Harry Wright Heermans, Ph.D.

Harry pioneered the Proactive Customer Support model, which reduces costs, improves service and product quality, and boosts customer satisfaction. He has successfully employed this methodology in founding industry-leading customer service organizations in domestic and international companies and turning around substandard departments. His enterprise-wide project management expertise, informed by his technical background and Ph.D. in psychology, has made him a leader in identifying, coaching, and promoting talent to deliver top performance and guiding companies' I/T initiatives through strategic change. An accomplished educator, his specialty is in blending multi-course classroom curricula with new distance learning technologies.

At CMGI, Harry was a member of the original management team that created the first co-branded Internet portal, growing it from infancy to an international company with 1500 customers, over 3 million end users, and a top 100 Jupiter Media Metrix ranking. He directed a service quality initiative that boosted sales by 33% and was cited by one Fortune 100 company for engineering the "smoothest rollout we have ever had" .

As the Director of Customer Support at PetroVantage, an AspenTech company, Harry completed the implementation of their customer support department in 45 days and pioneered AspenTech's first audio/visual distance learning module. While heading ByAllAccounts' Operations and Customer Support division, he directed the simultaneous upgrade and move of the company's entire technology infrastructure.

At Harvard University, Harry transformed a customer care center with a 72% budget deficit to one running a 29% budget surplus and introduced Total Quality Management principles to business unit functioning, changing a user services organization with a poor reputation to one with a 93% user satisfaction rating. He also led a university-wide customer focused assessment and numerous other cross-functional projects, one of which garnered Xplore International's award for innovation.

Harry has Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Rutgers University and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. He has taught at four colleges, in the areas of customer service, computer applications, and psychology, directed multi-course computer training programs at Harvard and private sector companies, and authored numerous articles, including several in refereed journals.