CX Experts We Love
Why do we love whom we love? It’s a question for the ages, unanswerable by poets, philosophers or songwriters. And yet, for some people, there are so many reasons why we love them. They make our lives better, share their expertise, uplift our spirits, and show profound generosity. This is a Valentine to those people, and more specifically those people who work in CX.
These authors, speakers, thought-leaders and dedicated customer experience professionals have all helped contribute to the widespread adoption of CX, not just as a strategy, but as a higher goal. They’re here, tirelessly working in every industry to make people’s lives just a bit easier, and a lot more joyful.
These are the CX experts we love, and we are happy to introduce you to them all.
If you’re on this list and you’d like for us to update your details, please send us a note.
Amy Etheridge
Why we love Amy: She’s head of Customer Advocacy at MindTouch. She was tapped to look after the customer experience as a whole as company growth accelerated. Her She is a customer journey expert whose analysis of customer feedback at key touchpoints has led to product and service enhancements that have delighted customers.
Angus Yang
Why we love Angus: He’s the Customer Experience Manager at Sendoso and prides himself in “helping people connect the old fashion way.” His responsibilities change on any given day but you’ll usually find him deep in conversation with a client, answering questions in the support queue, helping explain a new product feature they released, or onboarding clients for success. He’s a big believer in building relationships and is proud dad of Owen the corgi.
Annette Franz
Why we love Annette: She’s the Founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc. She has experience in both helping companies understand their employees and customers and identifying what drives retention, satisfaction, engagement, and the overall experience – so that, together, they can design a better experience for all constituents. She co-hosts the weekly #CXChat on Twitter, serves as an executive officer on the Board of Directors of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), mentors other professionals in this field to help them advance their careers, and is a speaker and an avid writer.
Augie Ray
Why we love Augie: He’s the Sr. Director Analyst: Senior research analyst & executive advisor on Customer Experience at Gartner. He has had a rewarding career as both a thought and people leader. He has implemented successful CX, VoC, social media and marketing programs and led highly-engaged teams, both co-located and remote around the globe. People refer to him as an iconoclast, skeptic, and change agent for his desire to bypass hype, solve business issues, and exploit customer opportunities with speed, creativity, and collaboration. Plus, his Twitter feed!
Blake Morgan
Why we love Blake: She’s a self-described “customer experience futurist”, keynote speaker, author of More Is More: How the Best Companies Go Farther and Work Harder to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences, and host of The Modern Customer Podcast. She’s also a contributor to Forbes, the Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres Magazine.
Clare Muscutt
Why we love Clare: She’s a digital nomad, keynote speaker, Founder of CMXperience, and shares her personal thoughts and experiences on The CX Nomad. Having held a number of senior CX leadership roles in Marketing and Retail, across a number of sectors, working for and with some of the UK’s best known brands, Clare has finely tuned her expertise to educate and engage internal teams to design and deliver industry leading services, and create innovative solutions that deliver the desired results for her clients at pace.
Colin Shaw
Why we love Colin: He’s a keynote speaker, best-selling author of several books such as The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives For Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level, the CEO of Beyond Philosophy, and Co-Host of The Intuitive Customer Podcast. Also, LinkedIn has recognized him as one of the world’s Top 150 Business Influencers.
David Yin
Why we love David: He’s VP of Customer Insights at Ancestry.com. A seasoned CX pro, David was with the Global Consumer Insights team at Clorox and Head of Global Research and Brand Strategy at Fitbit before joining the venerable family history and genomics company. He took a crawl, walk, run approach to building out his function at Ancestry, delivering early wins that built momentum and respect for the Voice of the Customer across the company.
Ellie Wu
Why we love Ellie: She’s a speaker, writer, and Senior Director of Customer Success at SAP Concur. Through hyper-growth SaaS companies, Ellie developed a fascination with the customer. Realizing the impact and the translated value for an organization, she created PictureCS (CliffsNotes for Customer Success Best Practices). She counsels leaders and teams responsible for customer outcomes by designing stronger organizations and guide cross-functional teams to leverage mutually beneficial opportunities with an advanced understanding of the customer journey, sales, product marketing, and operations.
Guneet Singh
Why we love Guneet: He’s Director of Customer Experience & Advocacy at Docusign where he leads the company’s NPS, customer advocacy, customer labs & customer research. He uses state-of-the-art technology to retrieve and analyze customer data to boost the likelihood of delivering meaningful improvement in customer experience. Sharing this data is key to garnering support for change, he says: “There are journey points that need to be addressed. But if you don’t have hard facts attached to them … then your management team will [ignore these points].”
Jeanne Bliss
Why we love Jeanne: She’s a speaker, best-selling author, most notably for Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers, a coach for Chief Customer Officers, host of the podcast The Human Duct Tape Show, and frequently writes articles on her site, Customer Bliss. And we probably haven’t even got everything covered.
Jeannie Walters
Why we love Jeannie: She’s a TEDx speaker, CEO and Chief Customer Experience Investigator at 360 Connext, trainer, workshop leader, consultant, and podcaster. Her specialty is connecting with audiences to help them emotionally connect with those they serve. It’s not as easy as we think and our brains work against us! Using humor, stories and her experience as a customer experience consultant, she uncovers what’s stopping your organization or association from really delivering great experiences.
