The Forum's National Conference speakers and panellists for 2021 are a wide variety of experts and professionals.
Technology Showcase: Anaplan
Originally broadcast Monday 28th September 2020, 12:30
Planning for the Workforce of the Future Join Anaplan’s online session to hear how strategic workforce planning can provide much needed agility in the face of digital disruption, financial pressures and turbulent external market factors. During this session we will showcase how to quickly and strategically realign your workforce to shifting skill and resource demands. We will showcase workforce analytics, deploying initiatives to right-size the workforce and reconcile with financial targets, as well as explore capabilities in workforce talent management. Join us to discover how to improve collaboration across thousands of users and how you can realise a 10x return on investment through organisational right-sizing.
Keynote: Digital Acceleration - Planning
Originally broadcast Monday 28th September 2020, 14:00
The Great Digital Acceleration The pandemic has fundamentally changed the way that customers engage with organisations. Digital adoption has leapt forward by a decade and the contact centre is playing catch up. During this session Sabio’s Stu Dorman, will describe how deep integration between the contact centre and digital experiences and the use of the latest generation of AI to support customers and agents can be deployed quickly and scaled to meet the needs of a more digitally savvy customer.
Keynote: Planning for Wellbeing
Originally broadcast Wednesday 30th September 2020, 09:30
If the P in planning stood for People Following an extended period of accelerated change across our industry, Keir will explore some of the advantages to putting our people first in the planning process, potential barriers to success and what would need to change for this to be a reality for every customer-centric business. Keir Greenwood is VP & General Manager Customer Success at Arise.
Technology Showcase: NICE
Originally broadcast Wednesday 30th September 2020, 12:30
Hear how Skipton Building Society is on a journey to develop their planning capabilities by proactively collaborating with NICE across a number of initiatives to drive colleague and customer excellence.
Technology Showcase: Business Systems
Originally broadcast Thursday 1st October 2020, 12:30
Inspired People go above and beyond – so how can you inspire your employees to engage with your planning team to drive impressive ROI? Your employees need to work in a positive environment so they can continue to grow, remained inspired and be more productive. So how can WFM help with this?
Technology Showcase: Calabrio
Originally broadcast Friday 2nd October 2020, 12:30
The State of the Contact Centre: Embracing the Evolving World of Work Join Ed Creasey, Director of Pre-Sales for Calabrio, as we explore how leading contact centres are turning disruption to their advantage. From the rapid increase in importance of the contact centre, to changes in demands from employees and customers, we will be envisioning the contact centre of the future. Join us to discuss tangible ways to embrace this evolving world of work.
Originally broadcast Tuesday 1st December 2020, 12:30
Agile & Reactive Modelling: the key to Modern Planning We must take into account not only future trends but unforeseen events and market conditions. The ability to make good business decisions is completely reliant on a plan that is adaptable and flexible enough to react with resilience and speed. In this session you will see how many scenarios can be created and compared to enable a decision to be made with good principles and alignment to strategy.
Technology Showcase: Aspect
Originally broadcast Wednesday 2nd December 2020, 12:30
Enabling Flexible Working Practices As organisations embrace flexible working strategies for their contact centre and back office workforce what working practices are going to change and how can technology enable these? Join Aspect Software to understand more.
Technology Showcase: Arise
Originally broadcast Thursday 3rd December 2020, 14:00
When People Do Your Planning Using a ‘live’ demonstration of their award-winning Starmatic scheduling tool, Arise will demonstrate how you could let your People do your Planning, exploring performance gamification, agent preference scheduling, intraday variation and meeting unplanned demand.
Conference Endnote
Originally broadcast Friday 4th December 2020, 09:15
Positive habits for a successful career With so much uncertainty in the world, it is important to take control of our conduct, behaviour and attitude. Developing simple positive habits can make a huge impact on how you learn, share ideas and ultimately transform yourself and our career. This endnote presentation will take a look at the role of professionalism, how to build positive habits and an opportunity to hear from members who have transformed themselves during 2020.
Keynote: Unlocking Opportunities
Originally broadcast Monday 26th April. 2021, 09:30
Hear from Phil Anderson, Director at The Forum with the conference opening keynote. Understand how disruption can pave the way for new opportunities and how you can become key to unlocking change and development.
Originally broadcast Monday 26th April. 2021, 12:30
“My supply always meets my demand”. In reality this almost never happens – but how do you bridge the gap between the two? Demand is constant but it is not consistent, nor does it affect every department equally. So how do you optimise your talent pool not only to drive customer satisfaction but maximise your operational efficiency? Come and see how two conflicting constraints on the business can work in harmony by using a Connected Planning platform.
Originally broadcast Monday 26th April. 2021, 13:15
Fear of missing out? New technological advancements in self scheduling and micro shifting. Planners and Schedulers are under increased pressure to provide hyper flexibility in the scheduling methodology and the general opinion is that micro shifting is too confusing and complex to manage. Life may have changed for all of us; for some, this means the ideal schedule is a couple hours early, a few hours midday and maybe a couple of hours later in the day.
