Sherif Mityas

Sherif Mityas is the Chief Information Officer and VP Strategy & Brand Initiatives for TGI FRIDAYS responsible for the Brand’s global Strategy, Digital and Technology efforts. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the retail and hospitality industries in both senior consulting and executive industry roles.
Prior to joining TGI FRIDAYS, Sherif served as the managing partner for JS Consulting and as the chief executive officer for Hollywood Video/Movie Gallery.
Mr. Mityas received a B.S. degree in aerospace engineering from Boston University, a M.S. in mechanical engineering from Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.B.A. from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

Todd Unger

Todd Unger is the Chief Experience Officer and Senior Vice President of Physician Engagement at the American Medical Association (AMA), where he leads membership, marketing and digital transformation initiatives. Unger joined the AMA in February 2017 after serving as Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Daily Racing Form where he led the successful digital transformation of the media and gaming platform. Prior to his role with Daily Racing Form, Unger served as general manager of four major digital media properties spanning pure-play, publishing, cable television and video gaming, in both corporate and start-up environments. He was a pioneer in the Local online space, building Digital City/AOL Local into the country’s leading online city guide and led digital organizations at Lifetime Television, Time4 Media (a former division of Time Inc., with 19 high-profile enthusiast sites) and Major League Gaming. Leading up to his career in the digital space, Unger spent a decade in brand management and advertising at Procter & Gamble and Leo Burnett, where he worked to build brands in consumer products, automotive and electronics categories. Unger earned his masters of business administration from Harvard University and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance from Miami University.

Nahal Yousefian

Nahal manages the rich human talent within MEC Co-op. All MEC workplaces – stores, head office and distribution centre – are her workplace. Nahal helps ensure that people possess the attitude, skills and experience to serve their members’ diverse needs. By removing barriers that prevent employees from being engaged and empowered, MEC can better deliver on its purpose. Prior to joining MEC in summer 2017, Nahal was with the multinational retailer, Tesco, in Prague, where she held several senior human resources roles. Among other points of pride, she was integral to building a service-centric culture among 120,000 employees based in Central Europe and Asia. After living 20 years abroad, Nahal is delighted to return home to Vancouver. Whether it’s running, hiking, yoga or meditation, Nahal likes to get outside as often as she can.

Mark Magnusson

Mark has 15+ years directing the UX strategic vision for top global brands and a recognized trailblazer of customer-centric design. The magic is when he's jamming with teams and customers to reimagine design problems. Culminating in products that add delightful moments to every brand journey.  He's persuading stakeholders to be a bit braver and look around corners. His client and brand portfolio include: EA SPORTS, Visa, Lufthansa, Sony, VW Group, Bayer, Mars Foods, and Henkel. His focus is on people and modding tech to shape solutions for a changing digital culture. Using his creative shebang to design entertaining experiences that fit in the our fragmented digital lifestyles. Over the years it has been his honour to help his clients win awards from the World Media Festival, Popvox Awards, to The Webbys.  Mark is also specializing in designing for next generation mobile devices, including iPhone and iPad apps. His indepth knowledge comes from his experience of designing web enabled retail spaces, such as.: DV-Signage, Instore TV On-Demand, Digital-Shopping-Assitants and RFID Smart Shelves

Roger Pugsley

Extensive award-winning senior management experience in driving customer experience change management processes, sales and marketing, account management and operations with global property management, domestic and international software, manufacturing and retail organizations with bottom line accountability. Metric driven with an excellent track record of consistently exceeding objectives.
SPECIALTIES: Customer Experience Governance and Change Management, Customer Insight Sales and Marketing Management, Relationship Building, Consultative Selling Process Implementation and Training, Retail Dealership Management, Business Planning, IT Project Management.

Mariana Filipic

Experience:

Over 20 years of professional experience in Quality Management, Customer Experience and Continuous Improvement at Schneider Electric Canada. The latest role was an Executive Director of Canadian Schneider Electric leadership Team.

Previous experience in Sales, Marketing and Television Broadcasting.

Key Skills: (What would people say you are really good at)

One of 16 Globally certified Master Black Belts in Schneider Electric.

Thinking forward. Mentoring and developing others. Loves challenges. Delivering results.

What do you want others to know about you?

Guest speaker on Argyle and CX Week Canada. Good sense of humor.  Authentic and straightforward leader who walks the talk.

