Rob Ettridge

Rob is a partner at customer communications consultancy Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. The lorries help organisations improve customer experience through better communications. He’s managed customer engagement, cultural change and tone of voice communications projects for leading financial, retail, utilities and manufacturing clients. He has a background in public relations, branding and communications gained in technology companies in the UK and USA.

Ian Golding

Ian is an internationally renowned leader in customer experience. Speaker, blogger, consultant, adviser and featured columnist and now also non-executive editor of CXM.co.uk in his role as Chairman of the Awards Ian will assist us to ensure the CXA has a clearly articulated role in relation to promoting CX best practice. Ian will also be an advocate for the UK Customer Experience Awards. A highly influential freelance Customer Experience consultant, Ian advises leading companies on Customer Experience strategy, measurement, improvement and employee advocacy techniques and solutions. He has worked across multiple industries including retail, financial services, logistics, telecoms and pharmaceuticals and has deployed Customer Experience tools and methodologies all over the world.

John Barr

John Barr is Customer Experience Director at Optivo (Housing Association) managing 44,000 homes in S.E. England & the Midlands.

John has 27 years’ experience in the housing sector and 5 years providing English language services to global businesses in Italy. John is passionate that social housing is as much a necessity as good healthcare and education. He’s driven by the idea that (increasingly vulnerable and disadvantaged) customers should enjoy a positive customer experience as professional as anything offered by the commercial sector.

Maggie Colman

Maggie brings over 25 years’ experience in the Telebusiness and Contact Centre sectors. Her enthusiasm and drive energises those who work in these fields so that they want to excel, and her ability to pass on her expertise ensures they have the skills to do so. As a result, sales teams bring in significantly higher levels of new business and customer service teams drive up satisfaction across the existing customer base, increasing both customer retention and customer loyalty.

Paul Weald

Paul is a consultant and a multi-channel contact centre specialist. Having worked in the industry for 25 years, his experience covers all aspects of people, process, technology, digital operations and customer experience.

Last year Paul received the Major Contribution to Judging accolade recognising his support for awards in the pursuit of customer excellence. He believes that every organisation can excel in how it serves its customers – how well you deliver customer service is a true differentiator.

Hina Sharma

Hina is a seasoned communications and marketing expert at Pitney Bowes working with teams to deliver on the challenges of company transformation, reputation management & building a strategy to achieve business goals. She helps shift company perceptions to build business reputation & grow brand awareness. Her business & commercial insight ensures a heightened focus to lead, shape and build on client needs across various geographies and markets, both internally and externally of an organisation. Hina believes different and diverse experiences add to personal learning and building company culture.

Michelle Ansell

Michelle Ansell is a Director and Managing Partner of Douglas Jackson, a specialist recruitment consultancy. Douglas Jackson offer Executive Search and Recruitment. We work in partnership with our customers to help solve their resourcing challenges, recruiting executive level, senior/mid management and skilled practitioner appointments for; Operations, Sales, Service, Experience, Strategy, Journey, Loyalty, Acquisition, Customer Contact, CRM, Digital, Planning, Programmes, Insight and Analytics. Michelle has over 20 years’ customer recruitment experience, working with a variety of organisations, offering professional advice and consultancy, whilst partnering with clients to identify, attract and recruit the most appropriate talent and individuals for their business.

Gary Jackson

Gary Jackson, Group Director of Communications & Customer Success for Mears Group, has delivered award winning customer experience training. Gary has a successful background developing and implementing customer and communications strategies, transforming business orientation from operations to customer centric, changing culture, leading high performing teams and improving business results. Previously, Gary has worked in the utilities, sportswear and manufacturing industries.

Ash Cripps

A Companion Member of the Institute of Customer Service and having been a Chair Judge at both the UK Customer Experience and UK Digital Experience Awards, Ash has worked for the AA for over 9 years. Fired up about CX, change, lean, agile, culture, continual improvement and the innovative use of technology, Ash leads Change Readiness Managers, and is responsible for ensuring change lands smoothly, on time and on budget. Ash previously had operational leadership responsibility within Contact Centres.

Caroline Tan

Caroline’s passion and expertise lies in CX transformation. This was inspired and developed during her career within Nationwide. Following roles in Senior Management with a remit to propel the organisation towards delivering a World Class customer experience, Caroline set up Inspiring People, a consultancy and training company aiming to help people do ordinary things extraordinarily well. Caroline is also a speaker and writer and feels privileged to be a judge, able to watch the very best service professionals in action.

Harsha Anand

Harsha is a utilities industry thought-leader with over 20+ years of international consulting experience across Europe, Asia and Australia. Harsha believes that the stage is set for disruptive and transformative change to enable customers of Energy & Water companies to obtain affordable, sustainable and secure provision of Electricity, Gas and Water.

He has a track record of successfully delivering multi-million-pound transformation programmes including leading a variety of industry separation projects, as part of the de-regulation of the Energy & Water industry.

Harsha has held several executive and senior management positions and built successful multi-million Energy & Utilities consulting businesses. Harsha believes in nurturing and building talented teams that can deliver tangible business outcomes to customers, while delivering exponential growth to their organizations.

Harsha was awarded the prestigious Leadership Award by UK’s Utilities and Services Industries Trust (USIT) in 2016.

John White

John is a Customer Experience Transformation expert, with over 10+ years’ experience focusing on how you can orientate your organisation around the customer and drive targeted change initiatives across channels focused on the customer. Areas of expertise include; Customer Experience measurement, Customer Transformation Design, Customer Experience design, Customer and Channel segmentation In the last year, John has led programmes helping clients develop their customer experience approaches across channels, products and customer propositions – with exposure to Executive and Board level executives.

