Global Speakers

Robert Sullivan is a well-respected international figure in the world of business and entrepreneurship. He is a respected academic having published in excess of 30 publications and having worked with a number of International Business Schools.  With a passion for Excellence, Quality Management and Customer Care he is ideally placed to introduce our exciting Conference.

Robert is a Senior Assessor with HM Cabinet Office for the Customer Service Excellence award and visits around 3 organisations weekly to audit and assess their customer insight and satisfaction.  With this knowledge and expertise, he also has a detailed understanding of the role of technology, the Internet and Social Media in Customer Acquisition and Retention.

He holds an MA in Economics and Economic History from the University of Glasgow and an MBA from Keele University.  He is also a Business Mentor with Virgin Group and Business Mentoring Scotland as well as developing and delivering training course internationally.

Chris Brindley is a prominent UK Business Leader and until recently was MD of Metro Bank, which has changed the face of retail banking in the UK. He is a leading authority on Customer Experience, Leading Teams, Employee Engagement, Performance Management and Sales Management particularly within organizations where change is on the agenda.

Chris has now burst on to the speaker market as a fresh, dynamic, challenging and highly credible speaker. His vast experience and insight of changing cultures within large organizations, private, public and charity, sets him aside from others. He is unique, in that he is a master storyteller. His stories of success, outstanding performance and legacy, stimulate audiences into thinking differently about the road ahead.

He also provides powerful, yet simple tools to create confidence and motivation for audiences to take immediate action with long lasting benefits.

Guy has focused on social customer care since 2008, when he set it up at The Carphone Warehouse. At that time he was seen as one of the early pioneers of social customer care in the UK. While social did not set out to disrupt the traditional service model, there is no doubt that it has been catalytic in forcing organizations to re-assess, re-imagine, and ultimately re-invent, not only the way they engage with their customers, but also how they organize themselves internally. It is how organizations are adapting at speed to this change that has fascinated him over the last few years.

As the Social Customer Care Lead at IBM, Guy helps organizations navigate through their own social journeys. He has been described as one of the world’s leading thinkers on social customer care, and to this end he does as much as he can to share the insights he has learnt through running workshops in the Middle East and South East Asia, writing about it, managing a community on it, tweeting about it, and speaking about it.

Alastair leads the delivery of customer experience in 20 Waitrose branches.  The area leads Waitrose in customer engagement and Alastair has influenced the company’s thinking on what it takes to attract customer loyalty.

Born and raised on a dairy farm in Shropshire, a farm managed for four years in the late 90s, Alastair has also served in the Army as an Infantry Officer.  After joining John Lewis Department Stores in 2001, Alastair worked in customer facing roles in Cheadle, Liverpool and Watford.  He has run two Waitrose branches and  still manages the Beaconsfield branch which won the company’s own customer service award in 2014.

Alastair is an NLP practitioner and executive coach.  Based on this experience as well as his years of retailing, he believes that strong customer loyalty is only generated with human interaction. “An understanding of customer emotions and the ability to lead behavior change are critical to success.”

Sandra Thompson is on a mission to create happier customers because these in turn make a happier workforce. She is the founding director of Exceed all Expectations, a management consultancy that helps businesses improve the experiences they deliver.

When she’s not attempting an Everest Base Camp ascent or borrowing a dog to take for a walk, Sandra and her team are mixing customer insight with business strategy and operational excellence for Arsenal FC, Vodafone, Aldermore Bank, the Open University and Network Rail, to name a few.

Lynsey has been described as ‘Frighteningly Knowledgeable’ and ‘the best social media trainer ever’ by some of the world’s leading brands.

With over 10 years experience, Lynsey and her team specialize in providing social media, digital marketing training and consultancy to all sizes of businesses, including household names such as The United Nations, The Metropolitan Police and Barclays. Lynsey is regularly called upon for industry insights and comment by the media including CNBC, The Guardian, BBC News & Bloomberg. She also works alongside other key influencers as part of the Social Media Council at the DMA where she is Vice Chairperson.

Throughout her career, Alex has enjoyed hearing and representing the voice of the customer – as expressed through data, research and service channels. With a career in marketing encompassing the high value, low volume products of London Business School and the high volume and fast growth of London’s start up scene, Alex is consistently fascinated by the aspirations and motivations of her customers.

