2018 CX Impact Awards

Bob Buiaroski is SVP, Head of Customer Experience and is responsible for partnering with leaders across the business to re-imagine the customer experience and ensure that customers are at the center of all decisions. He is also responsible for driving processes that simplify and improve the overall experience to create excellent customer service and to drive efficiencies.

Prior to joining Manulife in 2017, Bob was Managing Director, Customer Management at Capita UK and Chief Operating Officer at Digicel. Bob spent most of his career at Vodafone, where he held progressively senior roles and was responsible for developing global customer, corporate and technology strategies that would deliver consistent experiences and improve top and bottom line.

Bob says: "What an honor it is to be recognized in this way. At Manulife we are creating a movement that will ensure our customer experience is at a level that is in service of our brand mission. “Decisions made easier, Lives Made Better”. At the core to this movement is a CX team who are dedicated to making a difference and challenging each other to create something brilliant. This recognition is for all of my colleagues who wake up every day with the belief and conviction to make a difference."

Brian Burba is Vice President, Customer Experience Strategy & Design. He leads a company-wide Customer Experience (CX) transformation effort focused on building a customer-centric culture that eliminates barriers between our customers’ ideas and business outcomes. Through a variety of organizational tools and programs, Brian leads and coordinates efforts to put the customer at the center of all we do, improving customer loyalty and retention, and ultimately CA business results.

Brian’s CA tenure dates to his 1996 hire at a company acquired by CA in 2005. His career includes individual and leadership roles in product management, product marketing, corporate strategy, M&A, business development, R&D operations, and business unit leadership. He holds a degree in Mathematical Economics from Brown University and completed the Advanced Management Program at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Brian says: "It is an honor to be individually recognized by the CXPA for this award, but credit must go to my team and colleagues across CA. If there is one thing we’ve learned on our journey, CX improvement is truly a team sport."

As Senior President of Customer Service, Seth Hall's work is critical to the success of Philadelphia Insurance Companies. Ensuring customers are at the center of Philadelphia Insurance Companies’ work has always been the cornerstone of the company, and his role directly impacts the company’s customer experience goals. 

 Apart from Seth's role at Philadelphia Insurance Company, Seth is the Founder of March of Dimes Run for Babies Event and was a Vice-Chair with the March of Dimes responsible for driving strategic planning efforts from 2016 to 2017 term. His current role with the March of Dimes is as Market Chairman where he is responsible for strategic direction and revenue goals of Greater Philadelphia Market Board.

He has also won the American Business Award - Executive of the Year with P & C Insurance, as well as earned the title of Customer Service Champion from 1:1 Media in 2016. Seth also won the 2015 Gartner Service Excellence Award. 

Personally, Seth is the Founder of Tools2Educate, Inc. and is a 7-Time Ironman Finisher -including World Championships. 

Seth says: "I am incredibly honored and humbled to be chosen as a CX Impact Award Winner. The work I’ve done at PHLY would not be possible without my dedicated colleagues who continue to drive customer-centric change across our organization and embody true passion for enhancing the customer experience. Thank you also to the CXPA and their work in uniting and empowering CX professionals and propelling the industry forward."

Musa is a results-driven, creative customer experience leader with a career spanning more than 20 years in the B2B technology industry. He brings an exceptional and diverse background from the design and management of go-to-market strategies of highly successful products to development of customer experience programs aimed to increase customer engagement. Experienced in aligning customer expectations with his organization’s business values, he develops strategic plans that provide the best course of action for creatively solving complex customer issues, while adopting operational excellence best practices.

Musa believes that bad customer experiences are toxic to our social fabric and so, he works hard to define the journeys that matter the most to customers to anticipate their needs and future challenges. He works tirelessly to obtain the right customer experience buy-in from executive management to save and engineer experiences that instill customer trust and loyalty.

Musa leads a team dedicated to leading-edge customer experience. The team is responsible for building a comprehensive voice of the customer (VoC) practice at Genesys. They focus on customer engagement and end-to-end continuous improvement of customer experiences through the maturing of the Net Promoter System into a deeper customer feedback framework and system.

Musa is a participant of the Bain Loyalty Forum. He holds certifications in service design and as a certified customer experience professional (CCXP).