Rob Dermott

Rob has over 20 years’ recruitment experience into the Contact Centre and Customer Experience sectors, making him one of the leading recruiters into the industry. Over this time he has seen the industry change into the dynamic sector it is today. With a specialism in Senior to Executive levels he has helped numerous clients shape their customer focussed functions. He has also met 1000’s of industry professionals across all aspects of customer delivery, customer experience and innovation. This is Rob’s 5th year Judging at the CX Awards.

Joe Cahalane

Joe Cahalane is the CEO, of Arise who design and deliver award-winning Customer and Technical Support services on behalf of clients. Along with being the Chairman of the CRIOS GROUP, a cluster of key Business Process Outsourcers (BPO) Joe is a board member of the CCMA (Contact Centre Management Association) in Ireland.

With more than 30 years’ experience at Management and Director level with North American, Asian, and European multinationals, Joe is passionate about strategies to develop exceptional customer experiences.

Olga Wormald

Olga has over 15 years experience working with businesses like Asda, Hallmark, EasyJet and Bourne Leisure, leading the delivery of customer focussed change programmes, where customer experience is key. She now has her own consultancy company specialising in guiding businesses through strategic change - interpreting their vision into structured delivery plans that gets results.

Stephen Parry

Stephen Parry is the CEO of Lloyd Parry International: Adaptive Business Consultancy.

He is a multi-award winning, international strategist and speaker on the design and creation of adaptive enterprises. Stephen has a world-class reputation for passionate leadership and organisational transformation by changing the design and cultures of organisations to create differentiation and long-term profitability.

Stephen has written numerous business publications among them are the Introduction to Adaptive Business Practices and Change Readiness: Planting the Seeds for Change Success. He is also the author of Sense and Respond: The Journey to Customer Purpose written as a follow-up to his award-winning transformations. His work featured in the Harvard Business Review.

Tracey Roberts

Tracey is a highly experienced and successful Director within Capita Customer Management, being responsible for strategy, proposition development and shaping client solutions. Specialising in complaint handling for over 10 years, Tracey understands the value of staying one step ahead and keeping a sharp eye on the market. Covering many industry sectors, she provides clients with insight and practical solutions to ensure they are aware of regulatory and other market pressures which may affect their complaint handling and business review operations.

Helen Fennell

Helen is co-founder of lens, a customer consultancy dedicated to helping clients to drive customer-led change. Helen’s passion for all things customer began when she started out as a qualitative researcher and this has grown since working across various consultancy roles. Now, as Director at lens, Helen works with brands across various industries, including Financial Services, Travel, Telecoms, Retail, and Utilities. She supports clients to put the customer at the forefront of business decisions through the development of a customer experience strategy, adoption of a customer journey approach, and a focus on connecting customer insight.

Jo Boswell

Jo advises on customer experience innovation, and supports customer experience leaders with coaching development. She focuses particularly on helping organisations harness customer data, insight and technology to drive customer experience improvements, whilst driving the cultural change needed to unlock value for themselves and their customers.

Jo previously enjoyed a career with British Airways spanning 27 years, where she was the driving force behind the airline’s ‘Know Me’ initiative, a successful transformation programme that embedded personalisation into the customer experience and service strategy.

Laura Bowyer

Laura is a customer enthusiast who has used her infectious passion for creating great experiences to build customer-centric cultures within FMCG & Hospitality businesses over the past 10 years. Working within Customer Service, Experience & Marketing roles, she has helped brands better understand their customers, identified priorities for improvement and implemented change. She’s contributed to the success of well-known brands such as Green & Black’s, Gü Puds and PizzaExpress, and is currently leading the transformation for KFC UK & Ireland.

Marie Cross

Marie is a customer service extremist, with almost 40 years’ experience - passionate about developing the talent of frontline teams and leaders, in order to enhance the customer experience, build brand loyalty and develop employee engagement. An award-winning customer service trainer and entrepreneur, Marie’s expertise and infectious enthusiasm stimulates and educates everyone she works with. Her overall aim is to add real, measurable value to both the individual and the organisation, recognising people as the vital ingredient in the recipe for success.

Marlan Hardie

Marlan Hardie operates as the People Engagement Officer for global service providers at World Wide Technology. With 20 years in the customer care industry and a consulting background, Marlan has worked with many of the largest call centers in the telecom, cable, financial services, media and entertainment organizations. He evangelizes that “the brands that deliver the best customer experience have already provide the best employee experience”. Marlan lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife of 20 years and two children.

Peter Milligan

Peter is a professional speaker and business psychologist with 26 years of international experience in developing business leaders and teams. After moving from Australia to the UK in 2000, Peter became a director of Europe's largest executive coaching firm before establishing his own business in 2005. He has worked with leaders at all levels across a wide range of industries. He brings practical applications of psychology to the workplace so that individuals and teams have less stress, more joy, and greater productivity.

Phil Durand

Phil has worked in customer experience measurement for over twenty years. In his role at Confirmit, he works closely with customers to help define and design global Voice of the Customer programmes that aim to deliver real business change. He firmly believes that insights about the customer experience are only important when a business focuses on what this means, why it matters – and crucially – what they’re going to do about it.

Shadi Jamil Al Swairki

A high Medical and Operational Professional with superb leadership skills, impressive record of growth and success for more than 12 years of the experience inthe healthcare sector,

I firmly believe in passionate and inspirational business leadership which energizes both organizations and individuals. Investment in people is a crucial pre-requisite when embarking on a new opportunity

A Son of Great Parents, husband of a wonderful lady and a father for three angels, Helping people to live their best life is my ultimate goal,and it’s my motivational fuel

Stewart Pattinson

In his fourth consecutive year judging, Stewart combines a successful career in senior contact centre management with recent service transformation expertise, to offer consulting and interim services to the industry. A seasoned customer experience professional, Stewart has over 20 years diverse experience, across multiple verticals within both public and private sectors. In recent years Stewart has been helping organisations deliver improved customer experience outcomes, through optimising and transforming their delivery of sales and services via digital and traditional voice channels.

