2020 Customer Strategy & Planning Speakers

See how a new end-to-end planning tool has delivered consistency, control and agility whilst freeing up time to transform the role of the planning analyst at Barclaycard.

See how cohesive leadership, powerful customer insight and a re-orientation of coaching to focus on great conversations combine to deliver large scale corporate transformation.

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.

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.

Originally broadcast Tuesday 29th September 2020, 12:30

How to deploy Google AI within 30 minutes in your Contact Centre. Sabio demonstrate how advanced AI from Google can be deployed on web, messaging and voice channels starting from scratch to go live within 30 minutes.

Originally broadcast Tuesday 29th 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.

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.

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.

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?

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 Monday 30th November 2020, 12:30

See how data, technology and empathy can manage the customer experience. TMAC demonstrates real-life examples of  next best action, speech analytics and data-led team coaching working in tandem to drive revenue and create positive experiences for customers and agents alike. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Facilitation is a valuable skill for any professional. Learn how you can manage a session so everyone can be share and be heard.

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. 

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.

Originally broadcast Tuesday 27th April. 2021, 13:15

AI & Automation Following on from Sabio’s session earlier in the day, Stu Dorman, Chief Innovation Officer at Sabio will showcase the use of AI, Automation and Intent Capture and Analysis in more detail and explore how and why these are so rapidly evolving. Join us to learn how different approaches fit together in organisations that are making best use of these technologies.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Originally broadcast Friday 30th April 2021, 09:30

Hear from Phil Anderson, Director at The Forum on moving from Impossible to Inevitable. This endnote will explore different ways to transform as a person, as a team and as an organisation. Take a closer look at key professional skills and hear from a panel of professionals who have all demonstrated how they are key to unlocking opportunities, several of them graduates from our Leadership Assisted Learning Pathway.

Sensée, the work-from-home specialist, is creating 500 new permanent and temporary positions to meet the growing demand for homeworking staff.

The vacancies are for Customer Contact Advisors, Team Managers and back office staff to work for new and existing clients. Start dates are immediate.

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.

The trend towards flexible workforces has exaggerated the complexity of running a modern contact centre. Make simplicity a top priority.  That’s the verdict of Ross Daniels at Calabrio who shares a 5-point strategy to kickstart your journey towards simplification

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.

On Tuesday 12th October 2021, Lou Carter, founder of Rising Vibe, delivered her very first TEDx talk; Curiosity Cured The Fakeaholic, which explored how our innate fear of judgement stops us being honest about how we feel. A by-product of this is that we don’t have the conversations that matter…

Find out how Alvaria is helping enterprise contact centres reimagine the employee experience, 16 –17 November at Call & Contact Centre Expo, Europe’s leading call and contact centre event, at booth # CC-AJ44. 

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.

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.

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. 

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, 13:15

Getting started with Machine Learning and introduction for analysts. 

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 Thursday 4th November 2021, 10:30

Learn how Verint’s clients adopted Verint KM to close the gap between ever increasing customer interactions, channels, and expectations, with the same or reducing resource levels. 

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.

Using game mechanics motivates and engages call centre employees seamlessly while aligning employee behaviours to company goals – results in improved employee retention, performance, customer satisfaction and profitability.

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.

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.

There is no doubt employee engagement has never been a higher business priority—especially for contact centers. The necessity to quickly move from a primarily on-premises to remote workforce due to COVID-19 caught many companies off-guard.

Business Systems, Integrated Care 24 and CLEO Systems are delighted to announce that its NICE Nexidia Speech and Text Analytics project has been shortlisted for Best Healthcare Analytics Project for the NHS at the HSJ Partnership Awards 2022, recognising their outstanding contribution to healthcare – in what has been an exceptional and challenging period across the sector.

Using game mechanics motivates and engages call centre employees seamlessly while aligning employee behaviours to company goals — which results in improved employee retention, performance, customer satisfaction and profitability. 

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”.

• Understand how to control your attrition and benchmark against the industry.
• Develop an attraction strategy, helping to develop careers.
• Learn how to manage absence to reduce the impact of Pandemic related sickness.

Learn more about the current lending technology landscape – how wider society impacts lending patterns and the role of digitalisation in lending and repayments. Plus, find out more about impact of new lending models such as Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL).  

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.

We all want a positive customer experience in our contact centres. Often, this can only be achieved when your staff are motivated, engaged, and experience the work-life balance they require. Companies are seeing the importance of the overall wellbeing of their staff at all levels – and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Calabrio’s Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Toolkit provides insights and resources to help identify common challenges and provide ideas for improvements that will positively impact employees, as well as customers.

Stress is a major barrier to success and it is affecting everyone.  In a new three-part series Ross Daniels introduces Calabrio’s campaign to support improvements for people, processes and technology to enable greater wellbeing across contact centre organisations.  This first article outlines the key triggers for agents, supervisors and senior managers and shows why it pays to take a comprehensive approach to organisational wellbeing.
 

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. 

Alvaria, the world leader in enterprise-scale customer experience and workforce engagement management, recently introduced Alvaria Real Time Optimizer, a new cloud application of the Alvaria Workforce Engagement Management Suite that enhances the contact centre agent experience. 

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, 09:30

Hear from Lucy O'Shea, Hoist Finance a member of our Leaders of the Future programme, and the Forum team on how to gain the confidence to move ahead and move up. 

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

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?

At our Customer Strategy & Planning Connections conference in Newcastle on 26th April ‘22 we explored probability using Liquorice Allsorts.

Following the pandemic, the definition of customer experience has been redefined. They expect outstanding service using the channels they prefer (voice, video, text, chat, etc.), with agents who are knowledgeable and empowered to problem-solve quickly. At the same time, work-from-anywhere trends have created new opportunities and challenges in delivering exceptional customer experience.  

