Bruce Balentine
EVP and Chief Scientist, EIG Labs
| Bruce Balentine is a design consultant specializing in speech, audio, and multimodal user interfaces. In more than two decades of work with speech recognition and related speech technologies, Balentine has designed user interfaces for several media. He is EVP and Chief Scientist for Enterprise Integration Group, Inc., a user interface research and consulting firm. His book, How to Build a Speech Recognition Application, co-authored with Dr. David Morgan, has been an influential best seller within the speech design community. |
Gerry Barber
Call Center Senior Leader, Deloitte Services
| Gerry Barber is a twenty-five year veteran of the call center industry. He is currently the Call Center Leader for Deloitte Services, LP internal call center. Gerry is responsible for the strategic delivery of support services to Deloitte U.S. firms' 45,000 person employee base. Throughout his career, Gerry has attained operational success through blending the right technology with people, work processes and performance management techniques. He has engaged in award winning start ups, growth expansions and re-engineering projects. Gerry's experience in contact management leadership spans single and multi-site call centers, both large and small with experience in sales, service and support oriented applications. |
Lori Bocklund
President, Strategic Contact
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Lori Bocklund is a recognized industry leader in contact center strategy, technology, and operations. During her 20 years in the call center industry, 15 of them as a consultant, she has acquired an understanding of a broad spectrum of systems, applications, and operational environments. She shares her knowledge and experience through speaking engagements, articles, a two-day call center technology course delivered through ICMI, and the book she co-authored, “Call Center Technology Demystified” (Call Center Press). Attendees of Lori's seminars and courses appreciate her enthusiasm, energy, and humor. She has a great ability to use her technical and industry knowledge, along with her excellent communication skills, to make today's complex technology environment more readily understood. |
Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor, ICMI/Think Services
| Brad is recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on call center management and customer services. He is a passionate advocate of customer contact services that deliver higher returns to organizations and better experiences to customers. His enthusiasm and leadership set the standards for success that drive the entire organization. An engaging speaker and sought-after consultant, he has now worked across 40 states and in over 50 countries. His clients have included small startups, national governments, and multinational corporations. Brad’s articles have been featured in a wide variety of professional journals, and he has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal, as well as on major television networks and the in-flight programs of several airlines. |
Tim Cook
Vice President of North American Operations, Hilton Reservations & Customer Care
| Since 2000, Tim Cook has led North American Operations for Hilton Reservations & Customer Care’s six call centers with 2,500 employees handling over 30 million telephone calls a year. Hilton call centers pride themselves on giving superior customer service to Hilton guests. A call center veteran before joining Hilton, Tim worked for Walt Disney World as General Manager Reservations and prior to that was with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines as Director of Reservations. The first part of Tim’s career was with the airlines, both in sales and reservations. Tim holds a bachelor’s from the University of Oregon and a master’s from Stanford University. |
Drew Daly
Senior Director of Sales, World Travel Holdings
| Drew Daly is currently the Senior Director of Sales for World Travel Holdings, a multi-brand cruise travel distributor. He oversees the sales operation for WTH’s Miramar, Florida facility as well as the company’s extensive at home agent team. He has helped author the company’s sales strategy and methodology. Before his current role, he was responsible for the creation of the company’s Virtual platform and was instrumental in growing the team from the initial 30 person start up to its current size (approximately 250 individuals). He is an industry expert when it comes to managing remote teams and speaks regularly on the topic at top industry conferences. |
Bill Durr
Principal, Global Solutions Consultant, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions
| Bill is an industry veteran and has held sales, marketing and consulting positions with a number of major firms in the industry. He has authored numerous articles and white papers on contact center technology and management and is a frequent speaker on topics of interest to the contact center community. Bill is employed by Verint Witness Actionable Solutions as Principal, Global Solutions Consultant. In this role Bill evangelizes on workforce optimization. Bill provides private seminars for enterprise and contact center executives and engages in best practice consulting with customers and prospects around the world. |
Larry Eiser
VP, Call Center Operations, Duke Energy
| Larry Eiser took on the role of Vice President of Call Center Operations for Duke Energy in November of 2006. Larry’s initial responsibilities following the Duke/Cinergy merger, which closed in April of 2006, included the web, IVR and walk-in contact channels and designing the technology platform to support all contact channels. Prior to the Duke/Cinergy merger, Larry served as General Manager, Customer Contact Services for Cinergy since 2000. Larry has been with Duke/Cinergy for 30 years, after earning a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Dayton. Prior to moving to the customer contact arena in 2000, Larry held a number of positions in IT and then took a leadership role in previous merger and reengineering efforts.
