The future of customer experience

Clara Shih Salesforce

CEO of Service Cloud, Salesforce

Shih’s Salesforce career began with the AppExchange, which he helped scale before creating an application called Faceforce — a portmanteau of Facebook and Salesforce — that was one of the first social business applications. Shih then wrote the bestseller “The Facebook Era” and helped pioneer the social selling category with his startup Hearsay. Now back at Salesforce, Shih is using his experience to lead one of the largest SaaS businesses in the world.

Mohammed Attar Front

Chief product officer, Harap

Email has been a staple in customer communications for decades, but the platform hasn’t seen much change in that time. Front is trying to change that, adding workflow, automation and integration tools that surface customer conversations from text, social media and other channels, all in a familiar email interface. Attar led product and engineering for email marketing startup SendGrid, which was acquired by Twilio in 2018 for $2 billion, before joining Front to continue transforming email.

Brad Anderson Qualtrics

President of products and engineering, Qualtrics

Qualtrics was an early pioneer in the discipline of experience management, treating customer, product, employee and digital experiences like a science. The company uses a variety of statistical methods to capture and measure qualitative data on each of the company’s digital interactions with its customers. Anderson is a longtime Microsoft vet who built the management and security functions of Microsoft 365 before joining Qualtrics to lead its product strategy.

Adrian McDermott Zendesk

CTO, Zendesk

Founded in 2007, Zendesk was an early player in bringing IT help desks to the cloud. Today the company offers a range of products in full customer service and sales. McDermott joined the company a few years after its founding and is now focused on bringing new technologies such as AI, chatbots and natural language processing to customer interactions.

Simonetta Turek Twilio

GM of customer experience products, Twilio

Twilio emerged in 2008 as a company building developer-friendly APIs to host phone calls in the cloud. It will continue to add text messaging, video, email and other forms of communication. Turek joined Twilio after working in support at both AWS and Genesys. Now as general manager, Turek oversees the company’s customer experience products, including its programmable contact center unit Flex.

Jaleh Rezaei Blend

Co-founder and CEO, Mutiny

Personalization is a hot new buzzword in the CX space, and Mutiny’s no-code AI platform answers the call. The Y Combinator startup allows marketers to personalize their websites for each unique customer based on customer data. Rezaei, an engineer-turned-marketer, worked at VMware and helped scale marketing startup Gusto before founding Mutiny. Today, the startup counts companies like Twilio, Qualtrics, Notion and ClickUp as clients.

Amit Bendov Gong

Co-founder and CEO, Gong

Gong has seen tremendous growth over the past few years thanks to its revenue intelligence functions, which infuse AI into the sales process for better customer engagement. Bendov, who has worked in sales for most of his career, started Gong when he realized that sales teams didn’t fully understand their customers. Today, Gong is valued at more than $7 billion and has expanded to include products for customer success and marketing teams.

Umesh Sachdev Uniphore

Co-founder and CEO, Uniphore

Conversational intelligence and emotional AI have been getting a fair amount of flak lately, but the concepts aren’t new. Sachdev has evangelized the two technologies since 2008, when he started Uniphore to bring those technologies to the contact center. Today Uniphore is valued at more than $2 billion and offers AI, analytics and RPA software for contact centers and sales teams.

Sameer Patel SAP CX

Chief marketing and solutions officer, SAP CX

Patel spent several years growing SAP Success Factors before leading the company’s customer data platform, marketing, sales, service and commerce. Now Patel is focused on improving customer experiences in both the physical and digital space, using ERP records paired with qualitative data to measure customer satisfaction in new ways.

John Ball Service Today

Senior vice president of customer workflows, ServiceNow

AI is all the rage in enterprise software, and the same is true when it comes to CX. Ball led the engineering team that built Einstein on Salesforce, the CRM player’s intelligence layer. At ServiceNow, Ball focuses on using automation and AI to improve the customer service agent experience.