Biography of Ruth Balton
With over twenty-five years experience with customer contact center start-up and management in financial services, employee benefits, payroll, and healthcare insurance, Ruth Balton has helped companies improve their service delivery and their service processes. Over the course of her career, she has worked for IBM, Independence Blue Cross, Citigroup, CIGNA and Towers Perrin.
As President of The Balton Group, Ruth Balton worked to improve many facets of service delivery and service support within TIAA-CREF, Dow Jones Company, STV Incorporated and Day and Zimmerman. She focused on process improvement, quality assurance programs, project monitoring, and in training development, design, and execution. She holds an ITIL Service Expert’s V.3 certificate and has taught ITIL courses for private companies as well as through training providers. Additionally she has presented at several panel discussions for ITSMF, USA.
Prior to starting The Balton Group, Ruth was a senior director for IT Service Management at CIGNA where she created a performance measurement culture within IT, focusing on problem elimination rather than crisis management.
As manager of CIGNA’s Customer Service Desk, Ruth developed and directed CIGNA’s single point of contact 24x7 IT Service Desk which resolves IT problems for 500 proprietary applications, all other IT support for 33K CIGNA employees and over 1MM subscribers, providers, and professionals.
Ruth’s work at CIGNA was recognized by McKinsey Consulting, which awarded CIGNA “world class” recognition in 2003 for providing excellent service at industry low cost with a 92% customer satisfaction rating for four consecutive years. In addition, Ruth’s organization was benchmarked by the Gartner Group as “best in class” in 2001 and 2002 and was a finalist for the Help Desk Institute’s “Team Excellence” award in 2001.
Prior to Ruth’s work at CIGNA, she worked for Towers Perrin where she helped build and manage the Employee Benefits Call Center and for Citigroup as Vice President, Citicorp Information Resources.
In 2000, Ruth Balton was instrumental in restarting the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Help Desk Institute where she served as president for two years and then served on HDI’s Member Advisory Board as Regional Director of the Northeast Chapters.
Ruth holds a BA and MA from Queens College, CUNY.