Tiffany Carpenter

Tiffany has spent over 20 years helping organisations transform customer experience across their sales, service and marketing operations. In her current role at SAS, she guides organisations on the application of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to harness customer insights and deliver relevant one-to-one experiences. Tiffany is also co-founder of Griswold Studios, a boutique fitness concept delivering personalised fitness programmes powered by data and analytics.

Tim Pritchard

Tim leads the CX practice at Kantar UK (a division of WPP plc), working with leading brands from a variety of sectors to define, track and activate their CX strategies. He and his 52-strong team, help to identify the moments that matter most to customers, establishing priorities for improvement action to drive customer engagement and deliver commercial ROI. His expertise transcends NPS/CSat measurement programmes, advanced analytics (fusing and interrogating survey data and social data with behavioural and operational/CRM data), working with best-of-breed VoC platforms (Kantar has global partnership agreements with both Medallia and Qualtrics), and activation/CX consulting services to help clients to embed CX across their businesses and stakeholder groups. Tim is a Board Director at Kantar UK, and also sits on the global Kantar CX Steering Board, which gives him visibility of the CX programmes – and best practice approaches – employed by his colleagues in all 85 countries where Kantar operates.

Aaron Hunt

An experienced Insight Manager, with data analysis and Customer Experience background. I have worked in and around the customer experience domain for many years in the Financial, Retail and Housing sectors.

I have garnered experience from Contact Centres to large scale industry changing projects, bringing structure and detail to reports and insight that helps to bring the voice of the customer to life, allowing for continuous improvement in the customer journey and business strategy.

Ansi Rona-Bayildiran

Ansi has earned her career working in a variety of departments for the leading digital operator, Turkcell (Forbes #1744) in Turkey for almost 15 years. She had several roles in marketing, as well as customer experience. She is a catalyst and change leader with her unconventional ideas and expertise in building digital customer touchpoints, including mobile apps, AI-based chatbots and social media interaction tools, and managing company-wide customer-centric and employee retention programmes. She is a servant leader to her team. Ansi recently moved to London and established her own start-up, Tinderbox Technologies, to excel customer experience practices in consumer-serving industries.

Brian Ford

Brian Ford has been a member of the Samsung UK Board since January 2009. He is responsible for all aspects of Customer Experience and After Sales Support for the full range of products & services in the Samsung portfolio.

His team manages all Consumer & Business client support through Contact Centres in Leeds, Cluj and Manila supporting customers through Voice, Online, Social Media and Remote Services. He also oversees the Samsung nationwide network of retail based Customer Experience Support Centres and further engineer service delivery through a network of 150 Regional and National Service Companies.

Brian started his working life as a qualified technology design draughtsman before moving to Canon. In 2001 he was appointed Canon UK Service Director and then progressed to Head of European Services for Canon in 2005 before then moving to Samsung in 2009.

Catherine Lindsay

Catherine is an operations and customer experience professional with over 20 years of experience across a variety of sectors. She has been with Hitachi Capital Consumer Finance since August 2018 where she is responsible for the operation which includes customer service, complaints and collections, customer experience and the business insights programme.

At Hitachi Capital Catherine and the team are working on delivering outstanding customer experiences and embracing our digital first transformation programme.

Chris Garthwaite

Chris is widely recognised as a leading pioneer of innovative customer experience solutions in an ever changing market. Constantly championing the customer he has delivered measureable and innovative transformation programmes across a range of global organisations across almost every sector.

His career spans over 30 years of senior level board-level experience across a range of companies such as Allied Breweries, Woolworths, Kingfisher, Dorling Kindersley & Digitas, in each instance seeking to put the heart of the business through innovative proposition development. Chris’ visionary approach helps organisations challenge their status quo and shape their future based on customer insight and a deeper understanding of the value of customer experience.

Chris is immensely likeable and is regarded as one of the most exciting and provocative speakers in the industry. He is also the designer of Customer Heartbeat® technology, one of the most successful customer experience methodologies in the industry.

Chris has a Bsc in Sports Science from Birmingham University and an MBA from Bradford University and has worked on a wide range of strategic customer experience projects for national and international clients, including BP, Michelin, Orange (France Telecom), Hyundai, Rio Tinto, Renault, Inchcape, Govia and Coca Cola.

Elke Neuteboom

Elke is Research Director at Beehive Research and has worked on CX programmes for 20+ years – both client and agency side. During that time, she has worked with companies designing practical CX programmes, collecting rich feedback and delivering results in formats suitable to feed into business strategy. While coming from a research background, Elke recognises the need to help companies move from being ‘siloed’ to having a customer-centric culture where everyone knows their role in providing a positive customer experience.

Emma Wardle

Emma is an Operations Professional with over 20 years experience of running large Operations in Financial Services environments. As Senior Director of Operations Delivery at Capital One Emma is responsible for ensuring the right outcomes for customers across general customer service, collections, fraud and complaints channels. Her focus is to ensure well trained, knowledgeable staff are always available to deliver the best outcome for the customer and she does this across an in-house and outsourced model both offshore and in the UK. With a passion for people and delivering great service she relishes the opportunity to recover situations for customers where the expected levels of service may have fallen short.

