2025 Best Practice Guide
Raising Standards

Conferences

The Forum holds key conferences through out the year including our flagship Spring Customer Strategy and Planning, Summer Best Practice Showcase and Autumn #RaisingStandards conferences that offer a great opportunity to learn, share and network.

2025 Summer Best Practice Showcase (Virtual)

16th June - 22nd August 2025

Learn WHAT our award finalists are doing to continue “Raising Standards in Customer Operations”
This conference offers a unique chance for you to learn directly from our Awards winners. You will hear from the teams and individuals who are making a difference in their business, powerful partnerships whether that is with a technology provider or an outsource partnership. Finally, you can discover how large transformation projects have made massive changes in any business.

2025 Autumn: #RaisingStandards (Virtual)

13th - 17th October 2025

Learn HOW you can apply "Best Practice"
Designed specifically for Planning, Insight and Quality & Customer Experience Professionals. Learn first-hand from practitioners and business leaders who are delivering successful change whilst having the opportunity to collaborate with others. Bring new ideas and techniques back that will raise standards within your “Customer Operation”.

2025 Autumn Conference #RaisingStandards (In-Person)

Wednesday 5th November 2025, Coventry Building Society Arena

Learn HOW our community is applying “Best Practice”
This conference is designed specifically for Planning, Insight and Quality & Customer Experience Professionals. Learn first-hand from practitioners and business leaders who are delivering successful change whilst having the opportunity to collaborate with others. Bring new ideas and techniques back that will raise standards within your “Customer Operation”.

2026 Spring Customer Strategy & Planning Conference (In-person)

Tuesday 28th April 2026, Grand Hotel Gosforth Park, Newcastle

Learn WHY we need to keep “Raising Standards in Customer Operations" 
Our flagship Conference, this highly rated event is far more than just a conference. Designed specifically to focus on the hot topics within the industry and thought leadership whilst also delivering practical skills with new ways of thinking that will enhance you as a person. 

On-Demand Conferences

Catch up on the presentations from our previous conferences.
Best Practice in Quality & Improvement Assisted Learning Pathway

Best Practice in Quality & Improvement Assisted Learning Pathway

This course is for professionals, who want to make a tangible difference over the coming year, with robust frameworks for quality and improvement, based on proven methods.  Through the programme, you will:

- Learn how to put customer experience and quality at the heart of your operating model & culture.
- Understand how a fit-for-purpose monitoring & prioritisation framework can drive improvement and be able to apply this in your work.
- Learn how to drive powerful improvement, using data and feedback, for service recovery, process improvement and behavioural change.
- See what best practice looks like, with insight from practical examples, emerging trends and top tips, seeing how to avoid key pitfalls.

Customer Closeness & The ‘Advisor Of The Future’ At The Very Group

Customer Closeness & The ‘Advisor Of The Future’ At The Very Group

See how end-to-end customer journey improvements worth half a million pounds have been delivered within a year, driven by advisors in the model office, using agile transformation methods. 

Summary
Located at The Very Group’s HQ, the Customer Closeness Centre (CCC) combines model office principles with agile methodology to detect, explore and fix problems, applying a ‘fail fast’ approach to test solutions, before implementing across the contact centres. Here, a specially-supported team of 14 Customer Experience Experts, hand-picked to challenge the status quo, rotate fortnightly between two complementary roles. In the Customer Zone, they handle the digital retailer’s calls/webchat at an exceptional performance level, share insight, and help model how the ‘advisor of the future’ might look. In the Agile Zone, a three-stage process goes from root cause through solution-build to implementation. In just 28 sprints, this approach has identified £2m+ in potential savings, driving £550k in benefits to date in areas including knowledge management and automation. 

Free Webinar - 2020 Vision: Crystallising your knowledge Launch

Free Webinar - 2020 Vision: Crystallising your knowledge Launch

2020 is The Forum’s 20th year and this year we want to look back on our first 20-years and think ahead for the next 20-years. Our vision, back in 2000, was and remains to raise standards in customer operations helping to set standards across Planning, Insight and Quality. Now, having established communities of best practice we can continue to raise standards and prepare for the future.

This year’s theme refers to the clarity and sharpness of vision required to purposely move forward towards your targets, goals and dreams. Whilst recognising the benefit of our fluid thinking over the past 20-years to crystallise our knowledge of best practice and standards.

 - “Purpose, Learning and Self-Awareness” Keynote from The Forum’s Phil Anderson
 - 2020 Best Practice Guide launch and chapter review
 - 2020 Best Practice Programme – how to get involved

1-Day Influencing Skills for Analysts & Managers

1-Day Influencing Skills for Analysts & Managers

Learn how decisions are made, utilise behavioural preferences and identify the preferences of those we want to influence. After this course you will;

  • Understand the concept of influencing vs manipulation
  • Be able to apply social styles and six key principles to aid influencing
  • Appreciate how humans make decisions
  • Take away methods to try in the workplace
1-Day Feedback & Coaching for analysts

1-Day Feedback & Coaching for analysts

Learn techniques and explores coaching in the context of feedback and performance improvement as colleague, mentor or manager. After this course, you will;

  • Understand the role of feedback and be able to articulate best practice
  • Have developed and practised coaching skills
  • Know how to use coaching style questions to deliver feedback
Introduction to Continuous Improvement Methodologies

Introduction to Continuous Improvement Methodologies

Understand some of the key models, theories and tools which can simplify your processes and ways of working. Consider the opportunity to improve by applying CI principles to how you plan, schedule and manage your resources.

Scientific Methods

Scientific Methods

The Scientific method is a great way to structure your analysis to produce measurable and repeatable results.  In this webinar we will look at:

- What is the scientific method?

- Creating a hypothesis

- Testing your hypothesis

As a member, you are not on your own but part of a community with others facing many similar challenges. We are here to help you to make a tangible impact in your organisation and show how developing the capability of each specialist professional function is fundamental to your business.
Book for one of our events to experience our exceptional community or get in touch to talk about how we can help you and your teams to be fully effective in adding value to your business. Email advice@theforum.social, call 0333 123 5960 or contact any of The Forum Team