Optimize the experience at every customer interaction

Michael Taylor is Senior Managing Director of Travel, Hospitality, Retail & Customer Service Advisory.

Mr. Taylor founded and led the Travel Practice at JD Power from 1998 to 2004, and rejoined JD Power in 2017. Previously he worked as a consultant to academic medical centers (M.D. Anderson and The Mayo Clinic) and oilfield service providers (Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and Schlumberger).

Prior to that, he worked in television advertising research, where he analyzed and consulted on major advertising efforts for companies such as SmithKline Beecham, S.C. Johnson, Frito Lay and General Motors, focusing on “persuasion shift” and market share. He began his career in the consumer packaged goods industry at companies such as Alberto-Culver, Ralston Purina, and Abbot Laboratories.

Mr. Taylor earned a bachelor’s degree with honors from Indiana University and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago.

Mark Miller leads the JD Power Global Customer Service Advisory and is responsible for thought leadership, solutions development, strategic alliances and client support. He leads customer service, technical support and sales performance improvement and certification initiatives for the company.

Mark has over 20 years of performance-improvement consulting experience working with small, medium and Fortune 500 clients in more than a dozen industries to improve sales, customer service and technical support operations. Through his work leading the JD Power Certified Customer Service Program across channels, Mark has had the opportunity to interact with over 600 high-performing contact centers, which has given him a unique understanding of what customers want and what top performers across industries actually do to deliver an outstanding experience. With this perspective to draw from and with access to the most comprehensive research data around what defines and drives an outstanding customer experience, Mark is one of the foremost authorities on what top performers do to create a differentiated customer experience.

Prior to joining JD Power in 2000, Mark served as a strategy and operations consultant to senior-level management, as well as an executive in the sporting goods, computer and networking services, offshore software development and Internet security industries.

Mark has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA in marketing (with honors) from Regis University. He was selected as a member of the Alpha Sigma Nu Honor Society.

Scott Killingsworth is Director, Customer Service Advisory at JD Power. He currently manages the JD Power Customer Service Certification programs and is responsible for developing and maintaining the standards and operational benchmarks for the program. He also manages both internal teams and external partners in the execution of certification surveys and on-site evaluations of client operations.

Mr. Killingsworth has more than 20 years consulting experience to both B2B and B2C clients across a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, travel and insurance. Prior to joining JD Power, he was a market manager for Tecnol, Inc., a manufacturer of contamination control products for semiconductor, pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

Rich Bongiorno is Managing Director, Customer Service Advisory at JD Power. He is responsible for the management of the company’s Customer Experience Management product, including the Voice of Experience (VoX) data and analytics technology platform, which is  JD Power’s solution for customer experience management. In this role, he sets the strategic direction and product development road map in this space for JD Power. Additionally, he supports business development efforts as a subject matter expert within the organization. 

Mr. Bongiorno joined JD Power in 1998. Prior to his role in Product Management, he led a global business transformation initiative for JD Power, which focused on improving the way the company designs, executes and delivers its syndicated and proprietary data and insights products to the market. This initiative involved global teams across the company organized into work streams.

Earlier at JD Power, Mr. Bongiorno held several roles of increasing responsibility across several syndicated and proprietary research engagements. He was responsible for the management and execution of some of the company’s most respected and watched syndicated studies across the automotive industry. 

On the proprietary side of the business, Mr. Bongiorno has been responsible for some of JD Power’s largest and most complex proprietary tracking engagements across several different industries. During his tenure in this role, his team was nominated for and received the American Honda Premiere Partner Award multiple times.

Mr. Bongiorno received an MBA from Pepperdine University. He holds a certificate in Pragmatic Product Management and a Lean Six Sigma green belt certification. 

Denese Waiters is Director in the Customer Service Advisory practice at JD Power. Serving as a subject matter expert, Denese is responsible for delivering high impact customer experience solutions, cross industry benchmarking, and operational best practices.

Denese joined JD Power in 2022, bringing years of experience providing both strategic direction and tactical leadership in the contact center space. She has led several enterprise-wide, cross-functional projects to streamline processes and improve operational efficiencies and has a diverse background ranging from management consulting, strategy facilitation, business development, project management, and sales.

Prior to joining JD Power, Denese held several senior level roles with increasing responsibility for Carnival Cruise Line, ADP TotalSource, American Express and Arthur Andersen.

Denese has an MBA from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and a B.S. in Marketing from Hampton University.