Giles Owen

An avid lover of improving customer experience my whole career. With over 20 years experience in the redesign and transformation of group level customer engagement strategies, I have seen a myriad of changes happen in the contact centre industry. The constant change keeps the industry exciting. The constant in this ever changing environment is always the customer. Lose sight of them and you have nothing.

I love to see how different companies from diverse industry sectors tackle their own particular set of challenges to improve their offering to the customer.

Gökhan Kara

Gökhan Kara is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP). He’s the first CCXP in Turkey, founder and leads the Customer Experience Professionals Association Istanbul Network, awarded 2018 CXPA Most Innovative CX Day Event. He worked as a CX practitioner in Telecom, Banking and Energy sectors. He’s writing articles for HBR Turkey, CX Magazine and CX Network. He’s an international keynote speaker and spoke many of International Customer Experience Management summits.

Gökhan is Customer Experience Manager at Enerjisa. He is a part time lecturer at MEF University and gives Customer Experience Management course for MBA students. He gives trainings and consultancy to compaines for creating better customer experiences. / https://www.linkedin.com/in/gokhankara16/

Helen Gillett

Helen is an award-winning businesswoman, with wide-ranging experience in operational and strategic leadership, gained over a 25-year career.

Passionate about diversity and inclusion, especially in the realm of mental health. As a leader she believes in role modelling in an open and honest way, not least since her face hasn’t always obviously fitted the environment where she’s worked. Making Affinity for Business the kind of organisation where everyone can do their best, every day, wherever they have come from is extremely rewarding

Jessica Cordery

Jessica is Associate Director, Marketing and Customer Experience at BGL Group, with over 10 years’ experience in Marketing, Communications and Customer Experience within a number of industries including Financial Services and Travel. Currently working within the BGL Group’s Insurance Distribution and Outsourcing division, she is passionate about the delivery of new and innovative customer initiatives that leverage the very best talent and insight.

Karma Harvey

I have 20 years working in customer facing and client service environments specialising in financial services, insurance and environmental services industry. As Head of Customer Strategy and Insights, I have a great understanding around customer needs and wants across a mix of channels. I am extremely passionate about the delivery of excellent customer service and making a difference to the way customers engage with our brand.

Kathryn Simons-Porter

Kathryn has worked in the Contact Centre industry for over twenty years, both in the UK and across Europe. For the last five years Kathryn's role has overarched all pillars of Customer Experience and guides organisations on Best Practice, Futures, Cloud Migration, Digital Transformation, Agent/Employee Experience, Customer Journey Mapping and CX Strategy. Kathryn lives in Yorkshire with her husband, step-son and beloved dog Jackson.

Kerry Edwards

I lead our CX Practice that provides service design & delivery capability, underpinned by our CX Improvement Framework, helping our customers to realise the end-user experience ambitions.

Before Capita, I worked in Telecommunications for 20 years in roles spanning Operations, Service, Credit, Sales, Technology and CX Strategy & Transformation. Above all else, I relish the opportunity to connect customer experience with disruptive design and outstanding delivery.

Laura Mullaney

Having worked in Financial Services for over 10 years, I’ve always been most passionate about understanding and delivering exceptional customer experiences. Working with the team across our Insurance Distribution and Outsourcing division, I’m now focussed on delivery of new and exciting propositions, leveraging the best talent and technology to benefit our partners and customers.

Neil Kelley

Neil is an Operations and Process professional with over 15 years experience in the financial industry supporting teams in getting to the right outcomes for customers. In his current role, Neil is responsible for looking at new innovative ways through technology and process design to support customers when they need it most. Neil is passionate about making sure people have the right tools and solutions available to them to allow them to make a difference for customers and the experience they have with organisations.

Olga Potaptseva

Olga is a Founding Director of European Customer Consultancy, supporting major brands across the globe in their customer-focussed business transformation. With a strong research and insight background she helps clients to ensure understanding of their customer needs is used effectively to fuel value creation and growth. Olga is experienced in leading projects in the UK, Europe, Middle East, Far East and Russia, often pioneering CX adoption in new markets.

Paul Carter

Paul is the Founder & Managing Director of CMR, a boutique international recruitment agency which specialises in mid-executive level roles in Customer Management that offer permanent and interim contract solutions – they are leaders of talent acquisition in AI, Contact Centres & CX, which includes Customer Operations/Contact Centres, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Customer Experience (CX) & Insight, BPO, Change & Transformation.

CMR currently employ 20 consultants internationally and are now on a mission to be the leading and largest agency in this sector across Europe. They recently opened another office in Barcelona which is part of our international growth strategy to tailor a global talent solution to larger brands whereby we can trade locally and continue to build our network within local markets…. We're also doing a lot of work in The Netherlands & Germany and plan to have another subsidiary business open by the end of the summer 2019 in Utrecht.

Peter Hocknell

Co-founder of Outwith that helps businesses and customers grow mutually. Client portfolio includes giffgaff, UPS, Samsung, BP, Microsoft, Camelot and Virgin. Previously co-led Mulberry Consulting to become largest international customer experience consultancy (through to its 2015 sale). Started career leading international research for Unilever at WPP and Procter & Gamble at TNS. Became a lead customer strategist at PA Consulting, delivering performance improvements across EMEA, North America and SE Asia. Held senior executive CX positions at Nationwide and First Utility.

Sara Gorman

Sara is a Director of Portfolio at Liberty Global an international Telecommunications and Entertainment organisation and the parent company of Virgin Media. Sara has over 25 years’ experience of developing & implementing transformation strategies and leading business change. As a customer experience professional, Sara has worked across a variety of businesses within both public and private sectors. Sara is currently responsible for leading the ‘agile’ delivery of the Global Programme portfolio for digital customer journeys, creating a ‘best in class’ customer experience.

