2015 CX Impact Awards

Sandra De Zoysa is a customer service practitioner with over 27 years of expertise within the Telecom Industry in Sri Lanka and currently holds the position of Group Chief Customer Officer and Chairperson of the Customer Experience Excellence group leadership committee of Dialog Axiata PLC. Her vision is to lead the Customer Experience transformation towards a digital future by humanizing digital care to fulfill consumer needs of connection, self-expression & exploration through ubiquitous, omni-channel life-enriching experiences.

Sandra says: “It is an honour to be a recipient of a CXPA award in recognition of my life’s work over the last two decades as a Service Practitioner. It is a testimony to how much can be achieved when you work for a great company, have the support & guidance of a good mentor/ boss and bring together a team that shares the same vision and ultimate passion for Service. I am truly thankful to my boss, colleagues and my team for their unstinted support to make my journey in Service Management a successful one!”

Kristin Guthrie is Vice President of Customer Experience at Honeywell Aerospace. While many companies in aerospace dedicate time and staff to delivering positive passenger experiences, Kristin has tackled the complex objective of delivering exemplary customer experiences in a B2B environment. In under two years, Kristin has established numerous employee initiatives to shift cultural emphasis on customer experience. And launched an award-winning web tool for airline customers -making it easier to find critical, tailored information. Kristin has been requested to speak at multiple industry events on the topic of CX and how she launched it at Honeywell. Her Twitter is @marketingmite.

Kristie says: “It is such an honor to win and I’m truly flattered to have been nominated. I am blessed to work with such a dedicated, creative and fun CX team. And to have the leadership support to make things happen. Every day is an adventure as we scale new customer experience mountains! We are just getting started.”

Jennifer Maldonado is Senior Business Analyst and Voice of the Gamer program owner at Activision, and has been a full-time Customer Experience practitioner since 2008. She led customer experience programs in the B2B software space for 6 years before coming to Activision to enter the B2C world a year ago. One of the key tenets of Maldonado’s Voice of the Gamer program is to prove that Activision Cares. Her Twitter is @maldyj.

Jennifer says: “Being impactful is one of the highest compliments that can be paid to a customer experience professional – thank you! In my eight years in the CX industry I have had opportunity to contribute to several organizations’ experience improvements, but none so exciting as the opportunity I have here at Activision where Voice of the Gamer is embedded into an entire department dedicated to service planning and player experience. We’re thrilled to be making a difference!”

Karen Mangia is Senior Director, Insight Innovation & Diversity Business Practices at Cisco. Among Mangia’s accomplishments are leading the simplification and transformation of Cisco’s global customer satisfaction program, creating and launching a “Listening As A Service” function inside Cisco, and producing insights that enable sales and support teams to drive targeted actions. Her team partners closely with sales to incorporate customer feedback into customer meetings and sales strategy, in addition to providing research services to 10 primary business functions at Cisco. As a result, customer and partner feedback is available to every Cisco employee globally. Her Twitter is @karenmangia.

Karen says: “Spending time with our customers to understand their expectations and then partnering with our sales and support teams to exceed those expectations is core to Cisco’s culture. Thank you to CXPA for creating a professional organization to connect, inspire, and educate Customer Experience Professionals globally. It’s an honor to be recognized with a group of such talented people.”

Now a two-time winner of the CX Day Impact Award, Nancy Porte is Verint’s vice president of global customer experience. Porte established the vision, strategy and operational plan for the company’s customer experience initiative. This includes capturing the voice of the customer (VoC) and then putting this data to work in its customer journey mapping. Through the use of its own feedback solutions in combination with an effective communications plan, the Verint team leveraged these insights to create eight focus areas, in addition to launching a VoC program and “CX Zone,” where customers can provide powerful and actionable feedback. Her Twitter is @nporte.

Nancy says: “It’s an honor to be selected for the CX Impact Award for the second time. We have come so far in achieving our vision for the Verint CX program and are eager to extend its success globally. Verint is proud to help our own customers to accomplish that same level of success in their customer experience programs based on our award-winning methodology.”

