Vice Presidents

What do our vice presidents do?

Our VPs advance our strategic intent, promote and position The Institute and act as a sounding board for our initiatives. They work with our board, stakeholders and executive team.

President — Ian Smith

As regional senior vice president for Oracle UK, Ian managed the UK, Ireland, South Africa & Israel until his retirement in November 2008. The longest-serving MD in Oracle UK’s history, Ian led the organisation through the dotcom boom and bust and continual changes in the IT market changes, both in the UK and globally.

Prior to his role at Oracle, Ian was managing director of BT UK Customer Service, one of the largest divisions in BT and probably the largest customer service organisation in Europe.

Andy Wood

Andy joined Adnams in 1994 with responsibility for developing its customer service and supply chain operations. He joined the board in 2000 with the additional responsibility of the sales, marketing and the wine business. He became managing director in 2006 and chief executive in 2010. Andy has an MBA and a doctorate from Cranfield University and in 2010 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University.

Andy is also chairman of NORCAS a drug, alcohol and gambling harm reduction charity, Chairman of Business in the Community in the East of England and is chairman of Choose Suffolk a sub-regional economic development organisation. Prior to joining Adnams Andy worked for Norwich Union, now Aviva in a number of roles encompassing customer service, purchasing and change management.

Sir David Henshaw

David has been chair of NHS North West since May 2006. He was formerly chief executive of Liverpool City Council, chief executive of Liverpool Culture Company and deputy chair of the Mersey Partnership. He has also been a past president of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, an adviser to the prime minister’s Delivery Unit, a non executive director of the home secretary’s National Offender Management Board (Prisons, Probation and Youth Justice in England and Wales), an adviser to the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit and a member of the HM Treasury Public Services Productivity Panel.

Jo Upward

Jo is director of 21C customer experience. She is also responsible for BT Wholesale’s customer satisfaction and business improvement programmes, and for the longer term service strategy for BT Wholesale, focusing on delivering a world class service for all its customers.

Nigel Purveur

Nigel has worked in a wide range of financial services industry roles, managing user departments and IT projects. He’s also been involved in the establishment of two new organisations, MI Group and NatWest Life.

Peter Farrer

Peter has worked in the Scottish water industry for 26 years. He’s designed water treatment works and pipelines, becoming a chartered civil engineer in 1990. Since then he’s undertaken various operational general management roles, including four years as general manager of corporate and asset planning, where he was accountable for capital maintenance planning and delivering Scottish Water’s regulatory targets. After that he was appointed to his current role on the board of Scottish Water, where he’s the customer service delivery director, accountable for operational service delivery across Scotland and customer contact and complaint resolution.

Bob Johnston

Robert (Bob) Johnston is professor of operations management at Warwick Business School, specialising in the transformation of service organisations through the re-design and innovative delivery of service. Before moving to academia Dr Johnston held several line management and senior management posts in a number of service organisations in both the public and private sectors. He’s also deputy dean (COO) of the Business School responsible for operations and finance, and academic director of the Diploma in Service Leadership run in Singapore. He serves on the editorial boards of ten leading journals and is a member of several international advisory boards. His research interests include service transformation, service excellence, customer experience design, service recovery and complaint management and performance management. He is the co-author or editor of over 30 books and has contributed over 40 chapters to other texts. He has published around 70 articles in refereed journals, written over 100 case studies (paper and video) and three computer based simulations.

Steve Stewart

Steve joined Swiss Re in June 2008 as an interim customer services director to Admin Re UK. He is responsible for all policy servicing and administration activities across multiple sites and geographies to around five million customers. His remit includes managing the operational business integration during acquisition and changing the company’s operating systems and cultural alignment. Prior to Joining Admin Re UK, he held various executive positions within several large enterprises such as Virgin Media, Thus plc, Next plc and Yorkshire Bank Retail Financial Services. His principal activity in these organisations was to change large scale sales and servicing functions during major business transformations.

Paul Lewis

Paul is a regional director with the Halifax, part of the Lloyds Banking Group. He is a member of the Halifax Distribution Board and is responsible for the operational performance of the community banks in the south central area of the UK. His accountabilities include the customer experience, colleague (staff) engagement, sales & business growth, risk management and profitability. He’s also been head of customer service at Clerical Medical, operations director for Capita (L&P) and Zurich’s customer service director. Paul is a keynote speaker on behalf of the Institute at many national conferences.

Cheryl Black

Cheryl is director of Cheryl Black and Partners Ltd. She recently retired from her post as customer service executive at O2.