Sarah Hart

Sarah Hart is the Customer Experience Program Director at FinancialForce and joined the business in 2018 to drive a program of operational transformation designed to deliver improvements to the Customer Experience across the lifecycle. Sarah is passionate about driving value for our customers and ensuring that they have the best experience with our Products and Services. Sarah comes from a background strategy development and transformation program management across the Financial Services sector.

Sharif-Paul Anton

Sharif-Paul has 19 years of experience in Customer Support and Outsourcing. This gained across numerous senior roles leading operations at one of the main industry outsource providers, then furthermore within his current 6 year tenure at Samsung Electronics. He has worked with a number of leading well-known brands, onshore and offshore, across numerous verticals including Travel, Banking, Gaming, Retail and Consumer Electronics. With a passion for innovation he is constantly focussed on evolving opportunities to enhance and deliver world class customer experiences.

Simon Kitchen

Simon has extensive experience implementing and servicing CX programmes for financial service clients.

Simon has worked across a wide range of market research methodologies and markets in the financial services world over the last 10 years.

Kantar is a recognised leader in the provision of full service CX programmes. With a unique focus on navigating and activating the moments that matter and avoiding those that don’t they are adept at driving effect implementation, engagement, adoption and activation with a monetised approach that drives business growth.

Stephen Hewett

Stephen is a Fellow of the Institute of Consulting & Certified Customer Experience Professional, working with many household names he has experience in a wide variety of industry sectors. Stephen is a founder of iCustomer ltd and creator of the NetCNS metric.

•A customer business strategist, Speaker & Columnist

•A master of the science of first principles and simplicity

•Non-Exec, Board advisor to a number of companies.

•Author of The Customer Centric You, People Centricity & Customers Are the Agenda

Vicky Smith

Vicky is co-founder of lens, a customer consultancy dedicated to helping clients drive customer-led change. Vicky’s career started out in qualitative research before specialising in customer experience and journey design. Prior to setting up lens, Vicky led Experience Design within one of the leading global consultancies. At lens, Vicky works across a range of sectors with brands such as Shop Direct, PensionBee, Simply Business and Leeds Building Society. Vicky supports clients to put their customers at the forefront of business decisions through development of customer experience strategies, adoption of customer journey and experience design approaches, with a focus on connecting insight.

Waqas Piracha

Waqas joined Bupa Arabia in 2011 as Business Manager of Pre-Authorization and later assumed the role of Head – Pre-Authorization & Customer Service Operations and Service Excellence. In 2015, Waqas lead the project of establishing Hospital Service Operations to manage customer experience E2E.

Implemented Point of Care strategy to drive CX at Point of Care by mapping Customer Journey Touch Points in the hospitals. Implemented the 6 CX Pillars across the Customer Journey Map by keeping Customer in the centre of Heart.

Prior joining Bupa, Waqas worked with Unilever Arabia for 14 Years and worked across various functions i.e. Commercial Finance, Sales Operations, Supply Chain & Distributor Management. Waqas was managing Customer Service Operations and Excellence during the last 5 years of his tenure with Unilever for GCC region.

Ann-Marie Khan

After graduating from a Hotel & Catering management programme, Ann-Marie worked in privately owned boutique hotels and large global brand hotels.

Around 18 years ago Ann-Marie moved into the property sector managing office and residential space. Leading front-line teams delivering for customers day to day provided great insight into what makes a difference for customers.

Most recently Ann-Marie has taken the role of Customer Experience Director at Landsec, the largest commercial property development and investment company in the UK.

Anne Sheedy

Anne has spent over 25 years, designing, delivering and transforming the customer experience in a number of different organisations. Her experience has included working at director level with responsibility for both B2B and B2C customer experience. Throughout her career her passion has been to work on both top-down strategies to improve customer experience and to lead expert customer-facing teams, educating, empowering and encouraging them to excel in customer experience.

Anne is also a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and Chartered Manager.

Ben Llewellyn

In his role as Global Head of Customer Experience at Ipsos, Ben is responsible for making sure that Ipsos clients are delivered the latest thinking and technology in the Customer Experience space from over 1400 Ipsos Customer Experience professionals. He has extensive experience across multiple geographies and industry sectors focusing on helping clients ensure that a better Customer Experience will drive improved business results. With clients in over 60 markets he has significant insight as to what constitutes best-in-class Customer Experience programs and how they are best embedded through the organisation.

Brendan Dykes

Brendan has spent over 30 years in customer experience delivery roles, both business and technical. He has worked in front-line customer service delivery and designed and implemented customer experience systems in both the Power and Telecommunications industries. At Genesys, Brendan has worked with customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to help them to design better customer experience solutions. He’s passionate about how well-designed AI and machine learning will deliver better customer and employee experiences.

Brian Shuttleworth

Brian is a practitioner who moved into recruitment after working as a consultant within the Ember Group. He is a seasoned contact centre professional with 19 years’ experience of providing operational and strategic reviews, project management, process improvement, performance analysis and team leadership. He’s worked with a number of UK organisations including The Post Office and Birmingham City Council. Using his practitioner knowledge, he recruits senior roles aligned to Ember’s specialities in CX management consultancy, training, analytics, Customer Engagement and Digital Transformation.

Caitlin Jones

Caitlin has 8 years’ experience working to improve customer experience for her clients across contact centres and product innovation teams. Most recently she has been leading the implementation of an improved product application experience delivered using a new digital platform for a UK building society. Caitlin champions the use of service design across projects ranging from concept innovation to customer service operations. She’s passionate about developing inclusive experiences and believes this, alongside a large dose of empathy, is crucial in today’s society.

