2021 Customer Strategy & Planning Speakers

Originally broadcast Friday 28th March 2025 at 13:30

Closing the week with practical tips on how to use learning to drive action and raise standards. 

Originally broadcast Friday 28th March at 09:30

Celebrating 25 years of the Innovation & Transformation Awards, this keynote takes a look back from a finalist and judges perspective. Discussing key industry shifts, from workforce flexibility and real-time analytics to automation and omnichannel experiences. We will also explore what the next 25 years of Raising Standards could look like.

Driving the Next Chapter of WEM
Join Calabrio showcasing the latest innovations, enhanced capabilities, and strategic advancements in Calabrio ONE. Discover how their newest features are designed to elevate agent engagement, workforce optimisation, and analytics, helping organisations increase productivity, reduce attrition, and provide better sales and services to customers.

Originally broadcast Wednesday 26th March at 12:30

Moving from AI Experiments to AI Success in the Contact Centre and Beyond
Hear inspiring success stories from Verint customers who have transformed their operations with AI. Learn how they overcame challenges, achieved efficiencies, and delivered exceptional customer experiences. Discover practical steps to move from AI experiments to tangible successes, and gain insights for your own AI initiatives.

Originally broadcast Tuesday 25th March 2025 at 13:30

WFM Augmentation 
AI and Robotic assistance are buzz words and topics amongst the industry at the moment. NICE demonstrates how technology is supporting the operation, both from an agent experience viewpoint and an administrative and operational perspective. Practical application and examples of AI in the contact centre

Originally broadcast Monday 24th March 2025, 10:30

Membership – The Value of a Professional Community
Talking with members Anglian Water Services, Aviva UKGI and PTSB and discussing how they get value from being part of a professional community and the items that gives them the most value for their teams, organisation and personally

Originally broadcast Monday 24th March 2025, 09:30

The Forum has spent 25 years building a vibrant, future-focused community that embraces change, disrupts complacency, and fuels innovation. As we look ahead to the next 25 years, the challenge isn’t just keeping up—it’s leading the way. Join us on this journey of continuous improvement, where we redefine what’s possible, break through limitations, and shape the future of business excellence.

Originally broadcast Monday 14th October 2024, 13:30

Hear from Chris and Dave, Directors at The Forum as they take you through some of the learning journeys of our members and how our cloud-based Learning Management System is enhancing the learner experience. 

Originally broadcast Monday 14th October 2024, 12:30

Hear from members who have completed the Standards Benchmarking process to understand how they approached the self-assessment process and implemented change from their learning. 45mins

Originally broadcast Monday 14th October 2024, 10:30

This year we challenged you to Shape Your Future, but is the future already here?

Originally broadcast Thursday 4th July, 13:15

Join our Associate Heroes as they share their key ingredients for the perfect partnership

Originally broadcast Wednesday 3rd July, 10:30

In this session our Partnership Awards Judges will share their highlights from this year's finalists stories. Sharing what has inspired them, and the learning that they have taken from the process. 

Originally broadcast Tuesday 2nd July, 10:30

Learn from overall Innovation of the Year winners, indeed on Leading Global Transformation and OVO Energy talking about their Service Transformation.

Originally broadcast Tuesday 2nd July 09:30

How you can use this week to learn from our members. 

Calabrio, the workforce performance company, announced its new suite of Bot Analytics tools for Quality Management (QM). Bot Analytics gives contact centres more performance data and insights to streamline and enhance the user experience.  

Calabrio’s Bot Analytics helps monitor and improve the performance and quality of chatbots and voicebots; organising all transcript conversations into topics, simplifying the review process, and making it easier to address issues efficiently.  

Originally broadcast on Friday 17th May, 12:30.

Rounding off the virtual conference and first stage of this year's best practice programme with inspiration, ideas and clear next steps. This endnote will support your learning, and give you takeaway ideas on how to turn this into an action plan. 

Originally broadcast Monday 13th May, 09:30

How can we prepare ourselves for whatever happens? How can we think forward and be confident with our best next decisions?

Hear from The Forum’s team of Specialists as they each share their inspiration thoughts on how to Shape the Future.

This collaborative and professional partnership has revolutionised back office operations and enhanced customer experiences at Vitality Health. The deployment of Verint Operational Manager has given visibility, streamlined processes, improved data analytics, and facilitated better demand planning. The outcome was not only a substantial increase in operational efficiency but also a significant reduction in customer complaint resolution times, reduced from two months to 72 hours. A strong sense of professionalism and a governance framework has been key to delivering and demonstrating the success of this implementation.
 

Collaboration and joint ownership of the plan has been key to the success of the implementation of a WFM solution, tailored to the aviation industry. This has supported LBA’s passenger growth and service delivery expectations and enabled a consolidation and centralisation of their planning and forecasting functions. There is now a clear view of workload and staffing levels, this has enabled data-led decision making to improve operational performance, queues in security have been reduced and SLAs with airlines are being met, all helping the airport to bounce back post pandemic.

A consultative approach from SVL identified that Calabrio would provide Hoover Candy with a tool that not only reduced manual processes but also delivered self-service functionality for agents to have more control over their schedules. SVL worked closely with Hoover Candy to plan the roadmap forthe roll out to focus on areas that would get buy in from internal stakeholders early in the process and to resolve technical issues with some of the key interfaces. Open communication and a deep understanding of their clients’ needs has been key to the success of this relationship.