Musa says: "Collaboration runs deep in our DNA at Genesys. That’s why I am humbled to accept this CXPA award on behalf of my team of more than 5,000 global employees who are passionate about helping businesses connect every moment with their customers. I am proud to be part of CXPA, the organization charged with ensuring the industry is designing business practices and experiences hyper-focused on the needs of today’s consumers."

Elizabeth Killinger has over 25 years of domestic and international experience in the energy and services industries, including 16 years with NRG Energy where she serves as President of NRG Retail and Reliant. In her role, Elizabeth is responsible for directing all aspects of the retail division, a $5 billion competitive energy company, which includes the largest national competitive electricity business in the country and the leading portable solar power business in the U.S.

Elizabeth is the champion and driving force in establishing the company’s “customer first” initiative and educating the organization on the important role CX plays in a company’s ongoing and long-term success. She was instrumental in shifting the belief that CX was only the duty of call center representatives to ensuring all departments, levels and functions are responsible for the success of CX.

In leading a consumer-focused business with customers who run the gamut of age, demographic, lifestyle and region, it is critical for NRG’s retail operation to stay at the forefront of cultural, social, and digital trends to deliver products and services that meet the needs of diverse customers. Under Elizabeth’s leadership, one of NRG’s retail businesses, Reliant, led the industry in developing tools that help customers manage their electricity usage and costs, like being first to market with weekly summary emails and anomaly alerts, and developing a smartphone app that allows customers to take their energy usage and account management into their own hands. These efforts have been recognized throughout the years and most recently when ForeSee named Reliant the best in overall customer experience in the U.S. in its 2018 Utilities Customer Experience (CX) Insights report.

Elizabeth says: "I am honored to receive the 2018 CX Impact Award. At Reliant and NRG, we’re passionate about our customer-first culture. It’s one that involves every single employee – all departments, functions and levels of our organization. I’d like to dedicate this award to my talented and determined team who tirelessly work to improve the customer experience each and every day."

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away (okay, not that far), a budding call centre exec, didn’t get the job he was hoping for. Instead, he got a Customer Experience job. Best. Consolation. Prize. Ever.

A decade later and now at MultiChoice, still with CX on the bottom of his business card, his CX passions seem to be at odds with each other – he’s a fierce champion of robust, bullet proof measurement and loves the nuanced human complexities of organizational culture. For Clint, these are his tools of choice in any CX toolbox.

Clint has taken the guess work out of voice of customer and provided Africa’s biggest pay tv operator with a solid customer-based performance metric, paired with a unique insight framework that creates the blue print against which to design and redesign experiences.

It’s not clear if CX culture found Clint, or if Clint found Culture, but one thing is clear, he understands that organizational culture, supercharges your customer experiences. With a first full of local and international awards for #ninetynine, he’s working on what’s next.

Clint and his CX team at MultiChoice are the company’s center of customer experience excellence. With the smarts for the job and passion for the profession, we can expect great things. Watch this space.

Clint says: "Check out the esteemed company I’m in! It’s quite humbling and a little daunting. I’m fortunate to be part of a small but amazing group of CX folk here on the most southern tip of Africa, who inspire and challenge me every day. I’m privileged to work in an organization that really lives Customer First and gives me the opportunity to flex my CX muscle. Some things you can only learn by doing, and MultiChoice have made that possible for me.”

As VP of Service Management for NuAxis Innovations, a solution-driven support organization contractor for the federal government, Bob Roark’s role is to help transform and optimize Customer Experience (CX) via Integrated Service Management, Smart Talent Leadership, and designing a Customer-Centric culture in both the NuAxis team and their customer’s organizations. Bob is a results-driven Information Technology operations and service management executive with an unwavering focus on delivering world-class customer and employee experience for internal and external customers. With a broad range of technical and business experience across multiple industries, his positive approach of empowering, coaching and developing colleagues, drives business value for all stakeholders through a culture of collaboration and customer-centricity.

In honing the customer-centric culture at NuAxis, Bob’s projects have included creating mentorship and employee training programs, resulting in 10 managerial staff promotions, 12 staff promotions, 18+ contract renewals, reduced staff turnover, and the attainment of 45 HDI Team Awards, demonstrating tangible proof that the support center’s team members are equipped with the skills to elevate the customer experience, including 22 Pinnacle of Excellence awards spanning 7 managed services customers and over 200 NuAxis employees. These initiatives have resulted in the overall satisfaction of NuAxis’ customers and has led to organizational referrals from current customers, renewed contracts and new contracts.

