Partnership Perfection 2026: Co‑Creation at the Heart of Success

Over the past three years, our Partnership Awards have shown a clear evolution in how organisations work with their technology and service partners. In 2024, we highlighted the foundations of great collaboration: trust, shared goals, honest communication, and a focus on people over products. As our 2024 Partnership article noted, “the best partnerships invest in relationships… it’s about working together to make sure [technology] is used in the best way”.

In 2025, we saw partnerships becoming more strategic and culturally aligned. We described how successful collaborations “transcend traditional transactional dynamics” and how deeply integrated teams create a unified force working toward shared outcomes.

Twelve Months In: Leading with Intent, Engagement and Culture

Stepping into a senior leadership role in a new organisation is rarely a clean slate. It is more often like joining a story already in full flow. For Hannah Will, her first year in post felt exactly like that.

“It was like being dropped into the middle of a very complex story halfway through the book, with no glossary or terms of reference.”

Despite a warm welcome, Hannah quickly realised that success would not come from imposing solutions, but from listening deeply, understanding unspoken dynamics, and earning trust through authenticity.

Complaints: Fix It, Face It or F**k It

What The Muppets can teach us about complaints handling

Breaking Patterns to Find Purpose

The Moment I Noticed the Disconnect
The time was 3pm. Somewhere around my seventh Zoom of the day, I realized I had missed lunch and misplaced any clear sense of what I was even trying to accomplish that day. All I knew is that I had to be on time for my next meeting. Lately, I’ve been in a position of covering for multiple leaders in my organization. While I feel grateful to be able to do so, my calendar has been filled with back-to-back meetings, and entire days pass where I feel like I’m just bouncing from one task to the next without a moment to pause. Somewhere in the rush, that sense of clarity and direction – the “why” behind the work, started to blur.

It’s not that the work itself changed. It’s that I became so consumed with reacting and moving fast that I stopped feeling grounded in purpose. And ironically, it’s in these moments, when I’m most stretched and overwhelmed, that the need for purpose becomes even more urgent. Without it, the work seems heavier, and I feel more disconnected from myself and others. Accepting this disconnect as the norm can be a risk to any organization. What sets a true leader apart in these moments is turning that awareness into action. For me, it always begins with understanding what enables me to thrive.

Engagement: The Golden Nugget

In a year where we are calling for a Reset | Redefining of Customer Strategy, Planning and Leadership, it is easy to focus on frameworks, technology and governance. But none of these deliver value unless people understand them, trust them, and choose to use them. Engagement is the often-overlooked multiplier that determines whether insight becomes action, whether change is embraced or resisted, and whether best practice is truly embedded or quietly ignored.

This article explores engagement not as a “soft” capability, but as a practical force that shapes performance, learning and impact. Through real examples from across our community, it shows how listening, collaboration and shared ownership transform models, metrics and plans into outcomes that matter for customers, colleagues and organisations alike. In the context of 2026, engagement is not optional, it is the mechanism through which strategy becomes reality.

Resetting How We Care: Protecting Compassion in Customer Operations

Caring for customers has always been central to frontline work, but the emotional landscape has changed. People are arriving with heavier stories and more complex needs, and those supporting them are often carrying just as much privately. At the same time, the focus on how we identify and respond to vulnerability is increasing across sectors. This creates a tension between the level of compassion we want to offer and the emotional capacity we actually have available. The goal is not to care less. The goal is to protect our ability to care well. That begins with resetting how we think about emotional labour and redefining the systems that are meant to support it.

Coaching That Builds Capability

Picture an advisor mid-call: the customer is anxious, systems are slow, and decisions must be made fast. In that moment, confidence matters more than compliance. Coaching earns its value not by fixing mistakes later, but by building judgement, resilience, and ownership when it counts.

Is This the AI You’re Thinking Of?

We talk about “Artificial Intelligence” constantly, yet we rarely mean the same thing. That mismatch creates false expectations, limits innovation and makes good ideas harder to deliver. As in many areas of customer operations, the biggest challenge isn’t the kit, it’s the assumptions surrounding it. Resetting how we think is essential if we want clearer conversations, better decisions and more grounded expectations.

Operational Improvement with Purpose

Operational improvement is most powerful when it has purpose behind it. Drawing on the stories of last year’s Awards finalists, this article explores how culture, knowledge, coaching and capability became the foundations for sustainable change and what we can learn from the organisations who raised standards by design, not by accident.

What Breaks First In Contact Centres?

The first thing that breaks isn’t performance metrics. It’s belief. Belief that the work matters. Belief that anyone notices. Belief that I matter. By 2026, UK contact centres will have invested millions in AI, analytics, and workforce management systems. The dashboards will look brilliant. The technology will be sophisticated. But if leaders haven’t invested in daily human connection, they’ll have the machine of a contact centre without the heart of one.