Originally broadcast Tuesday 27th April. 2021, 10:30
The Evolving World of Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) in the Cloud: Five Tactics that Help Keep Agents Engaged in a Modern Contact Centre It’s no secret the contact centre is forever changed. Moving to a cloud contact centre can prove valuable with virtually limitless resources; fast, cost-effective scalability to accommodate seasonal changes and sustained growth; and access to new or more robust technology.
Technology Showcase: Intradiem
Originally broadcast Tuesday 27th April. 2021, 12:30
How to support your agents better in remote operations by optimising the delivery of coaching and training Want to find out how to support your agents better in remote operations by optimising the delivery of coaching and training? Hear how real time planning & operations teams at British Gas delivered this with the help of Intradiem’s award winning Intelligent Automation Technology solution. Join a panel of business leaders facilitated by Matt Rumins (Head of Customer Success) to discuss the engagement & effectiveness improvements and tangible results that leading organisations are experiencing with Intelligent Automation.
Technology Showcase: Verint
Originally broadcast Wednesday 28th April 2021, 10:30
The Engagement Capacity Gap… and How to Close It: The new research propelling resourcing strategies Discover the latest study on the fast emerging, and critically important Engagement Capacity Gap – the difference between resources available to meet customer demand and the exploding volume of customer interactions and communication channels.
Originally broadcast Wednesday 28th April 2021, 13:15
Empowering Your Workforce with Flexibility As contact centres have changed forever understand how technology can deliver the flexibility your workforce craves whilst delivering the service your customers expect. Now is the time to re-examine your WFM technology. Is your workforce management solution: Fit for the new normal? And most importantly, can it do all this in a public cloud environment from 250 to 25,000 advisors?
Keynote: Returning to Work
Originally broadcast Wednesday 28th April 2021, 14:15
The past 12 months have been rocked by disruption; and with lockdown lifting, what are the important factors and considerations you should take into account when planning for your teams to return to the office? Join Chris Haggis, Chief Operating Officer at Sabio as he shares Sabio’s plans and provides his insights into the challenges, research, attitudes, safety protocols, systems/processes and long-term plans you should be thinking about.
Technology Showcase: Sensée
Originally broadcast Thursday 29th April 2021, 12:30
What Communications & Collaboration systems and processes are needed in Hybrid Working Environments that put all citizens on a level operating field Having problems with absenteeism and engagement? Declining performance and productivity? People isolation and motivation? Is the new world of working making these problems worse?In this session, Steve Mosser will examine today’s burning work-from-home (WFH) and hybrid (home/office) challenges.
Technology Showcase: QStory
Originally broadcast Thursday 29th April 2021, 13:15
Balancing contact centre staffing with demand is tough Discover how Nationwide tackled this challenge along with many others by introducing Intraday automation into their business. Lateness reduction of 75%. 5% improvement in adherence. 1.3% Shrinkage reduction. 15% reduction in manual tasks, allowing the team to be value add Analysts instead
Keynote: Investing in Real-Time
Originally broadcast Thursday 29th April 2021, 14:15
Hear from Jen Lee (Chief Strategy Officer) & Paul Milloy (Forefront Executive Council Chair) at Intradiem on how leading organisations are investing in real time capabilities to optimise customer channels, increasing support for agents and creating improved experiences with less effort by leveraging data and Intelligent Automation to deliver increased optimisation.
Workshop: Tactical Planning
Originally broadcast Thursday 29th April 2021, 15:15
Tactical Planning: performance expectations in the ‘new normal’ As we move into new ways of working, we will need to look at new ways of managing our people on the day. How are we going to monitor adherence? How are we going to update our playbook to take hybrid or homeworking into account? What factors do we need to take into account
Moment of Truth – The Forum Community App, live stream exclusive
The moment of truth; critical time for your workforce strategy and hybrid operating model. Strategy is about to become the reality as organisations look to introduce strategic Hybrid operating model at scale post the summer holidays which will have important consequences for the future.
Standards and Business Accreditation
The Standards programme is designed as a journey of improvement leading towards accreditation for Planning, Insight and Quality teams and functions. Whether you are at the start of your journey, wanting to understand the fundamentals of best practice, or an established team wanting to become best-in-class this programme is you.
Originally broadcast Monday 1st November 2021, 09:30
How has our thinking changed during 2021? Phil Anderson and Dave Vernon, Directors at The Forum will explore the ever-changing business environment and the different approaches being taken to drive forward with improvements.
Keynote: Real Time
Originally broadcast Monday 1st November 2021, 10:30
Paddy Coleman, hear from the founder of QStory, his journey into planning and driving innovation with Real-Time automation
Originally broadcast Monday 1st November 2021, 12:30
David Preece talks about why Agility is the only defence your Contact Centre has against volatility and why Intraday Automation is the key to achieving it.
Keynote: Agent Wellbeing & Mental Health
Originally broadcast Monday 1st November 2021, 13:15
Join Sabio as we explore the #1 megatrend in the customer experience industry that nobody is talking about.