Bob says: "It is a great honor to be selected as a 2018 CX Impact Award winner. I am proud to represent NuAxis and our group of wonderfully talented team members that work tirelessly ensure our customers not only succeed but are WOWED every single day!"

As a member advocate, Karen Sweeney’s main objective is to provide member insights that help her business partners move forward strategic initiatives that will support, improve or enhance the members’ experiences across all channels (branch, phone, digital), leading to more engaged members and driving loyalty. Karen provides these insights in various ways:

With a robust VOC program in place, Karen has led the way in marrying operational data with survey data to enable business partners to be more specific in the actions necessary for improvement. New data points helped drive improvements at the top of the funnel, i.e. breaking down feedback by Branch vs. Phone origination helped identify pain points that were specific to those channels in the consumer loan process. In one channel it was a People issue where coaching and feedback was needed. In another, it was inefficiencies with the Process that drove dissatisfaction. Improvements were made quickly and satisfaction scores came back up soon after actions were taken.

In 2018, as part of an overall Member Experience Communications Strategy, the MX team rolled out Karen’s Korner: a bi-weekly blog, designed to focus on hot topics in the customer experience world - to help everyone understand the rise in customer expectations across industries. The blog is also leveraged as a way to communicate high impact changes and strategies that are affecting or effecting the Bethpage member experience overall.

Karen’s Korner has helped fuel the customer-centric culture at Bethpage as employees engage in discussion about the member experience, by asking questions or adding commentary on the blog, or by using the content in team meetings and morning huddles. It has been an effective way to advance Bethpage’s CX maturity, supporting purposeful leadership with executives focused on the importance of MX in key messages and employee engagement by soliciting employee feedback/inputs.

Karen says: "I am honored to receive the CX Impact Award for the work I have done at Bethpage Federal Credit Union to build and develop our member experience discipline. Bethpage values its members and I am inspired every day by how my colleagues deliver on our brand promise and enrich the lives of our members. It is a privilege to advocate for our members as part of my job and to be recognized by the CXPA for Bethpage’s efforts to advance the customer experience cause."

John Wompey is an experienced vice president with a demonstrated history of influencing the retail industry. Wompey began his career at Foot Locker on the front line of customer experience as a district manager, learning from customers first hand as he advanced through the ranks. As he developed deep expertise in training and coaching, driving efficiencies, and growing revenues, his passion for customer experience increased. He experienced first-hand successes in finding and magnifying the places where customer relationships and business returns meet.

With this background, Wompey has pledged that every decision he makes is centered around the customer. To deliver on this promise, he created a comprehensive customer feedback program designed to understand exactly what customers want and need at every point along their journey with the Foot Locker brand. Now in his role as VP Customer Experience and Connectivity at Foot Locker, Wompey spearheads the company's continuing evolution to greater customer-centricity.

John says: "It’s a great privilege to receive this honor from the CXPA! Empowering teams to deliver a customer experience that drives fierce loyalty takes a certain tenacity, commitment to authenticity, and deep customer understanding on a company-wide level. This has certainly been a team effort here at Foot Locker, and I’m just excited to be a part of it!”

Paula is a seasoned champion of global outsourcing and has played a pivotal role in the success and growth of the organisations where she has worked, over the last twenty years.

As the guardians of CX across multiple industries, having a mindset that is driven by innovation and transformation is a critical skill set for the truly successful leaders in outsourcing. Paula has been a digital evangelist ahead of its current revolutionary time, ensuring that her clients see the power and benefit of technology as enablement in the human engagement of CX, and ensuring that the journey through transformation never leaves the customer behind.

For one client she created a global digital hub that was capable of supporting customers 24 hours a day in 10 languages, regardless if the customer query was by phone, chat, social media or independent online forum discussions. This very solution reduced her client’s operating costs by 25% and evolved them to anytime/anywhere support at global scale.

Paula partners with some of the most successful Blue Chip leaders across the world, to design and deliver complex CX solutions that offer agile customer management across borders, skill sets and language. Her visionary outlook has extended to emerging markets and start-ups, where she has pioneered new thinking in AI-enabled multi-lingual support that has revolutionized how we think about the limitations of language and cost in the contact centre.