Jennifer van der Valk

As Managing Director, Marketing and Digital Strategy for the Government of Ontario, Jennifer leads an integrated team to deliver marketing strategy and creative development, social media strategy, digital data insights, market research and creative services. Working across the 30 ministries of the province, Jennifer has spearheaded multiple award-winning campaigns including those for including Health, Foodland Ontario, Education, Economic Development and Transportation.

In her previous role, as Director of Brand and Marketing for Metrolinx, Jennifer led the vision and alignment of brand, digital and marketing strategy across the organization. Working with cross-functional teams across Metrolinx operations and services, including GO Transit, Presto and UP Express, she managed a team of strategic and creative professionals to build public understanding of the largest transit infrastructure development in Canadian history and to help residents find ways to spend more time living and less time commuting.

Jennifer’s expertise in both public and private sector environments spans marketing, advertising, digital strategy, PR, issues management and corporate communications. She is fueled by a passion for break-through creative driven by strong insight and a determination to build responsibly brave public-sector brands.

Michael Oswald

Ying Chen

Ying Chen is the Chief Product Officer at Luminoso. She leads product, design, and development to power the next generation of Luminoso's award-winning software. Before joining Luminoso, Ying led Fortune 1000 organizations and VC-backed startups to deliver award-winning product solutions, most recently heading up global product marketing for platform technologies at Pegasystems, where she advised customers on digital transformation best practices. 

Sasha Fard

Sasha Fard is the Director of Consultative Solutions for AND Agency, a full-service provider of Customer Experience solutions. For more than ten years, Sasha has provided advisory services to Fortune 500, not-for-profit and SMB organizations to design and optimize custom customer experience programs that deliver business results. His specialty is in the financial services industry, having authored the most authoritative syndicated study on bank switching in Canada. Prior to joining AND Agency, Sasha served as a consultant for Hay Research International and Bell Media. Sasha received his MBA from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and is a Net Promoter Certified Associate.

Neel Singh

Dolly Konzelmann

Dolly Konzelmann is the President and CEO of CSPN. She has been in the customer service/customer experience industry for over 20 years. CSPN has been empowering organizations to create a customer-centric culture and helping them differentiate their organization and brand. Dolly leads the company’s benchmarking, consulting, and training efforts that help many of the leading organizations build customer loyalty through the lens of the customer.

CSPN is a recognized leader in the design and delivery of their numerous award-winning certified training programs including customer service, customer experience, change management and leadership.

CSPN hosts a number of events where people from all industries network, learn and acquire the knowledge they need to stay connected in this industry. Dolly is sought after speaker and has been interviewed on number on television and radio shows. She has been invited to be a judge on various service awards including the coveted FRPO (Federation of Rental-Housing Providers) and the BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association) Awards.

Sarah Metcalfe

Sarah joined Sure Petcare in 2010, taking responsibility for the company’s customer service and guiding it through an extraordinary period of expansion and growth. She now leads a talented multi-lingual team who deliver outstanding customer service and happiness to all Sure Petcare customers around the world.

Sarah is passionate about happiness in the workplace, and she knows the positive impact this has on the customer experience. Through continuing to innovate and improve the customer journey, Sure Petcare now has an Net Promoter Score of 90+ in over 20 countries around the world.
Sarah has trained with Happy Ltd, and Woohoo Inc, and has recently become a certified partner of Woohoo Inc and a certified Chief Happiness Officer to provide training & keynotes on creating happiness at work.

Seema Swamy

Swamy specializes in providing Customer and Market Insights to help organizations attain and maintain product leadership in the marketplace. She currently manages customer support research at a Fortune 500 company. Seema has managed Customer Success and Market Research at VMware. She has worked with both B to B and B to C companies providing actionable recommendations that informed the effective development as well as launch of products with optimal messaging and positioning to target audiences. She is an expert in both qualitative and quantitative research methods to develop holistic insights about key drivers and inhibitors of product adoption, customer acquisition as well as retention through increasing loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. She has been an invited panelist and presenter at International Conferences and published articles on customer insights in various journals. Her work on maximizing Trust and Safety on the eBay platform is a case study in Anna Bernasek’s book ͞Economics of Integrity: From Dairy Farmers to Toyota, How Wealth is Built on Trust and What That Means for our Future.͟ Seema has worked and consulted a number of organizations including Cisco, Apple, Intel, Trend Micro, VMware, Equinix, Yahoo!, PeopleSoft, and Capital One as well as stealth mode startups. She received her Ph.D. degree from Stanford University. Her dissertation focused on the application of Social Psychology to ensure products’ success in different cultures and markets

Brian Walsh

Brian Walsh is a twin-degree professional engineer based in Toronto, providing training and consulting for customer experience design thinking, beginning with empathy training and journey mapping. From 2010 to 2017 at Oracle, he introduced thousands of people to customer experience design for B2C & B2B customers, employees, donors, volunteers, students, citizens, suppliers and partners, including DuPont, McDonald's, Bosch, Cisco, Citibank, CIBC, Sun Life, Indigo, and the UN Refugee Agency. He was recently voted best new speaker at the International Fundraising Congress in Amsterdam.