As CA’s General Manager and Senior Vice President of Global Customer Success, Dayton Semerjian helps lead the customer experience charge across CA Technologies to build a superior end-to-end customer and partner experience that promotes higher levels of loyalty and growth. The entire enterprise is engaged in initiatives that focus on the customer experience such as current and future state CX journey-mapping, “Voice of the Customer” listening programs, and governance councils that initiate and track actions in response to critical customer feedback. His Global Customer Success team of 1,200 is comprised of Customer Support, Customer Success, Customer Experience Design & Delivery, and Customer Insights. His blog is http://blogs.ca.com/author/daytonsemerjian/ and his Twitter is @daytonsemerjian.

Dayton says: “Customer experience is a team sport. This CX Impact Award acknowledges and validates the work done by all CA employees in what is truly a global company-wide effort to help our customers and partners succeed. We are inspired by the clear and productive customer feedback we get across multiple touch points and are committed to quickly translating that into meaningful actions to help make our customers successful in the application economy.”

Paul Conder is a Principal at Lenati and co-author of the 2014 book The Art & Science of Customer Experience. With the CX team at Lenati, his work integrates business strategy, deep customer insights and design thinking to help brands build stronger connections with people. He believes that CX belongs at the foundation of any customer-facing brand, supporting every aspect of a business and every brand touchpoint. Through iterative research, CX design and real world testing, Paul’s team has realized hundreds of millions of dollars of new revenue for their clients, and driven new omnichannel experiences for customers worldwide.

Paul says: “The CXPA is doing a great job of advancing the field of Customer Experience, and to be recognized by the Association for our team’s work at Lenati is a real honor.”

Nikelle Knight is Voice of the Customer Manager (VOCM) at The Results Companies. Nikelle’s role as VOCM is dedicated to overseeing the overall Customer Experience our associates are providing to members and providers. Partnering with a Client’s Operations and Customer Experience Teams, she scoped, tested and implemented a Complaint Prevention Process that predicts potential compliant calls and provides near real-time intervention and resolution for members. As a result, customer complaints were substantially reduced and the process has transformed the company’s response to complaints from reactive to predictive.

Nikelle writes: “I’m incredibly honored to accept this award on behalf of The Results Companies. As a premier Customer Experience provider, we’ve worked hard to develop a very strategic and calculated approach to enhancing the caller experience. We could not succeed without the thought leadership of those individuals that I have the privilege of working with on a daily basis.”

As a Principal and Senior Vice President at Walker, McAllister ensures customer intelligence is being used effectively to drive bottom line business results for clients. With more than 20 years of experience as a CX strategist, she has worked with a number of the world’s most complex and influential companies who look to her for sound advice. McAllister helps companies overcome difficult obstacles and distractions to drive action, change and results from their CX initiatives. For example, since 2006, McAllister has led a team working with a leading global manufacturing company in the food packaging industry, helping them solidify their status as a market leader while growing profitably year after year.

Sonya writes: “This honor is a reflection of our entire Walker team’s commitment to helping companies become more customer-focused by building their strategies on known customer priorities. We’ve seen that pay off with improved real business outcomes. It’s very rewarding to help our clients achieve these kinds of results when improving their customer experiences.”

Matt Inman is Senior Director, CX Strategy & Design at MaritzCX. He works with organizations to help them develop customer experience roadmaps that go beyond reporting results to actually drive improvements within the organization and promote better customer experiences. Inman developed two service offerings for clients based on where an organization is with its CX maturity level: CX First Step Consultation (for organizations just starting efforts for a CX focus) and Organizational CX Assessment (for organizations who have a least some efforts underway). In addition, Inman is working on helping MaritzCX assign the current CX maturity level to each of MaritzCX’s clients.

Matt writes: “What a thrill to be recognized in a field so filled with strong customer advocates! I really love using my experience to help organizations achieve customer success and it is nice to see others appreciate what I enjoy and believe in. Long live customer success!”