Not only a proponent for the digital future, Paula is a recognized influencer for the workforce of the future - a driving force for gender equality in the industry, she is the founder and Global Lean In Network Leader for Convergys, as a partner with LeanIn.org, championing diversity and inclusion and an apostle for progressive female and senior female leadership.

Paula says: "It’s an incredible honor to receive this recognition from CXPA. We are all consumers of products and services and we are all finding our way, as consumers, though our ever-changing digital world, and that can be all too often a complicated experience.

To be able to influence what that experience is and means is incredibly empowering but, to receive recognition for CX Impact as a leader in the Outsourcing space is incredibly important, as we carry the huge responsibility of making CX the best it can be on behalf of so many incredibly influential brands that feature in our daily lives.

I want to extend my thanks to my incredible team in Convergys Europe – it is their hard work and everyday commitment to CX success, for their clients and customers, that has helped us achieve what we have in Convergys. And to the wider group that encourages our next generation of female leaders to step up and be bold, to know that what you do today can really make a difference, and open a tremendous career in this CX space."

Andrew Park has spent more than a decade designing, deploying, and consulting on customer experience programs for global Fortune 1000 companies. In his current role as Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy, Andrew provides strategic counsel to InMoment prospects and clients, architecting and evolving their customer experience initiatives to deliver maximum business and relationship impact.

He is CCXP certified, the author of several white papers, an experienced speaker, and regularly contributes to public conversations about customer experience in forums like the Huffington Post, Inc., and Forbes.

Andrew says: "In an industry led by such passionate people, I am excited and humbled to receive a CX Impact Award. I want to thank my colleagues at InMoment, and clients, for all of their hard work and innovation in driving the customer experience industry forward. I am grateful to be inspired by such incredible people."

Claire has a passion for building truly customer-centric cultures that inspire change and deliver measurable business improvement. In her role as SVP of CX Innovation at Confirmit, she focuses on driving forward the discipline of CX Management and ensuring that Confirmit provides the technology and expertise that organizations need to empower and inspire everyone across the organization to do the right thing, be that at board level; within their team, or through their own, individual actions.

With a background in Psychology and Systemic Management, Claire has over 20 years’ experience in working closely with organizations helping them bring together the voice of their customers, employees, and partners, enrich with financial, operational, and behavioral data and then distill down to personalized, focused priorities. Working as both a consultant and CX practitioner, Claire has enabled leading companies to empower everyone to be accountable for improvement, motivate individuals to do something differently and predict and monitor the business impact.

Claire says: "What a great honor to receive an Impact Award, it means so much to be recognized by my fellow CX professionals. I have been lucky enough to be part of the CXPA community right from the start and over the years have been inspired, challenged and hugely supported by our community. So a big thank you to all CXPA members for your continued commitment to our profession, together we will ensure that CX is recognized as a fundamental building block for any successful business and that everyone is empowered to make a difference."

Luke Williams is Head of CX Strategy & Thought Leadership at Qualtrics and is an award-winning researcher and author of a New York Times and USA Today bestseller (“The Wallet Allocation Rule”), and a Bookscan bestseller (“Why Loyalty Matters”). A statistician and methodologist by training, Luke is a thought leader in the space of customer experience, client satisfaction, client loyalty, client ROI, strategy, and analytics. His work has appeared in many academic and trade publications, including co-authorship of a Harvard Business School Case Study.

Prior to Qualtrics, Luke was Corporate Vice President of the Client Care Program at AECOM, where he was responsible for the global client feedback measurement, analytics and insights team. Luke previously held multiple roles at Ipsos Loyalty, including Head of Research Methods & Head of Consulting, and Vice President, Financial services.

Luke is a member of the Market Research Association (MRA) and CXPA. He holds a M.A. in Research Methods from Durham University in England.

Luke says: "I’m grateful for being recognized by the CXPA with the CX Impact Award. As the world’s leading organization for customer experience professionals, the CXPA plays a crucial role in the development and curation of not only professional skills, but laying the foundation for better customer experiences everywhere. In congratulating fellow winners, I’d also like to state how grateful I am for all of my mentors. And, most importantly, I’d like to thank and congratulate all of my teammates at Qualtrics who work with my every step of the way. I’d be nowhere without them!"