Caroline King

Caroline is an Operations expert with over 20 years’ experience of leading large scale customer support centres, delivering solutions across the end to end customer journey. Passionate about delivering exceptional service to customers, Caroline has led a transformation programme at Ageas, which has the aim of ‘making insurance easy’ for customers, by helping and empowering people to think differently about how they support customers and as a result, revolutionizing the service they provide. Through this work, the Ageas Sales & Service team have seen significant uplifts in NPS/NES scores, as well as unprecedented improvements in employee engagement.

Caroline Pain

Caroline is Senior Vice President, Customer Proposition, at Aetna, a CVS Health company. Her background and passion is in the intersection between analytics and customer insight, and the design and delivery of digital services and propositions that solve real customer problems. Before Aetna, Caroline was Client Services Director for a leading affiliate network, and also, amongst other roles, led the customer experience transformation programme at Aviva UK. Recent professional success includes the launch of a progressive genetics proposition, Aetna DNA.

Chris Chipperfield

Chris is Head of Customer Service Acceleration for HSBC UK, focused on accelerating the delivery of programmes and initiatives which will deliver the best possible experience for customers. He has worked in Financial Services for nearly 20 years, having undertaken a wide range of frontline retail banking roles, as well as leading the delivery of numerous Change programmes across the UK.

Chris Little

Chris runs a specialist insight agency which helps clients build customer value, innovate and grow.

Customer Thinking is a frame of mind, it’s about organising so that you develop a deep understanding of what makes customers tick and using that empathy to drive customer centricity and experience.

Chris has a marketing and CX background in financial services, telecom and retail. In addition to consultancy he occupies NED and interim CMO roles in digital start-ups.

Claire Hill

Claire joined Studio Retail Ltd in January 2018 as Customer Experience Director, driving the CX roadmap as well as taking responsibility for the UK and Philippines customer service operations with outsourced services across the globe. Recent benchmarks have demonstrated a 10% year on year improvement in Studio’s net promoter score.

Previous to this role, Claire spent 2 years with boohoo.com as Customer Service Director, accountable for a global, multi-lingual customer service operation, launching Customer Services digital platforms for boohoo, Pretty Little Thing and Nasty Gal. She previously held the role of Director of Customer Services for JD Williams, a FTSE 250 multi-channel retailer with group revenue in excess of £800m.

With over 20 years’ experience in customer service, Claire has delivered transformational projects with significant impact on employees and customers. Her career extends across in-house and outsourced customer service and financial service operations across Afro-Eurasia and the USA.

Damian Burkhill

A passionate, experienced and accomplished Client Director and Contact Centre professional with a proven track record of building exceptional client relationships, account management, contact centre delivery and building customer experience solutions.

With over 25 years in the contact centre industry has held many key and senior roles within account management, client relationship management, operational delivery and operational solution design across multiple sectors. Experienced in set up and management of multi-site accounts, in different geographies, including UK, Philippines, and South Africa.

Debbie Ashton

Debbie Ashton is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Customer Experience and a Founder of FinancialForce. Debbie has been instrumental in the growth and ongoing success of the FinancialForce business. In her current role, Debbie’s mission is to work with our customers to understand their journey, ensure they maximize the value they derive from our solutions and enhance the overall customer experience.

Emily Leadbetter

Emily has worked for National Grid PLC for almost ten years. During this time, she has undertaken a variety of roles working with customers and stakeholders, including on complex topics such as Electricity Market Reform, and the Future Of Gas. She now leads the Customer & Stakeholder team in the National Grid System Operator, working at the heart of the energy industry, seeking to transform the customer experience. Emily has previous experience in automotive, policing and business process outsourcing sectors.

Guy Masters

Guy has been recruiting into the Contact Centre industry for over 20 years. Formed in 2003, Cactus Search are a specialist Contact Centre recruitment business who recruit Executive, Management and Leadership roles in addition to running large scale volume resourcing solutions across the UK and abroad. Partnering small and large organisations alike, the team at Cactus Search have a superb record of success.

Ijeoma Okeke

Ijeoma is the Chief Customer Experience Officer at SV Gaming (trading as Betking), a disruptor in the Gaming industry in Nigeria.

Ijeoma has experience spanning across various sectors in building operationally efficient and high-performance contact centre. A thought leader on Customer Experience and a keynote conference speaker in Africa.

James Eyre

James is an experienced B2B marketing professional with twenty years' experience in a variety of blue-chip organisations. At Teleperformance, the worldwide leader in outsourced omnichannel customer experience management, James is responsible for their UK marketing strategy and execution.

He has a background in delivering integrated marketing programmes, with significant focus in BPO, customer experience, technology, in sectors such as retail, financial services, travel, logistics, utilities, government and telco.

Jonathan Mindell

Jonathan has had a career-long focus on improving customer engagement, with sector experience spanning financial & business services, healthcare, employee benefits and travel. He has worked for some of the world’s best regarded service organisations including Marks & Spencer, Prudential, Bupa, Wyndham Worldwide and Citibank and, most recently, Mercer, the global human resources consultancy where he was Senior Partner.

Co-founder of iCustomer, Jonathan is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and is using his experience to help organisations Define, Structure and Measure what their customers’ Need and Want from them.

Julie Stephens

Julie began her career in the Royal Mail group with 8 years in marketing, before taking this deep and diverse customer experience into HR using similar techniques to improve employee engagement and through this customer experience across the Post Office, Royal Mail and Parcelforce.

