Executives
David Jackson
CEO, The Customer.Co
David has been passionate about all things customer related for over 30 years. In 2000, he founded and was CEO of Clicktools, one of the UK’s first SaaS companies leading it through 15 years of organic growth and two liquidity events. His work now is all about helping B2B SaaS companies build customer focus into everything the company does.
Chris Mitchell
VICE pRESIDENT oPERATIONS, iNTRADO dIGITAL mEDIA
Chris has over 25 years leading customer facing teams with the last 10 years in SaaS and technology designing operational efficiency around customer outcomes. Chris is passionate about breaking down company silos to align Sales, Marketing, Services & CS around the customer to drive sustainable growth. Away from work he enjoys playing golf, cricket and mountain biking with his wife.
Executive Advisory Board
The Executive Advisory Board provides advice and oversight of the work of the Institute. Its members are widely recognised leaders with extensive experience in the field of customer success. Here’s the current membership: watch for new appointments in the coming weeks.
Rav Dhaliwal
Investor & Venture Partner, Crane Venture Partners
Rav describes himself as a “recovering software executive” with over 20 years of management and executive leadership experience in enterprise software. Most recently Rav was the first UK employee at Slack where he established the London office and founded the global Customer Success team.
No stranger to hyper growth startups, Rav has also built and led business units at Zendesk (now valued at over $11 billion) and Yammer (which was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion). Rav now works as a venture capital investor specialising in finding and backing the next generation of ambitious intelligent computing companies in Europe and working closely with their founders to build the foundations for long term revenue growth and customer value. Rav has also published several books on enterprise software deployment and is a regular public speaker and media interviewee.
Melinda Gonzales
VP Customer Success, Pendo
Melinda has 20 years experience in customer focused roles spanning customer success, customer experience, voice of the customer and consultancy. She has worked at some of the fastest growing SaaS companies including Salesforce and WeWork.
Melinda joined Pendon in August 2020 to shape customer success in a product-led growth environment.
Melinda is a member of the Outcome Selling Advisory Ecosystem.
Disha Gosalia
VP Customer Success, New Relic
Disha is currently Vice President of Customer Success at New Relic. She has been a former customer champion of New Relic in her prior roles and has used that experience to help build a world class CS organization that creates customer champions. Prior to NewRelic, she was VP of support & Services at Quantcast and helped them pivot from a managed services support structure to SAAS. Prior to that she ran the developer support programs for the Industrial IOT at General Electric.
Disha holds a B.S. in Computer Science and considers herself a nerd by heart! She is based out of the Bay Area in California. In her spare time, she's an avid hiker and loves going on hikes by herself and with her husband and two children. She is also active in various ‘women in technology’ communities and causes that increase representation of girls' education in STEM.
Chris Haggis
Chief Operating Officer, Sabio
Chris has extensive experience in customer facing roles with a focus on call centre technologies. Following roles at Datapoint and Barclays Bank he joined NewVoiceMedia, where he was instrumental in shaping the Customer Success function. Chris rose to the role of Chief Customer Officer and was part of the leadership team that led the company through the merger with Vonage.
In 2019, he joined travel technology provider Triptease as Chief Customer Officer, but because a victim of the the impact of Covid on travel industry. He joined CX technology vendor Sabio as COO where he is responsible for a team of 400 servicing customers with solutions in omnichannel interactions, customer insights, virtual assistants and workforce optimisation.
Matt Myskowski
VP Customer Experience, EMEIA, Cision
As an experienced & award-winning customer success leader & strategist, Matt has been successful in the creation, implementation and maturing of international customer success organisations.
Matt is obsessed with customer success and experience capabilities and the value it brings businesses through the connection of technology, education, data analytics and desired business objectives.
Jill Favro Sawatzky
VP, Head of Customer Success & Renewals, Commvautl
Following roles in consultancy and project management, Jill moved into customer success with IBM rising to lead a CS team of 50 helping IBM Commerce SaaS customers with deployment, adoption, and use of IBM software. She then took on CS leadership roles at Citrix and PROS before joining Commvault in April 2020.
Jill is a member of the Outcome Selling Advisory Ecosystem.
Terry Taylor
Chief Customer Officer, The Access Group
Terry is a member of the “The Access Group” Board and Chief Customer Success Officer with responsiblity for all customer success functions across the group. With 22+ years of international executive experience (UK, EMEA, CEE, APJ, USA) with companies such as Saleforce.com, Microsoft, Citibank and AT&T. As a leader Terry’s career has focused on building and leding amazing growth businesses and high performance teams; hiring, developing and retaining more than 70+ leaders, across 30+ countries.