Resetting Scheduling | Redefining Flexibility

A New Standard for Workforce Design, Planning Intelligence and People-Centred Operations

Forecasting With Foresight: Resetting and Redefining How We Look Ahead

Forecasting has always been about more than numbers. It is the disciplined art of looking ahead, balancing uncertainty with insight, shaping decisions at every level, and helping organisations respond with confidence rather than react out of pressure. In a world of volatility, shifting customer behaviours and increasing operational complexity, forecasting is no longer simply a technical function. It is a strategic capability, a cultural anchor, and a critical enabler of organisational agility. Yet, many organisations still view forecasting through a narrow lens: a model, a spreadsheet, a monthly cycle. This mindset limits its potential. To unlock the real value, forecasting needs a reset, and in many cases, a redefinition, so that it matches the scale of influence it was always meant to have.

Breaking Down Complexities in Scheduling Multi-Skilled, Multi-Channel Agents

Managing contact centres used to be hard. Now, it’s even harder.

Capacity Planning: The Mindset We Need to Reset and Start Redefining

Capacity planning has always looked cleaner on paper than it behaves in real life. We like to imagine tidy relationships between inputs and outputs, a straight line between demand, resource, and performance, even though queues react sharply, people behave unpredictably, and averages only tell part of the story. What makes this even harder is that much of the organisation still interprets planning through these linear assumptions, shaping expectations, decisions and pressure in ways that simply don’t match how operations function.

Redefining QA in a Modern, Automated World

Automated Quality Assurance is becoming more accessible, and many organisations are asking how and when to adopt it. Yet the more fundamental question is not “Why automate QA?” but “Why do QA at all?” Unless we revisit the purpose of quality, automation risks scaling outdated processes rather than unlocking new value.

Resetting AI Adoption in Customer Operations: From Tools to Capability

AI adoption in customer operations is not a technology problem. It is a capability, governance and mindset challenge.

The value of validation: How your capacity plan earns its credibility

Validation is the discipline of testing whether your capacity planning model reflects operational reality. Without it, errors can persist unnoticed, leading to overstaffing or understaffing by 10% or more, costing organisations in unnecessary spend or lost revenue. In a year where many teams are resetting and redefining how they plan, forecast and allocate resources, validation becomes more than a technical check. It is how confidence in decisionmaking is built and sustained. In this article, I explain what validation is, how to perform it effectively and why embedding it into your planning process is essential to keeping capacity plans credible and fit for purpose.

Benchmarking Sickness: Resetting How We Read the Numbers

Our latest shrinkage benchmarking survey shows average sickness absence at around 8%. At first glance, this appears higher than last year’s 7.6%, suggesting an upward trend. That conclusion would be misleading. A closer look shows the apparent increase is driven by sampling rather than worsening performance. As with last year, there is wide variation across organisations, with sickness rates ranging from around 3.8% to just over 20%. That spread matters far more than the headline average.

Shrinkage Revisited: From Benchmarking Numbers to Understanding Time

Shrinkage has always attracted attention, across our industry. It remains one of the most frequently requested benchmarks, often driven by a simple question: how do we compare to others? But as with many measures, that question can easily lead us in the wrong direction.

Using data from our latest shrinkage survey, this article builds on our earlier benchmarking work and takes the conversation a step further. Rather than asking what the “right” shrinkage figure is, we explore what the data reveals about how organisations use time, what they prioritise, and how well prepared they are for the complexity ahead.

This is not about redefining a new industry standard. It is about resetting how we interpret shrinkage and what we expect it to tell us.

Rethinking Skills in the Age of AI

As organisations move into a new era of work, we are being pushed to reset long-held assumptions about what capability looks like. Much like customer operations, our own skills and habits carry legacy thinking that no longer fits the world we now work in. AI is accelerating this shift. It challenges the skills we grew up with, changes how expertise is built and forces us to redefine what great looks like. This article explores that reset. It looks at the concerns people have today, the skills we may need to let go of, the new skills that will matter most and how we can use AI intelligently rather than passively. If we want to stay ahead, we need to rethink not just the tools we use, but the foundations of how we learn, decide and create value.

But to shape the future we first need to learn from the past...

The Power of New Perspectives: How Rising Stars Help Shape Change

Every year, we see through our awards programme, new waves of emerging talent. They show us that being fresh to a role is not a weakness but a catalyst for progress. These individuals step into unfamiliar territory and use their curiosity, learning agility, and instinct for improvement to reshape systems that have gone unchallenged. Their stories reveal a common truth: when someone is unburdened by history, they can see possibilities others have stopped noticing.