Jessica Pfeifer
Why we love Jessica: We might be biased because she was Chief Customer Officer at Wootric, but she’d make our list even if she wasn’t. At Pearl-Plaza, Jessica works with our phenomenal team to build a modern approach to enterprise customer feedback management. She guides our mid-market and enterprise customers by helping to solve complex problems and execute Voice of Customer strategy using machine learning. Her expert, consultative approach to customer experience gives her customers a competitive edge in the CX space.
Joey Coleman
Why we love Joey: As a keynote speaker, workshop leader, and consultant, Joey helps businesses design creative ways to engage customers – especially in the crucial first 100 days of the customer lifecycle. As a professional speaker who has given thousands of speeches all over the world, he also works with a small number of private coaching clients to develop and hone their speaking skills. His book Never Lose a Customer Again discusses the 8 phases your customer has the potential to travel through as part of their customer journey and the 6 tools you can use during that journey to create remarkable experiences for your customers.
Kia Puhm
Why we love Kia: She’s the Founder and CEO of K!A CX Consulting. She has held chief positions in customer success, services, account management and support at companies such as: Oracle, Eloqua, Day Software (Adobe), Intelex Technologies, and Blueprint Software Systems. Kia has pioneered the art of Customer Experience by leading businesses through the transition to customer-centric organizations. Her methodology provides clients with a disciplined and sustainable approach to increasing customer lifetime value and loyalty. She also holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering.
Maxie Schmidt
Why we love Maxie: She’s a keynote speaker, author, Principal Analyst at Forrester, and has a PhD in Business Management on Customer Care. She helps clients achieve smart profit growth through product and price optimization based on deep customer insights and has managed engagements and projects in a wide range of industries like telecommunication, retail, software, transportation, and high-tech.
Melinda Gonzalez
Why we love Melinda: She’s a Customer Experience Strategist with experience in Customer Success Management, Customer Experience Design, Voice of the Customer, and Customer Retention/Loyalty/Advocacy practices. She spent a decade at Salesforce and is now part of the incredible team at WeWork, bringing the Powered by We vision to life.
Rachel English
Why we love Rachel: She’s the Director of Customer Experience at Zuora. Rachel has built and led high-performing, thought-leading customer-focused teams. Through those experiences, and as a regular customer herself, she has developed a proven philosophy and methodology for creating Customer Success and honing an end-to-end Customer Experience. Rachel believes that companies and their customers are only truly successful together, and she understands the building blocks and the details needed to compound that effect.
Sandra Mathis
Why we love Sandra: She’s the Customer Experience Director and thought leader for Strong-Bridge Envision Consulting. She helps organizations and clients develop customer experience strategies, measurement programming, actioning of insights, and facilitate workshops focused on: customer journey mapping, employee engagement, to enable organizations to move the needle with customer experience adoption for higher customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Sarang Bhatt
Why we love Sarang: Sarang is an Account Executive at Pearl-Plaza. His big heart, quick wit, and eye for process have made him besties with many a customer. “I learn a customer’s goals and what motivates them – why do they want implement a Voice of Customer Program? To reduce churn? Optimize their product or service? Knowing that enables me to anticipate their needs and present them with a plan that will give them success. The real transformative customer experience comes when you can answer the questions they don’t know they have. It’s in that moment that you win a customer for life.” His specialties are NPS, CES, CSAT and text analytics.
Shep Hyken
Why we love Shep: He’s the CAO (Chief Amazement Officer) of Shepard Presentations. He’s also a keynote speaker, Customer Service trainer, and the author of The Convenience Revolution: How to Deliver a Customer Service Experience that Disrupts the Competition and Creates Fierce Loyalty, among other best-selling books. In 2008 Shep was inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame speaker for lifetime achievement in the professional speaking industry.
Steven Van Belleghem
Why we love Steven: He’s a keynote speaker, entrepreneur, author of four best-selling books, one of his most popular being Customers the Day After Tomorrow: How to Attract Customers in a World of AIs, Bots, and Automation. He is also Co-Founder of consultancy firm Nexxworks and the Co-Founder of content creation company Snackbytes. He is an investor in the AI startup Hello Customer and the fast-growing digital agency Intracto.
Sue Duris
Why we love Sue: She’s a speaker, writer, mentor, Director of Marketing at M4 Communications, and co-host of #CXChat, a weekly Twitter chat on customer experience and employee experience. She’s passionate about helping organizations differentiate and grow by coaching them to be customer-centric, advising them on their digital transformation initiatives, and collaborating with them to design omnichannel experiences that engage employees and deliver customer value. She’s also a diversity and inclusion advocate.
Venk Chandran
Why we love Venk: He’s a customer-obsessed Director, Product Management at Salesforce.com who is an evangelist for the use of Customer Effort Score metric at SFDC and in the broader SaaS technology space. Venk uses CES and other customer metrics to monitor and improve the self-service customer experience at Salesforce. Bottomline, customers are his playbook.