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Richard Finnegan
Finnegan Mackenzie, The Retention Firm
| Richard Finnegan is often referred to as “the turnover guy”. He is the author Rethinking Retention in Good Times and Bad, his book that details the best strategic approach to cutting turnover, with specific, research-based tactics that work. As President of Finnegan Mackenzie, The Retention Firm, Richard is recognized by executives across people management professions as a leading thinker and advisor on employee retention. He has worked with scores of clients across 6 continents on employee retention solutions. These clients have included among others Sprint, Hilton, The Hartford, GE, Johnson & Johnson, and the CIA. |
Glenn Gemmill
Director of Operations, Customer Development Center, Coca Cola
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Glenn Gemmill is Director of Operations for the Coca-Cola Enterprises Customer Development Center, a multi-site sales and service organization managing over 12 million annual customer contacts. Glenn has been with Coca-Cola Enterprises for 15 years, serving in multiple sales and operation roles. Recently he has been focused on building the company’s contact-center infrastructure. Recognized for his leadership and organizational abilities, Glenn has been the driving force behind numerous customer-service strategies and culture-changing initiatives including the implementation of a system-wide customer response model and the integration of several major technologies.
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Rebecca Gibson
Learning Currents
| Rebecca Gibson has a long history in a wide variety of contact centers with an emphasis on employee performance management. During six years with one of the fastest growing call center outsourcers in the country, she consulted with clients in the pharmaceutical, insurance, healthcare, financial services and high-tech industries on program implementation, selection practices, and workplace learning. As the Manager of Educational Services with ICMI and Training Director for nation’s largest behavioral healthcare services provider, she designed holistic strategies to improve employee performance and boost employee development efforts. She's currently the principal consultant with Learning Currents, where she focuses on tackling tough organizational challenges and designing and developing workplace learning strategies and programs. |
Layne Holley
Director of Community Services, ICMI
| Layne Holley oversees content, research peer channels, Executive Peer Groups and other programs and services for ICMI community members and stakeholders. An award-winning journalist, Layne has spent more than 10 years as a business and technology writer and editor covering the people, processes and technologies in the contact center. Her deep background in journalism and group facilitation is the foundation for her ability to connect ideas and people to develop analysis and build understanding that leads to positive action plans. Her experience as a retail frontline manager served as a gateway to her mission to help improve the quality of the customer experience while meeting business needs and goals. |
Dee Kohler
Vice President, Member Services, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska
| Dee has over 14 years of experience in the Contact Center industry. She has leveraged contact center principles and executed the transformation from “departments answering phone calls” to true customer contact service centers. Dee has been with BCBSNE for four years and prior to that worked with Prime Therapeutics, the Pharmacy Benefit Manager supporting BCBSNE along with twelve other Blues plans. While at Prime, Dee was responsible for strategic leadership and implementing call center operational plans. Before entering the healthcare industry, Dee’s experience included the Boys Town National Hotline, a 24-hour crisis line; and a start-up sales/retention service center located in Houston, TX. |
Roger Lee
Manager, Education and Development, Customer Experience Operations, Thomson Reuters
| Roger Lee has more than 20 years combined experience in finance, call center operations, information management systems, restaurant operations, payroll services and quality. This experience includes developing and implementing a quality monitoring program formalizing and implementing Lean and Six Sigma. Roger has led and participated in several process improvement projects in various organizations utilizing the Six Sigma methodology, resulting in approximately $10 million in cost savings. He has given several thought provoking presentations and written articles on various topics impacting the contact center including workforce optimization, optimizing your quality monitoring program, Six Sigma in a service environment, leadership skills and the importance of developing frontline employees. Currently, Roger leads a department that is responsible for training, coaching, and order process auditing for customer service and customer technical support. |
Mary Murcott
Chief Executive Officer
Novo 1 Contact Centers
| Mary Murcott is an innovative, strategic business transformation consultant with over 20 years experience in designing service delivery platforms, developing global distribution channel strategies and leading high performance teams in attaining best in class technology, service, sales and economics. She has held the position of CIO and SVP Technology and Worldwide Reservation Services for Budget Group Inc., and has been instrumental in driving change and performance turnaround in many companies including American Express, DHL, Budget, Ryder TRS, and Cox Communications. Mary has proven extremely successful at leading start-up operations, consolidations and turn-around situations. |
Scott Murphy
Contact Center Manager, Employees Retirement System of Texas
| Scott Murphy is the Contact Center Manager for the Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS) and is responsible for all aspects of the Customer Service Contact Center. Scott's professional career in the contact center industry began over fifteen years ago when he managed front-line customer service teams and was successful at quickly achieving the most productive teams within the organization. Scott has been employed at some of the most successful contact centers in the industry, including centers such as, First USA, Good2CU.com, and Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Scott specializes in small contact centers, specifically workforce optimization, performance measurement, employee recognition and quality improvement. Scott is the former board chair for the Austin Contact Center Alliance, a local Austin non-profit contact center trade association that supports the needs of the Central Texas contact center industry through training, education, and networking. He holds a BBA from St. Edwards University in Austin, TX. |
