Iliyana's Blog

Iliyana Stareva

Iliyana Stareva is a thought leader in Customer Success and AI. She’s the author of Inbound PR, a keynote speaker, and currently leads Customer Health for EMEA at ServiceNow. Iliyana has held global and regional roles at ServiceNow, Cisco, and HubSpot, spanning customer experience, operations, and digital transformation.

Recent Posts

Thrive: a Paradigm Shift to Success [Updated with an Infographic]

[fa icon="calendar'] 13-Apr-2014 17:45:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Personal Development, Career

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On the scale of one to ten, with ten meaning "extremely" and one meaning "not at all", how successful would you say you are? How accomplished do you feel? How satisfied are you with your career and professional life? I hope your answers lie somewhere close to ten. Now, let me ask you some more questions: How stressed would you say you are? How satisfied are you with your relationships and personal life? How happy are you?

If you gave all those questions an answer close to ten, congratulations! You are one of the very few lucky people in this world who's got it all!

Now, let's talk about the rest of us - the ones who still feel there's something missing, there's something to improve, there's something more to do and work on so that we feel truly accomplished and happy at the same time.

That journey towards true happiness in our personal as well as our professional lives starts with our definition of success, or the way society as a whole pictures what success should look like. And for the past decades that picture has unfortunately been rather distorted.

This is one of the messages of Arianna Huffington's, founder and president of the Huffington Post and best-selling author, new book "Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder".

Having been deeply inspired by Arianna's commencement speech at Smith College, I was eager to start reading the book the minute my pre-order was delivered on my Kindle. And I loved it.

The way the book

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Women in the Workplace: The Progress Made

[fa icon="calendar'] 07-Apr-2014 09:16:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Career

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If you follow my blog, you know how passionate I am about the issue of gender inequality in the workforce. You’ve also seen my commitment to join and support well-known female leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Barri Rafferty by fostering the conversation about women climbing the career ladder. And that is the aim of this post – to speak up yet again and offer you some interesting facts and figures.

My posts on the topic have so far been rather negative – highlighting how much more there is that we need to do in order to ensure real gender equality at the workplace. With this piece, I am going to focus more on the bright side and show you some facts and figures about the progress women have made over the past centuries.

Below you’ll find a very informative infographic that presents a rather optimistic view for the future with millennial women leading the change.

The infographic offers an interesting comparison of how things are now for women and how they used to in terms of titles held, advancement opportunities, aspirations and how having kids factors female careers.

Here are some highlights:

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Sustainability: Key Driver for Business Growth?

[fa icon="calendar'] 01-Apr-2014 08:22:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Sustainability, Brands and Business

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What does sustainability mean to business? Is it about reducing environmental impact? Or maybe about improving reputation through CSR activities? Is it worth it? How can we translate this sustainable business vision into actual business operations? How can we align commercial performance to sustainability for the long run? Those are questions that many leaders and company executives ask themselves when being faced with the challenge of adopting sustainability in their organisations.

The truth is, if truly embedded into every part of the business, sustainability can offer tremendous competitive advantages.

This is not something I just made up. Many studies and even my own research have shown that embracing sustainability and effectively managing the triple bottom line can be a key driver for innovation, growth and progress.

A recent survey by BSI and Verdantix confirms that yet again.

150 sustainability executives from 20 industry sectors, including retail and consumer products, consumer services, manufacturing, business and financial services, oil and gas, utilities and mining were part of the research, depicting a fairly sound representation of organisational leadership.

The overall finding was that the majority of business executives (70%) identify sustainability as key growth driver, however, connecting sustainability to overall financial and business performance still remains a challenge with only 51% believing that sustainability issues will impact their firm’s financial performance over the next two years.

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The Future of PR is Socially Responsible

[fa icon="calendar'] 26-Mar-2014 14:28:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Public Relations

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The biggest change the PR industry has even faced is social media. With the massive embracement of social networks in our daily lives, it became possible for ordinary people to influence corporate behaviour with just one tweet, one Facebook post or one Instagram photo. Individuals today feel empowered to demand change and expect social consciousness from brands. This has left businesses with no other choice but to meet the triple bottom line balance between environmental, societal and economic concerns.

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Visual Content is King

[fa icon="calendar'] 26-Mar-2014 08:33:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Social Media, Public Relations

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Did you know that 350 million photos are being shared on Facebook each day? On Instagram that number is 55 million photos. That’s more than 400 million images on just two sites every single day! Welcome to the world of the visual web. It is not a fad. It is here to stay.

Just look at the rapid growth of social networks such as Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr – people are on them and they are really active!

Visuals and photos are being facebooked, instagrammed, pinned, tweeted, tumbled and flickered every second of every day.

The rise of the visual web for business is undeniable too. The major social media players have completely redesigned their platforms to make them purposefully more visual – consider Facebook (including the new ad formats), Google+, and even Twitter.

Why did they do that? Because people love visuals.

They are easy on the eyes and the mind to comprehend, understand the information and then share this data with a simple click without having to add any further explanations.

For businesses this means that they now need to adapt their communications and leverage the power of the visual in order to reach and engage their audiences.

Not convinced?

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