the public face of KCI. Over a 30 year career, as an executive, management consultant and thought leader, Michael has proven results in leading operational excellence. Michael has expertise is in human development, advanced learning technologies and techniques, as well as business effectiveness. He specializes in creating award-winning products, successfully introducing profitable technology and process improvements at over 50 companies, including Fortune 500 companies such as Verizon, BT, Revlon, and Chevron. In his role as an executive, Michael served in leadership positions at several startup companies on their way to market success. Michael is a Board Member and Sr. Fellow of the futurist think tank, The DaVinci Institute, and often speaks on the future of learning, career management, and nonverbal communications at work. He is a sought out expert and has appeared as a spokesperson on local and national TV.

Walter is Chair of Universal Mobile Solutions, a leading marketing consulting firm specializing in mobile marketing. UMS is positioned as a leading provider of mobile marketing opportunities and solutions and is active in several verticals including medical, retail, financial, manufacturing and event management. UMS partners with leading firms in the mobile services space to deliver customized mobile marketing strategies and solutions for their clients. UMS core services revolve around three components central to any successful mobile marketing solution: strategy, sustainability and communications. Walter has a vast depth of knowledge and experience on both the front line of customer service, and in managing and developing successful customer service strategies. His vision of the customer experience has been molded in over 20 years of progressively senior roles spanning a cross section of customer-service oriented organizations in the automotive, hospitality, software development and membership services industries.

Tom Feeney is the president & CEO of Safelite AutoGlass®, the nation’s leading provider of vehicle glass repair and replacement services. In his 20 years with the company, he has been instrumental in establishing Safelite AutoGlass® as a national company and a well-known brand, which now serves more than 4.5 million customers annually and provides mobile service options to 95 percent of the U.S.

Ben Watson is a principal in the newly formed customer marketing team for the Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. Ben’s responsible for working across the Adobe organization to optimize the enterprise customer journey and provide customer input to help define Adobe’s industry leading customer experience solutions and CEM platform. Ben is a recognized thought leader and is directly engaged in many customer experience initiatives with Adobe’s leading customers. While at Adobe he has been an energetic advocate within community and social media circles and was one of the first external Adobe bloggers. He has worked in both platform and enterprise marketing and lead the creation of the role of technical evangelism and the team at Adobe in its formation several years ago. Prior to joining Adobe, Watson served as director of user experience and BPM strategy at IMP Solutions, director of product strategy for Yahoo! and the senior manager for developer and platform evangelism at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, he spent several years in the advertising agency and publishing space in varied roles such as creative director and CTO and has worked on campaigns and internet strategy for many of the world's top brands. In 2008, he was honored as one of Canada’s Top 10 Men in Social Media.

Professor Morris Pentel runs one of the most respected consulting businesses in the UK with a track record based on successful work for some of the largest institutions in the world. He has been involved in the delivery of some of the most significant innovations in technology over the last 30 years winning a number of prizes. He has influenced technology design and best practice for the delivery of contact technologies for more than a quarter of a century.” He has hosted and spoken at numerous events and had many articles published across the world. He is regarded as a leading thinker in business science pioneering both the cost modelling of customer experience and the use of social media. He is the founder and current Chairman of the Customer Experience Foundation and is also the Head of the Institute of Contact Sciences and the Contact Foundation where he is developing Degree Courses in Contact Sciences with global educational partners.”