2021 Customer Strategy & Planning Speakers

For many organisations, outsourcing customer operations has historically been treated as a commercial transaction rather than a professional capability. Contracts are negotiated, suppliers are appointed, and governance frameworks are established to monitor performance. Yet despite the scale, complexity and strategic importance of these relationships, outsourcing is rarely managed with the same discipline applied to areas such as workforce planning, customer experience design or operational transformation. This gap is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Originally broadcasted on Thursday 19th March, 09:30

Resetting Insight explores how data, analytics and AI are moving from reporting to responsible, autonomous decision-making, and how organisations can embed insight directly into the systems that shape customer and colleague experiences.

Originally broadcasted on Wednesday 18th March, 12:30

Join QStory's David Preece for a tech showcase of our Back Office solution, Work Item Manager. This session will demonstrate how the system acts as a "Back Office ACD'" to accurately capture true handling times, measure agent productivity, and replace gut-feel planning with reliable, data-driven metrics.

Originally broadcasted on Wednesday 18th March, 09:30

Resetting Improvement explores how Quality, Learning, Knowledge and Continuous Improvement must evolve for a new era of customer operations, moving beyond legacy habits and outdated metrics toward adaptive frameworks, evidence‑based readiness and human‑centred performance that can thrive in the complexity of 2026 and beyond. 

Originally broadcast on Tuesday 17th March, 12:30

From Excel to Execution: A New Way to Plan Capacity
Most contact centres still rely on spreadsheets to plan capacity and staffing, even though the pace of change has outgrown static models. In this 45-minute joint technology workshop, Aspect and Cinareo will show why moving beyond Excel is no longer optional, and what good capacity planning discipline looks like in practice.

Originally broadcast on Tuesday 17th March, 09:30

This keynote challenges outdated thinking in Resource Planning and redefines forecasting, insight, scheduling and Real-Time as a single system of strategic intelligence.

Originally broadcast on Monday 16th March, 13:30

Join Hiya for a focused session on Branded Calling and how verified, identifiable outbound calls are transforming customer communication. As trust becomes critical to engagement, branded calling helps organizations improve answer rates, reduce call hesitation, and build confidence at the moment of contact. We’ll explore why it matters, how it aligns with evolving customer expectations, and practical ways to strengthen voice engagement.

Originally broadcast on Monday 16th March, 12:30

The Real-Time Workforce, Realign the Moment: How Real-Time Insights Reshape Performance
Our Gold Sponsors Verint explore how moving beyond traditional WFM unlocks a new era of performance and employee experience. We’ll walk through the journey to Reset, Redefine and Realign—resetting long‑held assumptions about coaching, redefining performance through real‑time behavioural insight, and empowering agents to realign instantly with live coaching, instant EX scoring, and flexible scheduling tools. 

Lastly, we come to the commercial metrics. These are largely financial measures and, in the private sector, they help us understand whether the business is succeeding.

Next, we turn to employee metrics. Vince Lombardi, one of the most successful American football coaches of all time, once said, “Happy employees lead to happy customers, which in turn leads to a successful business.”

Next come the customer metrics, the measures we use to understand whether we are meeting customer expectations.

The first group of measures and targets we will look at are planning metrics.

Originally Broadcast Thursday 16th October, 12:30

Join Route 101 for a dynamic session exploring how Zendesk can revolutionise back-office operations through intelligent omnichannel routing and email management.Discover how unstructured inboxes can be transformed into structured workflows, enabling smarter task planning, queue categorisation, and actionable analytics. With insights from Route 101’s systems integration experts, this showcase will highlight real-world examples and integrations - bridging the gap between back-office tasks, CCaaS, WFM and QM to unlock new efficiencies. 

Originally Broadcast Wednesday 15th October, 12:30

Compassion fatigue and how to help your teams to care without burning out. Every day, our colleagues are expected to show up with empathy for customers in vulnerable circumstances. But what happens when empathy itself becomes exhausting? That’s compassion fatigue. It’s not burnout - yet - but if ignored, it can take us there. Join Helen from the National Support Network in an interactive session. 

Originally Broadcast Tuesday 14th October, 12:30

What if supervisors and agents could chat to your WFM solution? What if resolving staffing issues took just one click? Workforce management (WFM) is entering a new era. Artificial intelligence is transforming the process of forecasting, scheduling, and employee engagement. In this session, Scott Budding from Calabrio unveils new Gen-AI capabilities with their award winning WFM including Agent and Supervisor Assist and Predictive Actions. The future of WFM is Workforce Intelligence. 

