While studying communication at Houston Baptist University, Rhonda Dishongh aspired to be a disk jockey for a heavy metal radio station. She began working as a registration representative in the emergency room of a hospital to earn extra money while in school. In those three years, she was bitten by the healthcare bug, forfeited the plan to be a disk jockey, and continued her career as a manager in the business office. Interactions that occurred during her beloved grandmother’s death inspired her to dedicate her career to designing desired experiences in healthcare. With twenty-five years of service at the various hospitals and system offices, Rhonda has been an instrumental part of the leadership team. Rhonda has contributed to teams’ successful outcomes, receiving national recognition for performance in quality and customer experience. Rhonda continues to serve as the director of Customer Experience Design and Patient Business Services. On a personal note, Rhonda has been married to her high school sweetheart for twenty years and spends her personal time documenting a pictorial history of her two sons and daughter.Qaalfa Dibeehi (pronounced "alfa dibay-i") is a recognized global expert in Customer Experience with more than twenty years of experience in the customer-related space with particular emphasis on the special problems and sensitivities of organizations that have a dual commercial and social/community responsibility. He is the chief operating and consulting officer of Beyond Philosophy, the Customer Experience consultancy. He was previously a managing consultant with Round, the customer centricity consultancy. While there, he helped develop an assessment tool that eventually won a 2003 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Innovation of the Year award. His experience also includes senior roles at Fulcrum Analytics, where he was director of their consumer and strategy consulting practices in New York and London, respectively. He has held senior strategic planning and analysis roles with Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals and Citibank. In the early 1990s, Qaalfa worked for the city of New York and was responsible for medical, physical, and psychological occupational health standards. He is coauthor of the book Customer Experience Future Trends and Insights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He has been keynote speaker at a number of conferences, is frequently quoted in the international press, and has authored and published a variety of white papers and magazine and journal articles. Qaalfa is also an award-winning university professor. He has an MBA (international business and management) from New York University and master’s degrees in statistics, psychology, and health administration from the City University of New York, having graduated with departmental distinction from the State University of New York. Qaalfa is a world traveler and has lived and worked in the three of the world’s great cities (New York, London, and Tokyo).Kalina Janevska is a business psychologist with expertise in analyzing and designing emotionally engaging customer experiences. She has experience helping companies in a variety of industries (e.g., healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, retail) and geographies (Europe, Africa, Asia) achieve cultural transformation. Kalina has successfully designed and delivered tools and programs for employee engagement, experience assessment, journey mapping, and customer experience redesign. Coming from a family of physicians, Kalina developed an interest in helping people better their lives at an early age. Her curiosity to discover the root causes of people’s decisions and behavior led her to study psychology and work as a teaching assistant in social psychology at the St. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, her home country. This is when she became trained in assessing and managing human psychology, interaction, and behavior. Kalina moved to London to complete her master’s degree in business psychology, which introduced her to her job as a Customer Experience consultant in Beyond Philosophy, a Customer Experience consultancy with a global footprint. Since that time, Kalina has been the project lead on programs aimed at improving organizations’ customer experiences to drive customer loyalty and greater business outcomes.After attending Lamar University, Greg Erickson joined the U.S. Navy and trained to become a nuclear medicine technologist. When his service to his country was complete, he settled in Houston, Texas, with his family. He started his postservice career as an assistant director in the Nuclear Medicine Department of Texas Children’s Hospital. Due to his natural leadership abilities, he quickly moved from supervisor of a single modality to director of the Imaging Department. In 2004, he took his talents to Community General as the director of Imaging and Cardiac Cath Labs. During the next three years, he held the unique position of leading a successful de