As Customer Insight Director at Getty Images, Alex helps everyone in marketing to generate and publicize insights from their channels. Her “built to grow” approach unites the whole team around the customer and their needs, democratizing the task of customer insight and amplifying the results of the marketing teams.

Dan Moross is Director of Customer Experience at moo.com – an online print provider, making it simple for companies of all sizes to create beautiful, expertly crafted business stationery and promotional materials that’ll help start conversations, open doors and strengthen relationships. Since joining MOO as their first customer service agent, Dan has built a highly engaged team of over 70 support specialists across two locations (London and Rhode Island, USA).

Dan’s principal responsibility is to ensure customers are delighted with their entire MOO experience – from creating their personalized products online through to the final package they receive. Armed with the MOO Promise, which is aligned with the company’s overarching brand values, it’s clear that MOO understands how important it is to have a customer focused team that sits at the heart of the company, committed to helping customers along their journey.

“We’d like customers to be satisfied of course, but we’d prefer it if they were absolutely thrilled with our products and services. We’ll move heaven and earth to make sure customers get exactly what they want, when they want it – or their money back” –  The MOO Promise

Morris Pentel is a Customer Experience and Contact Strategy Designer and runs one of the most respected private Customer Experience and Contact Strategy consulting businesses in the world. Based in the UK, he has a track record for successful work for some of the largest institutions and government organisations all over the world. He has delivered workshops over the last 18 months in 11 countries and his designs influencing billions of the world’s Customer Experiences.

Tania Seif is a digital marketing expert with over 10 years of experience in digital strategy and application.

Currently on sabbatical and studying psychology at the University of London, Tania was most recently the Head of Social Marketing for the sports and gambling brand Coral; leading the team named by The Drum as In-House Team of the Year 2015 at the Social Buzz Awards.

During her time at Coral, Tania implemented a successful social media customer service and communications strategy that has regularly featured in the marketing and consumer press. She is also a well-known speaker at conferences and events in the UK and Europe.

Sabrina Rodriguez started her career in the Telco industry in 2011 as part of the European Leadership Programme at Telefonica, working within the Sales & Service department for O2. It was in this role that Sabrina began her journey into Social Media when she built a bespoke internal social community to bring the O2 Guru communities together in one virtual social space.

Sabrina then went on to lead the Online & Social Strategy for the Vivo Guru program in Brazil, following which she spent a year and a half managing the international accounts of Telefonica Digital’s start up “Standing On Giants”, an agency borne out of giffgaff, which specializes in providing online forums for brands looking to become more digital & customer-centric.

In 2014, Sabrina joined Travelex as their Global Social Media Manager with the view to helping drive the digital transformation of the business and ultimately building more meaningful relationships with their customers. Sabrina is also a member of #IPASocialWorks, an initiative to identify good practice in social media effectiveness and measurement, as well as the New Entrepreneurs Foundation (Class of 2015) and the Conversocial Customer Advisory Board.

Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. She is one of thirteen WIRED 2015 Innovation Fellows; has given TEDx and Royal Institution lectures, and her research and biography were featured on the BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific.

She uses conversation analysis to understand how talk works – from first dates to police interrogations. Outside the university, she runs workshops with mediators, doctors, salespeople, police and other professionals using her research-based communication training method called the “Conversation Analytic Role-play Method”.

Martin is a customer engagement and post silo business strategist. He is also an author, international keynote speaker and chair.  Working under his own brand, Brainfood Consulting, he delivers a range of master classes and interventions.

Current topics include empowered service cultures, omni-channel design, automation and self service, proactive service models, mobile and social customer service.  All are targeted at delivering disruptive service innovation.

Martin is also a founding member of Beyond Silos – a group of specialist practitioners offering design and delivery service for embedding customer hubs – next generation customer engagement.

As Chief Digital Technologist at Rackspace, Mike enables customers to navigate the complex world of digital technology partners, cloud platforms and industry trends. With an unrivalled enthusiasm, he helps businesses realise their digital potential and become more successful online. With a background in ecommerce architecture, he brings a strong focus on customer experience, performance and measurable success criteria.

As an advocate of all things digital, you might catch Mike speaking at conferences, networking events or executive briefings. Mike has over 18 years of IT strategy experience, he blogs at thehostinginsider.net and tweets about industry related topics as @hosting_mike.