In moving to Bupa, beginning in Bupa Care Homes before joining Bupa Dental Care in 2018, Julie delivers transformational change through continuing to focus on the delivery of business results through employee and customer experience, Julie is commercially astute with high positive impact, her energy and enthusiasm drive ambitious outcomes in hard to reach areas through visionary people leadership.

Katie Broadbent

Katie advises on customer experience; focusing on using human-centric design to ensure her clients are taking a ‘North Star’ approach to customer experience to deliver real value to the end customer. She believes empathy by all stakeholders forms the basis of good design.

Most recently, Katie has tackled the problem of delivering regulatory compliance for a UK Building Society, using a design thinking approach and agile practices to optimise the end-to-end customer experience.

Katie May

Over the last nine years, Katie has placed talented individuals into the Construction, Travel and Financial Services sectors. Katie now heads up CMR’s RPO offering which provides end to end managed solutions across a range of Customer Contact functions such as: Complaints, Remediation, Operational Change and Multilingual Contact Centre Advisors. Katie consistently delivers high calibre individuals and teams and is committed to delivering a best in class service for both her Candidates and Clients.

Lisa Akeroyd

Lisa has an infectious passion for customer excitement with over 20 years’ experience of putting the customer at the heart of everything across a number of different industries.

A self-proclaimed ‘Travel Passionista’, Lisa has gained a wealth of diverse experience living in the USA, Thailand, France, Singapore, Germany, Australia, Saudi Arabia and the UK.

Lisa is now Managing Director of Growth at Sixt where she is responsible for accelerating the company’s already rapid pace of expansion and is focused on making the customer the hero of Sixt’s story.

Louise Newman

I am experienced in managing and implementing change with over 20 years of working in a variety of industries, including Banking, Insurance and Manufacturing. I am responsible for introducing large scale change within the contact centre environment to benefit our internal and external customer’s journey. With a passion for enhancing the customer experience, my focus is to ensure that I understand how our customers feel and more importantly, understand what needs to be done to improve this.

Lynzi Harrison

Lynzi has over 20 years’ experience in the financial services industry leading multi-disciplined teams in different countries. Until recently Lynzi was at Old Mutual Wealth as Operations Director where her team won multiple industry awards for Customer Experience and Customer Service. Lynzi has a passion and a drive for delivering the best Customer Experience possible.

Lynzi is proud to say that she has recently moved to LV= as Customer Experience Director. LV= is a business that is passionate about the Customer, and places the Customer Experience at the heart of its decision making.

Manoj Mistry

Manoj has worked in the CX industry for over 25 years with some of the world’s most well known brands. As founder and Director of Remis, he specialises in CX Strategy, Contact Centre Transformation, CX Technology and Outsourcing Strategy. He has advised clients in many verticals as well as consulted with some of the world’s most well known delivery and strategy consulting firms. Remis is currently leading the design of one of the UK’s largest public sector transformation programs.

Miles C. Thomas

Miles leads on customer service and experience for the International Baccalaureate supporting over 5000 schools across 150 countries, he has developed their service and experience strategy and VOC approaches while building a proactive engagement style customer service.

Miles is a certified CX professional and believes in the importance of inspiring leadership and employee experience as a foundation to great customer experiences. His experience in technology, service and experience combined with a degree in Psychology has provided a unique lens in humanizing the customer experience.

The IB aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

Niranjalee Rajaratne

Niranjalee Rajaratne is the Head of Quality Assurance and Delivery at Third Bridge Group Limited a leading independent financial research company. Niranjalee is a software quality assurance and delivery process optimization strategist and leader with over 13 years’ experience of successfully delivering enterprise-scale high-quality software through structured QA and delivery practices in top quality organisations In the capital/financial markets, financial research, publishing, e-commerce and telecommunication industries. She is a frequent conference speaker and a member of the judging panel for the European Software Testing Awards since 2017.

Patricia John

Patricia has worked as a Director developing and delivering customer service operations transformation and building better customer experiences across a variety of businesses and industries and, has more than 40 years’ experience in this arena. Companies that Patricia has worked for include Marks & Spencer, The AA, Prudential and The Open University.

Patricia has a passion for delivering the best experiences for her customers and also for her teams.

Paul Kavanagh

Paul has spent his career using insight to help brands engage with their customers better and to drive business growth. At Beehive Research his passion for delivering insight that has the power to transform and deliver a return on investment has become the philosophy of the company.

His expertise lies in the rare combination of understanding the strategic use of insight; being a creative thinker to solve business problems; and, having an eye for detail to ensure implementation and delivery meet business objectives.

Pavitra Bhaskar

Pavitra Bhaskar is Global Head of Client Services at INTL FCStone, managing Global Payments client.

With 14 years of experience in business process transformation, building global client management teams and driving innovation towards best-in-class solutions, she has worked in notable companies such as Thomson Reuters, IHS Markit and London Stock Exchange.

As a collaborative leader, she has demonstrated her ability to identify and adapt global teams to the evolving business environment, whilst effectively managing risk and ensuring high quality service.

Pete Evia-Rhodes

Pete is Director of Customer Value for The Times & The Sunday Times. He's responsible for all aspects of Customer Experience and management of 500,000+ subscribers. Over the last three years they've consistently delivered double digit growth through individualised customer segmentation and record retention. His team manages the programmatic customer lifecycle, including award winning A.I content recommendations, Times+ and the Operations. Pete started his working life at BT with highlights including supporting the launch of BT Sport and BT Consumer's period of rapid growth.

Pramod Tiwari

Pramod is part of a rapidly growing Cognizant Consulting team working as a Digital Transformation expert delivering complex business transformation programmes across leading Energy and Utility clients in UK and Europe. With over 23+ years of experience Pramod helps clients set strategies in motion that unify business and digital strategies, generate growth and enable competitive advantage. Programmes delivered by Pramod have not only helped business to achieve the stated objective but also delivered industry recognitions through multiple industry awards.