Originally broadcast Tuesday 2nd November 2021, 12:30
Ed Creasey discusses how the potential to work more flexible shift patterns and in remote locations has thrown resource planning into a new era.
Originally broadcast Tuesday 2nd November 2021, 13:15
Graeme Gabriel and David Kay share practical top tips, tactical insight and strategic vision for digital planning.
Keynote: Investing in People & Technology
Originally broadcast Tuesday 2nd November 2021, 14:15
Mark Brown of Virgin Media and Paul Milloy of Intradiem discuss how investing in people and technology is the key to the future of Customer Service.
Originally broadcast Wednesday 3rd November 2021, 12:30
A panel discussion on the tools and processes required to deliver flexible work-from-home options for employees, as well as high productivity, cost savings and great CX
Originally broadcast Wednesday 3rd November 2021, 14:15
The evolution of workforce management with intelligent automation, hear how this has made a real difference at AXA.
Originally broadcast Friday 5th November 2021, 09:30
Learn how to invest your time wisely to help you spend time on the things that matter the most. Doing something different on a daily basis.
Looking back on 2021
2021 was our year for Unlocking Opportunities. Doing more of what we do well is a great opportunity that we don’t always fully exploit. One of the most valuable things we can do is put time aside to reflect on what has gone well. When things go wrong we are quick to review, so that we can learn from our mistakes. We are not so good at learning from our successes. If we can repeat and build on our successes then that has to be a good thing. As we come to the end of 2021 it is time to look back on what we have done well, so that in 2022 we can do it again only better.
Moment of Truth: Confident to Succeed
Our actions, or inaction, will define us. We are the key to our own success. During 2021 we focused on unlocking opportunities and the part each of us can play in helping to shape the future. For 2022 we want to focus you on your Moment of Truth and being confident to succeed.
Free Webinar: Key Industry Trends in 2022 - The 3As
Attrition, Attraction and Absence will be on going challenges during 2022. With a continued uncertainty around COVID and an indecision on what hybrid working really means, a number of problems will be experienced due the “3-A’s”.
Keynote: Your Moment of Truth
Originally broadcast Monday 4th April 2022, 09:30
Confident to Succeed Every day we practice living versus an ever-changing world and environment. Those who strive to learn and improve can adapt better. Those who are contempt with how they are or refuse to accept the changes around them will find it hard to catch-up as the change required to survive and thrive becomes bigger.
Originally broadcast Tuesday 5th April 2022, 12:30
Agents are now used to flexibility in every aspect of their lives, they can choose when to do their banking, catch up on box sets and even play games. We need to reflect this flexibility and customization in the work place.
Technology Showcase: Centrical
Originally broadcast Thursday 7th April 2022, 12:30
Webhelp & Centrical – WEM’s Moment of Truth? Transformation leaders from Webhelp will share how they’re redefining their CX operating model, leveraging real-time performance management, advanced gamification, and microlearning to engage employees and push the limits of performance with Centrical.
Originally broadcast Tuesday 12th April 2022, 12:30
Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Toolkit: Practical strategies & resources to turn workforce wellbeing into your competitive advantage with Calabrio.
Originally broadcast Wednesday 13th April 2022, 12:30
In a live session of Dear Dave, David Preece from QStory will answer real-life questions and show how IDA and QStory’s latest features make Real-Time teams’ lives easier
Your Moment of Truth: confident to succeed
For our 22nd year, we focus on the opportunity we have, as professionals, to drive successful improvements, whether in planning, insight, or customer experience. This Best Practice theme for 2022 represents the next stage of this coming of age for our professional disciplines.
So, we invite you to consider your moments of truth. What makes you confident to succeed?
Liquorice Consistents – Does somebody at Bassetts not like me?
At our Customer Strategy & Planning Connections conference in Newcastle on 26th April ‘22 we explored probability using Liquorice Allsorts.
Questions to consider for annual leave
As the world reboots after the firm reset of the Pandemic, we have the opportunity to revisit, redefine and reshape how we have done things. 2020 was a strange year, especially for annual leave, as lockdown restrictions changed how we used annual leave and the Government stating leave can be carried over, firmly “kicking the can” down the road, to give us a problem for another day (or year).
QStory Technology Showcase
Originally broadcast Monday 14th November 2022, 10:30
Hear from Gold Sponsors QStory as they showcase examples of how NatWest and Anglian Water are using Intraday Automation to transform the experience for agents, team leaders and planners.
NICE Technology Showcase
Originally broadcast Tuesday 15th November 2022, 12:30
The Psychology of Adaptive Choice Join Graeme and David from NICE, as they revisit The Psychology of adaptive choice, the challenge of offering our agents choice and empowerment over their schedule.
Verint Technology Showcase
The Struggle is Real: Insider Tips to Empower Your Remote Agent. Join this insightful and lively fireside between renowned experts Chris Rainsforth of the Forum and Huw Jones, Workforce Management Guru at Verint.
Community Learning Keynote
Originally broadcast Friday 18th November 2022, 12:30
Hear from a Forum Hero and organisations who have taken a team approach to learning.
Partner Article: Improve Contact Centre Operations with Robotic Process Automation