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).

Accelerate ‘22 is the fastest way to access Alvaria resources including updates on the product roadmap, executive perspective thought leadership sessions, tips and tricks, success stories, use cases, company announcements and more.  

In today's day and age, a negative customer experience can make or break an organisation's reputation. Delivering a good customer experience is now pivotal to how customers perceive a brand, and this is only intensified when operating within the healthcare space. 

The partnership will improve agent engagement and provide an effortless service for outstanding customer experience.

Detailed Answers to Common Cloud Questions from Leading Solution Providers

Centrical is pleased to announce that OVO Energy, the UK’s third largest energy supplier, has chosen Centrical to support team engagement, and to deliver personalised learning and development pathways across their customer care operations. 

Sunnyvale, CA (October 3, 2022): eGain Corporation (NASDAQ: EGAN), the leading knowledge management platform provider for customer engagement automation, today announced that it has been named in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for Customer Service Knowledge Management Systems. 

Filling contact centre roles used to be easy. Full time? No problem. Temporary staff? Easy. All within 10 miles of the contact centre? Sure. But fast forward to today, and this is no longer the case. 

Originally broadcast Monday 14th November 2022, 09:30

Hear from Chris & Phil as they discuss the benefits of being prepared.

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. 

Originally broadcast Monday 14th November 2022, 12:30

Are your agents empowered to be Brand Guardians? Join Tripti Tapuriah-Modi and David Evans from Calabrio who will discussing key findings from Calabrio’s State of the Contact 2022 report and how to treat and empower agents as Brand Guardians.

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.

Originally broadcast Tuesday 15th November 2022, 12:30

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.

Originally broadcast Wednesday 16th November 2022, 09:30

Hear from Rob Hanrahan, CEO of miPerform.

Originally broadcast Wednesday 16th November 2022, 13:15

Tips for the successful selection and procurement of CX Technology CX technology alone rarely delivers the beneficial impact and financial returns promised – as successful adoption needs more than just a great technology solution. Hear from Davies Group.

Originally broadcast Thursday 17th November 2022, 09:30

Calibration is a fundamental necessity of any Quality Assurance, development, and improvement process.  Hear from BPA Quality & L&Q.

Originally broadcast Thursday 17th November 2022, 12:30

Join eGain for a discussion on Knowledge Hubs and how to Turbocharge your CX and AX with KX (Knowledge-Guided Experience).

Originally broadcast Friday 18th November 2022, 12:30

Hear from a Forum Hero and organisations who have taken a team approach to learning.

Alvaria Automate™ Attended and  Alvaria Automate™ Unattended allows centres to optimise normal and repetitive operational activities and automate error-prone tasks through robotic process automation (RPA) —improving accuracy, efficiency and consistency, while helping maintain compliance. 

Hammersmith, London. Sensée is delighted to announce that its LiveDesk™ application to create Digital Workplaces for hybrid working front and back-office environments is now available through Crown Commercial Service’s (CCS) G-Cloud 13 Government Framework to public sector organisations.

With 2023 just around the corner, it is time to look at what the next 12 months might hold. It seems clear that some of the trends that emerged during the pandemic will continue to manifest. For example, hybrid working models have become deeply ingrained throughout society and the staffing challenges of recruiting and retaining the right people are unlikely to go away. However, there are other factors that will likely come to the fore in 2023 that may need automation technology investment to fix. 

Staff turnover is higher in the contact center than in almost any other industry. A common assumption is that call center attrition is simply a fact of life - it can't be controlled or 'fixed'. I'd like to challenge that assumption. One of the responsibilities of call center managers and team leaders is to constantly assess the reasons why people leave the center. Perhaps more importantly, it’s also critical to talk to happy staff and find out what keeps them there and constantly strive to reduce unwanted turnover.

UK businesses are firmly committed to a flexible working future but the majority are still in the planning stage of their hybrid working projects according to a new industry survey of contact centre industry professionals.

What is your contact center service level goal? Odds are, some or all of the groups are at either 80/20, 70/30 or some combination of those. They are extremely common. Do you use average speed of answer (ASA)? If so, is it 20 seconds or 30 seconds? Those are by far the most utilized ASAs. But what do these actually mean and how do you know if you have the right measure?

These familiar metrics are critical to managing every contact center. And it’s vital to take them into account properly within the workforce management process. The problem is, they all sound very similar and are sometimes confused with one another. Let’s examine them one by one.

Matt Rumins, European Head of Customer Success at Intradiem, argues that while these technologies can empower humans, they neither can nor should ever replace them. 

Keir Woolhouse, Commercial Director at miPerform, writes about how virtually every COO/senior contact centre leader is struggling to meet their KPI/Service Level targets with the resources available to them.

Join Alvaria on 18^th April at 4:00 PM BST for the webinar, Is Automation and AI Taking Over the Call Centre? Does the “Less Human” Approach Work with Your Customers?  

We build strength when we focus on how we collaborate and who we do this with. When we bring together trusted data, analysis and insight alongside a group of people with a collective desire to improve, we can achieve greatness.

Powerful member stories reveal a sea-change in empowering operational teams and developing the role of real-time in our new hybrid world. Alison Conaghan and Dave Vernon explore the operational end of the planning cycle.

As planners do we see time away from the operation mainly as a cost to control? Instead, how could we analyse where each different area of shrinkage time is adding value? We need to look from the colleague as well as the customer and commercial point of view.

Dave Vernon explores how we can look at shrinkage as a value not a loss, and change how we think about shrinkage targets.