Rachel Adlard

Rachel Adlard leads the Programme Management Office for the Zebra Technologies’ Professional Services Business Unit. Rachel’s team is responsible for launching new service offerings as well as defining the methodologies and tools for delivering successful customer projects across the globe.

Rachel has worked in the Technology and Telecoms Sector for the duration of her career and has held a diverse set of leadership positions including roles in product quality, software development, new product deployment, customer advocacy and programme management.

Ruth Kinsella

Ruth has worked in the public/private services industry for over 20 years working in a variety of roles including Account Director of a £40m Highways and Design contract. Ruth’s career has steered her towards becoming a Customer Experience professional in an industry which has typically focused on commercial outcomes rather than providing a service to end-users. As co-founder of Co-Creation Partnership, embedding successful customer and collaboration strategies in to service industries is her single-minded focus

Sabrina Gross

Sabrina is the Customer Success Director at Vizolution. Vizolution is a market-leading customer experience technology company that helps enterprises across Financial Services, Telecoms and Utilities streamline complex customer journeys into effortless experiences.

In her role, Sabrina leads a team that engages with the customer from pre-sale stages through to BAU to ensure they are able to maximise the full value of the solution.

Sabrina has a background in customer support, quality assurance training and consulting for organisations in Europe, North America and APAC.

Samantha Statham

Sam has worked in the Tool & Plant Hire Industry for nearly 13 years and now focuses full time on effectively managing strategic as well as ‘hands on’ support, by championing, and improving the customer experience. By collecting and analysing valuable customer insight, Sam has enabled the business to have a deeper understanding of the customer, and as an effective communicator, Sam has been able to share this valuable insight across the business. Recently Sam has designed and implemented a high level CX programme, to enable long term focus of activities to help achieve a customer centric culture.

Sarah Simpson

Sarah is a customer experience expert who has used her infectious passion for creating great experiences to build customer-centric cultures within travel and leisure businesses over the past 16 years. She believes that every company should strive to create a world-class customer experience. Working within Customer Service and Experience roles, she has helped brands better understand their customers, identified priorities for improvement and implemented change. She’s contributed to the success of well-known brands such as National Express, First Group and Jet2.com. She is currently leading the Customer Experience team at Sky Betting and Gaming. The work of her teams has been recognised by industry accolades on many occasions from the National Customer Service Awards to Which?

Steve Elvins

Steve has worked in customer facing leadership roles for over 20 years. Working in both B2C and B2B environments he has helped businesses improve their customer relationships in over 20 countries. An expert in Customer Service transformations he is passionate about creating company wide cultures that put customer experience at the heart of all activities and that deliver first-class service at all touch points.

Stuart Bishop

As Director of Service at leading technology provider CDL, Stuart has extensive experience in the UK insurance and tech spaces. With a passion for developing people and building high performing teams, he believes that a customer-centric culture is central to organisational success. A Companion member of the Institute of Customer Service and former judge of the National Customer Service Awards, Stuart is excited to hear the success stories from this year’s entrants.

Stuart Miller

Stuart joined the board of Newcastle Building Society as Customer Director in 2017. He is an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers and holds the Customer Experience Professionals Association qualification for senior business leaders.

Stuart has more than three decades' customer service experience in the financial services sector, including roles with Virgin Money, RBS International, and NatWest. He is responsible for ensuring Newcastle Building Society members receive an outstanding experience accords all its channels and back office functions.

Sue Amies-King

Sue Amies-King is a non-executive director for Hastings Insurance Services Ltd and an independent consultant advising on business transformation, operational excellence and customer management. Sue has worked at CEO and Board level across a range of sectors spanning retail, insurance, energy and water. Sue has deep functional expertise in sales, marketing and customer operations, having led large customer facing teams in the retail and service sector for over 25 years.

Tracey Price

As a seasoned Head of Customer Insight & Customer Experience I’ve got a wealth of experience from, retail and call centre environments to housing, for some of the UK's most well-known brands. I’m proud to have delivered some dynamic experiences and solutions. I thrive channelling insights and reporting and bringing the voice of the customer to life, looking for new and innovative ways to improve the customer journey for the mutual benefit of both the customer and business.

Victoria Orr

Victoria has a wealth of global experience directing large scale programs and transformational projects across diverse organizations, including Marriott and Amazon. She is passionate about people and customers and believes that a positive employee experience is absolutely integral to delivering world-class customer experience.

At Parkdean Resorts (a UK holiday company with 67 award winning parks), Victoria is responsible for product innovation and transforming the customer journey through exceptional service delivery and cutting edge technology.

Yvan Goupil

I am the Head of Customer and Marketing Insight at CYBG plc, a UK-based commercial bank made up of four unique brands: Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank, B and Virgin Money. My role spans across CX insight, brand insight and marketing analytics.

Before CYBG, I held a variety of insights and marketing strategy positions at top blue chip Fast Moving Consumer Goods companies, e.g. the Coca-Cola Company, Danone or PepsiCo.

Besides customer experience management, I have a keen interest in behavioural economics and decision science.

Yvette Wise

Yvette comes with masses of energy, enthusiasm and over 20 years of sales and service operational experience. She has a strong background in coaching and performance management, has managed multi-functional contact centre and field based sales teams and uses this experience when designing performance improvement strategies. Yvette has delivered profitable and sustained results across industry and organisation, with clients including TSB, IBM, AXA, Marks and Spencer, TUI and Nationwide. Yvette has previously judged at the TJ Awards.