Bios

CCXP Celebration Luncheon Panel Bios

Moderator:

Barbie Fink, CCXP
Director of Customer Experience
Adobe Systems

Barbie Fink works with teams and leaders across Adobe to champion customer experience innovation and advocacy on a cross-functional basis. In her current role within Adobe’s Customer & Employee Experience Organization and previously in the Digital Media business unit, Barbie is an agent for change, focused on creating and delivering innovative experiences for customers of many of Adobe’s leading products and solutions, including Adobe Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.

Barbie is first and foremost a customer champion and a relentless advocate for great end-to-end experiences across the customer lifecycle. During her tenure with Adobe, Barbie has been a leader in the creation and implementation of a company-wide customer “top issues” process with a set of related best practices, including root cause analysis, issue triage and prioritization, customer storyboarding, experiential improvement strategies and measurement. She was also critical to the introduction of customer experience reviews to Adobe, allowing a broader set of teams to better anticipate customer needs based on product, audience, or location, and establishing new best practice for multiple teams to leverage as part of their go-to-market processes. Barbie is an engaging storyteller, using customer stories together with measurable data and analysis, to raise visibility around the issues customers face – creating urgency and inspiring meaningful change in the way leaders and teams incorporate customer experience in their planning and execution.

With over two decades of direct customer engagement and learning, Barbie has applied her passion for the customer experience in many areas of Adobe’s customer-focused operations, including Customer Care, Technical Support, Operations, Knowledge Management & Self-Help, and Online Experience. Barbie is an active member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) and is deeply engaged in supporting knowledge sharing and best practice evolution.

Panelists include:

Sandra Fornasier, CCXP
Global Directory, Customer Experience Specialists
Ciena

 

  Sandra Fornasier is the Global Director of Customer Experience Specialist team at Ciena Corporation. She is responsible for designing, driving and executing on Ciena's vision for superior Customer Experience as a competitive differentiator.

Sandra is passionate about breaking down organizational silos that can stand in the way of delivering optimum B2B customer experiences even in the best organizations. The power of diverse thinking through bringing cross functional teams together to rethink the end to end customer journey is a fundamental game changer.

Along with the customer experience vision and strategy, her team is responsible for gathering and analyzing the Voice of Customer, driving the customer experience culture even deeper into the organization and for marshaling resources to resolve critical and systemic partner and customer issues.

Over the last 21 years in diverse roles in Telecommunications, (Customer Advocacy, PLM, System Engineering, NPI and Customer Program Management, Design), Sandra has honed her abilities in customer relations, product definition, sales support, system engineering and software development.

Sandra is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and received her Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science.

 

More Panelists:

Vicki-Amon Higa, CCXP, CX Expert
Principal
Amon-Higa & Assoc

  Vicki is a passionate and experienced catalyst and change leader that partners with leaders throughout organizations to identify and drive improvements that matter to employees, customers and shareholders. She has spent more than 30 years, both as an internal and external consultant, to change mindset and implement the right improvement methodology to deliver the best outcomes. Her career started in the early 1980s doing research and translation of how Japan was achieving such top Quality results.

Her work experience spans industries and countries … high tech (NeXT Computer, Apple, Symantec & Cisco), electric utility (Florida Power & Light), defense (Hughes Aircraft), construction (Shimizu), film (Pixar), software (ADPgsi, KANA & Intuit), and healthcare (Palo Alto Medical Foundation, La Clinica de La Raza & Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Healthcare System) … in the US, Japan and Europe. She has led teams in Quality, Project Management, Operations, HR, Merger Integration, Process Excellence and Customer Experience. She is passionate about helping people discover what needs to be done to improve the customers’ experience and coaching employees to be the best they can be.

Vicki has a BA in Asian Studies from UC Santa Barbara and a Masters in Int’l Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. She is a mother of four, married to her life partner, Peter Higa, and is a consummate volunteer. She and Peter co-founded Animal Assisted Happiness in 2009 … a place for children with special needs to interact with animals and find happiness. Her mantra of never letter the crystal balls drop reminds her to focus on health, family, faith and her friends.

 

 

 

Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CX Expert
360Connext
Principal

 Jeannie Walters has spent nearly 20 years evaluating and improving customer experiences. She’s worked with Verizon Wireless, Allstate, Bath and Body Works, Orangetheory Fitness, Citrix and many others.

Jeannie is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP,) the Chicagoland Ambassador for the Customer Experience Professionals Association, and a TEDx speaker.

She’s passionate about making the everyday interactions we all have as customers better and writes, speaks, studies and trains on customer experience issues around the world.

Michael Barlett, CCXP
User Experience Manager
Springfield Public Schools

Michael Bartlett is an Englishman currently making himself at home in Missouri – a state he previously only associated with Jerry Springer and tornadoes before moving there and realizing how beautiful the Ozarks are. He began his career at a Space Agency developing software, moved into consulting with Accenture and then spent a few years running his own motion picture company. In 2011 he moved to the USA, and shot the film ‘Treehouse’, which is now on Amazon Prime after a successful Redbox run in 2015. He currently works as the User Experience manager for the largest school district in Missouri and recently authored the book CCXP: Exam Preparation.

Outside of work he enjoys chess, 80s music (especially Pet Shop Boys) and supporting Chelsea FC. His biggest passion is animal rescue and he is actively involved with numerous shelters in Missouri. He is married with two children: a beagle named Basil and Mac, a beagle-pit mix named after Kurt Russell’s character in John Carpenter’s The Thing.