In a strategic partnership with Sabio, DHL Express UK embarked on transforming its resource planning and employee engagement, addressing staffing inconsistencies and inefficiencies. By overhauling their Workforce Management system, focussing on accuracy, optimisation, and schedule flexibility, they achieved significant improvements in forecast accuracy, resource efficiency, and employee satisfaction. Sabio took time to understand DHL, and their service goals, and worked hard to support and upskill the team at DHL. These efforts led to marked cost savings, showcasing the value of leveraging technology and innovation in the logistics industry.

A mature and established partnership between QStory and Jet2holidays delivered an extremely successful intraday automation implementation, which has been a great enabler for Jet2holidays homeworking model. Once they had a better visibility of their absence, QStory supported Jet2holidays with the establishment of a centralised absence management function SMART. The QStory policy of retaining 30% of developer time to be available to work on customer requests has been a real enabler for this change, ROI and stakeholder impact has been positive. Jet2holidays are so delighted that QStory were awarded one of their coveted supplier awards.

Driven by a goal to discover whether NICE’s NEVA technology could be used to support scheduling activities, NICE and BT Group worked together as one team to design a solution. By adopting NICE’s NEVA technology, they were able to reduce the number of interdependent systems, remove transactional work, and create new skills and career development opportunities for schedulers to learn robotics. This venture was built on mutual respect, open communication, and shared goals, and created a new use case for NEVA which works for BT Group and which NICE can share with their customers.

miPerform and Northumbrian Water have been working in partnership since 2020 to redefine the boundaries of client and technology collaboration. At the heart of this partnership is a joint vision to deliver customer service excellence through empowering agents and enabling self-management, through deployment of an innovative toolset that supports peer-to-peer benchmarking, gamification, transparency, and fairness of reward. The operational background of the team at miPerform has been key to success; they understand what is important, combined with rapid response times, shared goals and an openness to learning and challenge. This is a very successful and embedded partnership.

This pioneering partnership teamed up to enhance customer service through improved voice communication. They tackled the common challenge of background noise in contact centres, leading to a significant uplift in call quality and operational effectiveness. Leveraging Iris Clarity’s advanced audio technology, which uses AI for voice isolation, the collaboration has notably elevated customer experience by ensuring clearer communication and increased satisfaction. Beyond solving a practical issue, this partnership demonstrates the impact of technological innovation in setting new benchmarks for empathetic and efficient customer service, with exciting potential for broader applications.

This open and trusting partnership has delivered on the selection and configuration of the best fit interaction analytics platform for Dwr Cymru Welsh Water. Davies, through their Managed Analytics service trained the team and helped them to identify priorities, and scale problems to ensure that they did not try to do too much all at once, and ROI was achieved. A process issue affecting one vulnerable customer was identified, queries revealed the extent of the customer base that could be affected by this flaw, this enabled them to make a change to the process, improving services for their most vulnerable customers. Results include a reduction in verbal complaints of 15%, a reduction in AHT by 35 seconds, and a speed up of the investigation process from 14 days, to just one day.

In a strategic collaboration, global retailer TJX and Davies revolutionised employee onboarding, focussing on decentralised training and soft skills. Incorporating digital learning and aligning with cultural values, they achieved a 300% investment return, which included a reduction in the glide path to productivity in the contact centre from 8 weeks to 6 weeks. This partnership not only enhanced employee engagement and customer service for TK Maxx and HomeSense but also established new benchmarks for training excellence, an increase in empathy and rapport with customers with a positive impact oncustomer loyalty.

This strong, responsive, and mature partnership has delivered the first ever integration of the OPX back-office system with NICE, and the first integration that NICE has had with a back-office system. Student Loans now has full visibility of staff across the estate, allowing for the dynamic allocation of staff to different roles based on changing needs and operational priorities. Frequent and transparent communication at many levels, and easy access for the SLC team with CMS developers really helped to deliver a solution that meets their customers’ needs. ROI is very impressive, with £925k in year one and savings of up to £3.6m per annum.

A cohesive and genuine partnership underpinned the introduction of an employee engagement platform. Both teams worked very closely, even before contracts were exchanged and Ocado became a design partner of Centrical.bThe vision for the launch was to reduce the complexity for leaders, it was important that this was not just another link to follow, another set of data or another system to log in to. During the design partner program, they worked closely to understand the key requirements of Ocado’s QA programme, and how Centrical could support this directly within the platform. QA was not an existing feature, but through their close partnership, this new feature was brought to life and the Centrical system rapidly became a one stop shop for all employee engagement, performance management, rewards and recognition, and quality management, allowing the platform branded internally as ‘Mint’ to become an integral tool to the business.

Through partnering with Business Systems to implement Calabrio, Motorway has experienced significant improvements in their WFM and Planning operations. These include substantial improvements to adherence, equivalent to 30 FTE per week, a considerable increase in the efficiency of internal processes such as holiday requests, and the fostering of an overall more positive work environment resulting in greater employee satisfaction and improved customer service. Through innovative problem-solving and dedicated teamwork, they overcame challenges in integrating systems, delivering significant operational improvements and financial benefits. Shared goals and a willingness to “walk in their customers’ shoes” were key elements of this successful partnership – we understand that Neil did get a good price for his car!