Chris Doell

Chris has an impressive track record of developing successful customer-facing organizations for some globally-recognized brands such as Intuit, Macromedia, Doubleclick, and now Cisco. He also has a passion for building great companies. Over his career, seven of his prior companies have achieved liquidity; including, sportsTALK.com which he founded, served as CEO and ultimately sold to ESPN.

Julie Persofsky

Over the past 15 years, Julie has honed her expertise in helping companies exponentially grow from expansion revenue. Having helped pioneer Customer Success in the early days of Marketing Automation at Eloqua in Toronto. She ran Client Services at a PharmTech startup called PharmaTrust. In 2012 Julie joined Influitive in as employee number seven to run Customer Success and get it to scale at which point Julie created an Account Management team to focus on revenue expansion. She later became the GM of a new product and brought it to market. Now Julie is bringing Customer Success and Sales expertise armed with the Science behind Winning by Design to the Toronto community and Customer Success teams globally. Fun fact: for the past 8 years Julie helped open and grow one of Toronto's top BBQ restaurants.

Gregory Williams

Patrick Bresnan

Perry Monaco

Perry Monaco leads the Customer Success Organisation in North America for the Search and Staffing segment at LinkedIn. His teams work with talent acquisition companies, building social media recruitment strategies while focusing on the end user to manage retention, customer experience, and account growth through customer success planning. Perry was one of the first 4.5 million members of LinkedIn and was previously a recruiter before helping to build the CS practice at LinkedIn. Perry currently resides in the Greater Toronto Area with his wife and three children

Jeff Cann

Mo Cheema

Jessica Cryer

Jessica Cryer is a sharp and experienced Customer Experience consultant who has a passion for helping businesses create, design, build, and execute strategies that will make a tangible difference. Now as the VP, Business and Customer Strategyl Jessica is responsible for managing a Customer P&L and leading a team in identifying, developing, and executing customer and category growth opportunities through the use of relevant and personalized marketing and sales strategies. Jessica also plays an integral role in leading consulting initiatives that reshape customer-centric thinking and management across organizations.

Prior to joining CSPN, Jessica worked at Monitor Deloitte leading strategy projects for major Canadian financial institutions. Her passion for customer experience led her to Idea Couture, where she focused on customer experience innovation and transformation.  Jessica is driven by the opportunity to conceive and build memorable customer and employee experiences, linking disciplines from Strategy, Human Resources, and Service Design to produce desired business outcomes.

Kia Puhm

Kia Puhm is an entrepreneurial business leader with over 22 years of experience building innovative Customer Experience practices that accelerate business growth. Her passion for, and rich experience in this relatively new and evolving field make her a sought after Thought Leader and change expert.

She has extensive experience in building world-­‐class SaaS business practices and processes within rapid-­‐growth environments. She has pioneered the art of Customer Experience and expertly leads corporations through the journey to become truly customer-­‐centric organizations – with astonishing results.

K!A CX’s proprietary methodology provides clients with a disciplined and sustainable approach to increasing customer value and long term loyalty. Kia has a deep understanding of the key challenges faced in making the strategic transition to become a truly customer-­‐focused company – and more importantly she knows the pitfalls to avoid. Her company is a leader in making these transformations happen and offers tools guaranteed to dramatically increase revenue, ramp up retention and smoothly negotiate change as the practice evolves and scales with company growth.

Prior to building her own firm K!A CX, Ms Puhm held chief executive roles in customer success, services, account management and support at companies such as: Oracle, Eloqua, Day Software (Adobe), Intelex Technologies, and Blueprint Software Systems.

In 2005, while working with enterprise content management firm Day Software, Ms. Puhm was named one of Switzerland’s top 50 highest ranking women in business by Swiss publication Basler Zeitung.

She is also a former member of the Canadian National Swim Team, national record-­‐holder in the women’s 200-­‐metre backstroke and world top 10 ranked swimmer.

Kia holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto.

Eraj Siddiqui

Mark Magnusson

Mark has directed the UX vision for top global brands for 15+ years. He’s a recognized trailblazer of customer-centric codesign in order to reimagine product solutions. Mark is persuading business stakeholders to have an empathetic perspective of the broader customer journey and embrace design thinking as a competitive advantage.

Jocelyn Brown

Nick Noel

Nikolai Chowdhury

Sara Schmidt

Sara is an architect of change, developing and implementing successful strategic client experience initiatives that drive transformational culture change in the public and private sectors. She has spent over 25 years in the client service and experience discipline in the insurance and financial services field. She has helped organizations develop cross-functional CX strategies that include a CX delivery model, agile CRM tools, effective Voice of the Client program and corporate measures for Client Service scoring (Net Promotor/CSAT/CES), to effectively embed a culture of client centricity. For her MBA capstone project, Sara conducted academic and primary research on Preparing an organization for a changing workforce. Her work in this space contributed to the strategic recommendations to evolve a corporate posture towards developing an employee environment focused on anticipating and meeting the changing needs and expectations of clients.

Vanessa Hannay

Vanessa Hannay is a Senior Customer Success Strategist at Muck Rack, working to change the way professionals approach public relations and encourage better relationships with the media through a unique mix of technology and partnership.

Vanessa works with brands and agencies to ensure they are working smarter to surpass goals, reinvigorate strategies, and streamline workflows. She often refers to herself as an extension of her customers’ teams. Vanessa joined Muck Rack as a Customer Success Strategist in 2016. Prior to this, she worked in customer experience at Capital One and digital marketing at TITLE Boxing Club.

Haresh Gangwani

Haresh Gangwani is co-founder and CEO of Bolstra, a customer success management platform for growth-minded B2B organizations. He is a veteran SaaS executive with leadership experience in product strategy, sales and marketing.  Before starting Bolstra in 2016, Haresh was the Chief Revenue Officer for ReachForce, after working for Aprimo (and their acquiring company, Teradata) for over 14 years. He is a champion for SaaS companies as they determine how best to charter custom success teams to deliver value-rich services to cultivate greater customer loyalty. 

Dave Blake

Ben Hong

Phalgun Vekram Kumar

Phalgun Kumar is a specialist in communications, client acquisition and client retention. Having worked in university settings for close to a decade, he gained a 360-degree perspective of the millennial generation and what makes them tick. He shares these insights with audiences and helps resolve the enigma around the millennials' behaviours to enable businesses in succeeding with this client segment. Phalgun has a degree in business, a graduate degree in peace studies, helps students with university applications, and enjoys discovering the world through music and culture.

Sheona McGraw

Ana Hulshof

Aslan Mirkalami

For customer success organizations that are either building their team, scaling their team, or re-defining their processes, they know firsthand how many components go into planning and determining the right customer engagement model. Before we jump in to explore what types of engagement models are available to customer success organizations, let’s look at how your mindset as a team leader can impact on the success and failure of your CS model. Aslan will show you show to use your inner unconscious mind to produce outstanding results for your business:

• So what has your unconscious mind got to do with work, ROI and enhancing Customer Success models and principles?
• How to discover your ‘limiting beliefs:’ How to harness your internal belief system for your project and wider success
• Why change and how can you embrace challenges and workplace dynamics and use for implementing best in class project and team management
• Using this knowledge for better team and client relationships.