In 2018 as principal of Structured Empathy he conducted engagements with the UN Refugee Agency in a dozen global cities, Save the Children (London), Resource Alliance (Amsterdam), World Animal Protection (Copenhagen), Allianz, Capital One, Inertia Engineering, CMHC, York Region, and the Geneva Center for Autism. This year he has facilitated design sessions on medicals devices in Toronto, first nations housing in Ottawa, and refugee donations in Australia, and guest lectured CX students at Centennial College.

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.

Rob Russini

Rob Russini serves as Senior Director of Marketing for Hudson Heritage Federal Credit Union. Rob oversees marketing and communications for the credit union since January 2018 and additionally, helps spearhead special projects around innovation, collaboration, customer experience, and strategic planning.
Prior to joining Hudson Heritage Federal Credit Union, Rob held management roles in both the energy and financial sectors, including within retail banking for several financial institutions. Rob has also held several advisory board positions in the educational and non-profit sectors throughout the tri-state area. Rob holds an MBA in Marketing from Babson College and is finishing a second Master Degree in Integrated Marketing Communications through Northwestern University.
Rob’s research and interests lie in marketing strategy consisting of integrated marketing and branding through innovation and personalization. Rob has spoken at several conferences and events on topics consisting of branding, digital marketing, customer experience, segmentation, marketing analytics, and strategic marketing.

Nancy Ortenburg

Nancy Ortenburg is a Customer Experience professional with a keen interest in how the culture of an organization drives corporate performance metrics, both up and down. She is currently the Manager of Customer Experience at MiWay, the public transit system serving the City of Mississauga which provides 40 million rides per year with a staff of 1,400.

Challenging questions entice Nancy. Questions like: “How do we change the culture of an organization that has had three leaders in 45 years and also loves the saying, “But we’ve always done it this way!” Examples like this provide a real context to the famous saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Her approach is to look deep into the layers of an organization’s culture for the root causes and build programs that address them. At MiWay she discovered that the root cause of many issues was inconsistent decision making. So, she looked to the world leader in managing diverse and remote staff for the answer: the Magical world of Disney. Today, she’ll share took what she from the Disney Institute courses and the process that she used to adapt and apply them to the MiWay organization, which is not only a completely different industry, but a municipal government AND unionized as well. To enable a tipping point in the cultural story of the organization, she has created the “MiWay Basics”.

Her Customer Experience team works on strategic planning and visioning, Customer Metrics, implementing game-changing projects/processes, and most importantly, organizational cultural development.

Tisa Sinclair

Maureen Russolo

Nitin Badjatia

Nitin Badjatia serves as the Head of Business Strategy for ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management product line.  He’s a two-decade veteran of enterprise customer service applications, having been at Siebel Systems, RightNow Technologies, and Oracle in various sales and strategy roles.  Nitin also led business strategy at knowledge management pioneer Knova Software.  In 2012, Nitin was awarded the Consortium for Service Innovation’s Innovator award for his extensive contributions to the industry at large.

Ana Hulshof

Tammi Winchester

Mark Smith

With over 20 years of global experience in marketing applications and analytical CRM, Mark Smith is a leader in building, growing and managing successful companies. As the President of Kitewheel, Mark is focused on helping marketing agencies deliver better consumer engagement through solutions that unify the “logic” layer of today’s customer-facing technology for their large brand clients.

Mark’s journey into customer behaviour and experience started early in his career. Shortly after achieving his Ph.D. in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Edinburgh, Mark founded Quadstone – the first data mining company to focus explicitly on the analytics of customer behaviour. In the years that followed, Mark moved to Boston to build the US business and oversaw revolutionary analytic progress at clients including T-Mobile, Dell, Merrill Lynch and Fidelity. His leadership role expanded to global sales, marketing and product teams that lead to a series of 3 successful M&A transactions over the last 10 years.

Mark shares his perspective on customer journeys, omni-channel marketing, solutions sales leadership and high-tech marketing.

Katrina Schiedemeyer

David Singh