Your CX Instructors
As your faculty chair, Carol Buehrens is a customer experience strategist, author, keynote speaker and educator. Her best-selling customer experience book, Happy R.A.V.I.N.G. Customers! provides practical advice to bring customer experience best practices to your own organization.
Focusing on constructing extraordinary experiences for over 30 years, Buehrens has led numerous teams to success at large corporations, including Northrop, McDonnell-Douglas, Bechtel, Liberty Mutual, GE, Mercury Marine, and ICW Group Insurance Companies. At Northrop (now Northrop Grumman), Buehrens innovated the learning experience to meet and surpass the requirements of the government development contract for the B2 Bomber program, leading the way for disrupting how 3D Modeling and Design engineering training was traditionally conducted. Her tutorial-facilitated program would go on to train over 15,000 engineers for numerous stealth programs, far exceeding contract expectations.
For the past 20 years, she has lead teams in the improvement of customer experience. In her 18 years at ICW Group, she actively helped the organization grow from a $40M company to over $3B in business annually. Her passion for improving customer experience has resulted in numerous awards, including the “CX Innovation Award” from the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), ICW Group CEO Award, and the Liberty Mutual Star Award. She has been listed in the top 20 of the Global Top 30 Gurus for Customer Service since 2015, and is a founding member and expert of the international Customer Experience Professional Association (CXPA), and an active member of the San Diego Customer Experience Special Interest Group (CX SIG).
Buehrens provides corporate and educational workshops on customer experience worldwide. She brought to fruition the first university-backed, accredited Customer Experience Certificate Program, now taught across the nation and internationally at leading universities.
Erich Dietz is the Vice President of Worldwide Strategic Accounts for InMoment. He
has over 15 years of executive experience spanning consulting, business development,
and solutions architecture. Erich joined InMoment in 2003 and primarily works with
InMoment’s large, complex client organizations within their B2B, B2B2C, and B2C markets.
Erich partners with clients to architect and implement Customer Experience Management
(CEM) & Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs that enhance critical business measures
including; revenue generation, operational efficiency, cross-channel service alignment,
customer retention, base management, loyalty, and brand advocacy. He is also a designated
CXPA Expert and regular contributor to the community’s Google+ Hangouts and other
events.
Prior to InMoment, Erich was a Management Consultant for several global consulting
firms. He holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Rutgers School of Engineering.
JP Saini is a C-level IT executive for a B2B company with 20 years of in-depth business,
technology, operations experience and strong leadership skills. Developed from his
portfolio of business, technology and operations experience is his ability to advance
the overall strategic direction of information technology in alignment with strategic
business plans, growth goals and position IT as a strategic business enabler and partner.
His sharp focus on Excellence is driven by his knowledge of client service and performance
based metrics.
Mr. Saini has been successfully managing IT business and strategy through the harnessing
of technology for business growth and profitability, risk mitigation, and the identification
of commercial opportunities.
Michael Truett is known for creating, improving and executing collaborative design
thinking sessions and customer experience frameworks across diverse industries (media,
streaming services, ed tech, health and wellness, SaaS, PaaS) at different stages
of growth: early-stage start-ups, seasoned companies looking to transform, high growth
and declining businesses.
His experience ranges from professor, board member, keynote speaker to leading global
business transformation (B2B, B2C, B2B2C), business development/launch strategy, customer
experience, customer success, customer engagement, customer retention, customer service,
lifecycle management and AI transformation at companies like Spotify, The New York Times, Dow Jones, tech start-ups and telecom providers globally.
Truett’s passion for DT and CX is based upon his adventurous lifestyle where he is always seeing a new experience. He has a love for traveling, experiencing new cultures, surfing, golfing, running ultra marathons, participating in triathlons, and spending time with his friends and family.
Client initiatives Truett supports include customer obsessed strategic planning, experience journey and persona mapping (customer, employee, process, and product), AI – artificial intelligence transformation, service CRM/omni-channel transformation, strategic business and product-level transformation, operational best practices and centers of excellence, mobile/digital product and platform strategy, global experience (LATAM, APAC, EU and BRIC), C-suite alignment and change management.
Instructional Team Contributors
Alvin George started off his career at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he learned about his passions — cybersecurity and technology. Currently, as a service account manager at DELL Technologies, George builds relationships within accounts serving as the support services trusted advisor, targeting total customer experience and satisfaction.
Jenny Lapushner is an award-winning and experienced sales, marketing, sales effectiveness and operations leader with a demonstrated history of work within the consulting, medical device, pharmaceutical, B2B, and Cloud industries. With two M.B.A. degrees focused in both Business Strategy and International Marketing from Rutgers University-Newark, she is well-versed in navigating change management challenges for customers and companies, as well as inspiring innovation and economies of scale.
Tim Boylan has over 12+ years of marketing experience. He currently works as director of marketing retention at Sirius XM, where he is responsible for digital experience, retention offers and strategic vision with 6-9 months visibility. Prior to Sirius XM, Tim worked at Verizon for over 8 years. During this time he focused on retention/acquisition strategy, marketing segmentation, branding, new product development and digital CX/UX experiences. He has worked on various products/projects such as SuperBowl XLVIII, Verizon FiOS, Verizon Wireless, Verizon Up, 5G Home, 5G Wireless and Verizon's suite of apps and add-ons. He holds an M.B.A. in Marketing and Supply Chain from Rutgers University, graduating in the top 20%, and a B.S. in Marketing from Penn State University.
Aaron Salko is the author of The 9th Stratum, and creator of the functional concept. As a sales management professional with the innovative solutions-based company Stephen Gould, Salko has a demonstrated history of talent development, innovation, creativity and organizational growth. For more than two decades he has focused on human performance in both career and life in a highly competitive, entrepreneurial-based, global sales environment, with an intense interest in exploring and teaching how the science and mechanisms of human behavior, psychology, social interaction and human physiology apply to performance. Salko’s life’s desire is to help individuals attain their highest levels of performance in order to achieve success in their career and find purpose and fulfillment in life.
Michael Rojas graduated from The College of New Jersey with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and from Bard College with an M.B.A. in Sustainability with a concentration in Entrepreneurship. Rojas has a deep interest in studying the intersection of engineering, purpose-driven entrepreneurship, and environmental justice. His work focuses on exploring the integrated-bottom line of people, planet, and economic prosperity to develop successful business cases for purpose-driven organizations. Rojas cultivates a space where individuals are environmentally and socially conscious of their decisions. He has experience in project and program management, student mentorship, sustainable business strategy, and leadership development.
Mentor Team Contributors
Anthony Ferrera currently serves as the Hillsborough Township Administrator. He is responsible for serving a population of over 43,000 residents in a 54 square-mile suburban township ensuring the municipal quality of life, economic viability, and fiscal integrity. He directs human resource functions, including the development and enforcement of personnel policies, creation and execution of departmental and individual annual goals and objectives for a cumulative staff of over 200 employees, and oversees the management of a $37 million budget.
Curtis Paul Shuey
Curtis Paul Shuey is currenting vice president of Global BioDevices, Commercial at Zoetis. He has over 30 years of experience in customer facing leadership in the global animal health industry. He has led commercial teams globally from U.S., Asia and Europe. Shuey lived in Asia for 8.5 years and lead the Asia business for Alpharma for 4.5 years. As a graduate from Pennsylvania State University (BS) and Bucknell University (MBA), Curt knows that you can always learn more and gain further growth from others.