Originally Broadcast Monday 13th October, 12:30

Smarter. Faster. Stronger: How Verint Co-pilot Bots Supercharge Contact Centres. In today’s fast-paced customer experience landscape, efficiency and personalisation are no longer optional- they’re essential. Join us for an exclusive session as we reveal how Verint’s Co-pilot Bots are reshaping contact centres by automating micro-workflows, reducing average handling times, and significantly increasing agent capacity.

Originally Broadcast Monday 13th October, 10:30

Reset, Redefine & Raise Standards
This keynote launches the week by challenging us to turn intent into action. Explore how learning, reflection and ownership drive personal growth and organisational progress. Discover how tools like the Learning Tracker, Reflective Method, and the Learning Pyramid support continuous improvement. We'll explore how to break out of firefighting, align strategy with daily action, and shift from “being busy” to “making a difference”. It's time to reset habits, redefine success, and commit to doing things differently. Because done will always beat intended.

Messaging is popping up all over customer service teams. WhatsApp, in-app chat, SMS – you name it, someone’s testing it. But here’s the truth: just launching a messaging channel isn’t enough. Doing it well takes some serious thought.

The picture above, many will recognise, is the Severn Bridge. It is also the view from my friend’s back garden. It’s a magnificent view and connects England with Wales across a huge and extraordinary expanse of water. Bridges connect places: some are huge, others exceedingly small. Some are incredible feats of engineering, others a plank across a muddy gap. We use the word ‘bridge’ as a verb. Something we do. We ‘bridge the gap,’ and it is the gap that interests me more than the bridge. We ‘abridge’ books, shorten them into easier to access chunks, and it is the parts we choose to include, and exclude, that draws my attention.

Speech analytics has revolutionised how organisations manage customer interactions, progressing from its origins in large contact centres to becoming a critical enabler of real-time customer engagement. Historically, it was a resource-intensive tool housed on on-premise servers, primarily adopted by enterprises to optimise quality assurance (QA) processes, extract insights from customer interactions, and, in some cases, improve sales performance. Today, advancements in real-time analytics and large language models (LLMs) have vastly expanded its capabilities, introducing automation, efficiency, and real-time problem-solving into operational workflows.

Whether you love it or hate it, AI is here. AI has had a bigger impact on Contact Centres than Analytics, WFM, Quality Management, Insight Dashboards, and other technologies we’ve used over the years. It’s as significant in our lives as mobile phones, broadband at home, smart devices and IoT have been.

We all get fixed on forecasts, but none of us can see into the future. A forecast is basically a guess – an educated guess. What we can do is study what has happened in the past. By analysing past data for patterns and trends, we can make an educated guess about future outcomes. Unless we get lucky, it will probably be wrong.

Outsourcing is a tricky balancing act. Get it right, and it can transform your business. Get it wrong, and it can turn into a never-ending headache. Companies outsource for many reasons, like saving money, gaining expertise, or increasing scale. But success largely depends on managing the relationship well. To make outsourcing successful, follow these tips and avoid common mistakes. Also, learn why some businesses choose multiple outsourcers to spread their risk.

In recent years, more and more companies have started to recognise the importance of mental health and stress management in the workplace. As businesses realise how stress impacts not just employees but also the overall success of their organisation and customer satisfaction, many have rolled out initiatives like flexible working hours, wellness programs, and policies promoting work-life balance. These all sound great in theory, right?

How can we combine data and human intuition to drive continuous improvement? Today, there is huge excitement about the potential of data, machine learning, and AI. With these tools, we’re capturing more data than ever. We’re pushing our analysis to new heights.

Why haven’t we covered this topic on its own before? Probably because it isn’t the most exciting topic ever. However, we can change our mindset. If we view compliance and risk management differently, we can make data governance an engaging and valuable initiative. This will excite teams and align with broader business goals.

This is a new term that is starting to be used in our industry. So I thought I would look into this in detail. Is this a leap forward for our industry? Or, is it another tech advance that promises much but won’t change much? I have found one thing. When people consider the implications, they don’t grasp the real world Team Leaders and their teams inhabit.

Customers are key to the success of our operation. Understanding their needs, wants and frustrations allows us to set the right strategies. In recent networking groups we have been discussing customer insight. What data do we have? How can we use this? What are the challenges. In this article I will be sharing some of my learning from these groups.

With rising customer complaints, organisations must focus on complaints management. It’s now critical in all sectors. Businesses from banking to telecoms and retail, face rising customer dissatisfaction. This article looks at rising complaints and the challenges for organisations. It discusses how data-driven strategies and empowered staff can help manage them.

Step up to the challenge for intra-day leadership and a bright future for real-time readiness and effectiveness.