Cheryl enjoys a number of non executive roles across a wide spectrum of industries. She's a highly experienced senior executive with acknowledged strategic and operational expertise in customer service and general management.

She has experience of customer–led, blue chip multinational organisations, and of balancing service improvement with cost reduction while embracing change.

Oke Eleazu

Oke is managing director of Think Outside In which helps organisations take a holistic approach to improving their customer service skills.

Oke was appointed director of customer service strategy at Sainsburys in April 2011 and has held positions at directorate level within Prudential and BUPA.

Liz Jackson, MBE

Liz is an entrepreneur and founder of Great Guns Marketing.

She launched her telemarketing company, Great Guns Marketing, in 1998 at the age of 25 with a small loan from the Prince’s Trust. She has since gone from success to success and built it up into a 130-employee business with a £2.5 million turnover and a reputation as one of the UK’s leading business-to-business telemarketing agencies. Now a regular speaker at Institute events, Liz has been recognised for her significant efforts within customer services, having worked in the marketing industry for over 20 years.

Mark Day

Mark is a director of healthcare insurers, simplyhealth.

Mark started his professional life with Crookes healthcare (subsequently Boots Pharmaceuticals) and then moved to the Automobile Association before it was merged into the Centrica Group providing Mark the opportunity to change direction and commence his Human Resources career. Mark steadily climbed the AA HR ladder until taking the HR Directorship at HSA.

Being disillusioned by the large corporate PLC, and a desire to join an organisation that truly treated staff and customers in an appropriate and ethical manner, prompted the move to HSA.

Six months following his appointment to HR Director, Mark took director responsibility for HSA Customer Services division. Mark has focused on improving the quality, speed and accuracy of service provided to Simplyhealth customers and to make Simplyhealth an employer of choice (achieved March 2003 when the organisation first made the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For list). Mark firmly believes that people can be the only true differentiator in business and maintains this core to all initiatives across the Group.

Graham Heald

Graham joined Waitrose in 1987 as a graduate trainee. He has experienced a number of different roles throughout the business. He spent several years as a Branch Manager and in 1997 opened their most northerly branch. More recently he spent five years as a regional manager during a period of significant growth (both organic and acquisition) and then moved into several different Head Office roles. He now has divisional responsibility for Retail Services.

Retail Services has a wide remit which includes all support functions, security, branch investment and future developments. Within this are the critical service responsibilities which include the customer contact centre (which supports the entire Waitrose business) and all strategic service developments and initiatives.

Tulsi Naidu

Tulsi is operations director at Prudential UK & Europe and a member of the UK & Europe Executive Committee, a role she was appointed to in January 2010.

Tulsi has overall responsibility for Business Change, Information Technology and Customer Service. She's also responsible for Prudential's India organisation, PPMS, which provides a range of services to Prudential Group's operating units.

Tulsi has held a number of senior general management roles across Pru UK since 2006, including responsibility for Direct Distribution, Corporate Pensions and the Mature Life and Pensions business. She joined the Prudential Corporate Development team in 2003.

Tulsi began her financial services career at Arthur Andersen and has also held positions at ICICI Bank and CSFB. She is an MBA.

Stephen Gold

Stephen works for Oracle.

Simon Roberts

Simon is chief operating officer at Boots UK.

Simon joined Boots in October 2003 from Marks and Spencer having begun his career in retail management at the age of 18.

His first role in Boots was as the regional director for the South, where he was responsible for 400 stores. In June 2006 Simon joined the Boots executive team as stores director, responsible for 1450 stores across the UK and Ireland.

Simon was recently appointed chief operating officer, where he will continue to be responsible for all aspects of stores and pharmacy operations across the UK and Ireland and Boots Opticians. He'll also take joint accountability for the delivery of the operating plan.

David Young

David is director of customer experience at South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive, a public sector organisation overseeing delivery of public transport.

David leads, directs and oversees the delivery of SYPTE's strategies encompassing the management of bus, rail and tram contracts/franchises and ensuring that the standard of service offered to customers is acceptable.

He also directs all the customer facing activities, from Bus Interchange and Park & Ride site management, to Traveline (Call Centre), Travel Shops and those teams involved with offering services to both businesses and the education sector, in addition to asset management. Previously, David worked in both the private and public sectors.

Bob Buiaroski

Bob is currently the global head of converged products and service for Vodafone, responsible for delivering customer experience across Vodafone’s global footprint.

Previously Bob held the role of customer operations director for Vodafone Australia where he is also a lifetime fellow member of the Customer Service Institute of Australia.