20 Transformational Innovations Changing the Future of Work

Celebrating the 20 finalists from this year’s Innovation & Transformation awards. Trailblazers who are redefining workforce planning, customer experience, and operational excellence. From AI to culture change, these organisations are proving that bold thinking drives real-world results.

2015 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Customer Insight: Closing the loop at Allianz

How data, communication, analysis & rigour, from the insight team, underpin customer improvements at Allianz, by collaboration with leaders, operations teams, underwriters, marketing, QA & risk.

2015 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Homeworking - A flexible working culture at LV=

Learn how homeworking at LV= has boosted morale, improved customer experience, raised productivity and delivered a £2.3 million return on investment.

2015 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Transforming planning and sharing best practice at Ageas

See how Planning & Performance Analysts at Ageas delivered improved stakeholder engagement leading to a full redesign of the efficiency metrics lifting adherence by 3.33% and contributing to reducing attrition by 5%.

2016 Innovation & Transformation Awards: 52 Weeks of Green: focus on operational performance at Direct Line Group

See how planning and front line operations teams developed outstanding collaboration and buy-in, as a result of an absolute, shared focus on service consistency, every single week of the year.

2016 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Follow the money: Insight drives improvement at RSA

End-to-end improvement of process & policy is saving millions of pounds at RSA, by approaching insight in ways that establish a culture of continuous improvement in claims processing.

2017 Innovation & Transformation Awards: The human touch: is it easy to make the right choice? at Aegon

See how behavioural psychology has transformed sales and put the customer first, with great conversations, based on new scripts and training that gives the confidence to go beyond them.

2018 Innovation Award Winners

The Innovation of the Year 2018 award was won by Homeserve; an organisation centred on people and customers. In achieving commercial success and building community engagement, front-line teams re-connected with the organisation’s purpose, to rebuild trust. Marked out by judges as one of the best entries they’ve ever seen, this is a story everyone can learn from and be inspired by. They were also presented with the Innovation Award for Social Transformation.

2021 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Click Mechanic

At Click Mechanic for instance, highly commended by judges, they aim to bring transparency, trust, and convenience to car repairs, identifying a clear gap in the market. This is made possible by an operating model that’s truly joined up, creating a seamless journey that removes effort for both mechanics and customers. Another key ingredient of success is an innovative quote engine, in a simple-to-use app, that brings together data from a variety of sources and uses machine learning to generate simple, fixed-price quotes.

2021 Insight Awards: FIS

At FIS (the global financial payment giant), they have created a risk thermostat that clients can adjust, by generating a score not a binary decision, cutting fraud and saving costs.

2021 Insight Awards: Three Ireland

At Three Ireland (Team of the Year 2021) automation is also the first policy for all reporting, and they focus on how to remove blind spots (turning unknowns into knowns). Work requests are prioritised through the clear use of problem statements and a full reporting audit is undertaken every three months.

2021 Partnership Awards: Sainsburys Bank x Webhelp

Sainsburys Bank and WebHelp demonstrated an outstanding client-outsourcer partnership, with WebHelp’s exceptional focus on looking beyond just cost benefit, adding real, further value for the bank, including new work on analytics.

2023 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Creating time for meaningful conversations at Water Plus

2023 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Creating time for meaningful conversations at Water Plus
At the heart of the Innovation & Centre of Excellence is an internal talent growth programme driving improvement through automation and robotics. This isn’t about replacing people, this is about releasing mundane tasks that shouldn’t take a human to do, so the humans can add real value to customers.

2023 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Unlocking the power of data and actionable insight at Firstsource

2023 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Unlocking the power of data and actionable insight at Firstsource
Maximising the power of data to build a capability providing insight and foresight into risks that would otherwise disrupt the operation. Information is no longer dealt with in isolation as the platform brings different teams together to discuss and plan jointly.

2023 Insight Awards: Automation delivers a step change in customer service at Water Plus

2023 Insight Awards: Automation delivers a step change in customer service at Water Plus
Using robots, the team are simplifying processes for their advisors and their customers. Automating time consuming processes is removing the risk of human error and freeing up time to focus on the customer. This has helped to improve efficiency, reduce complaints and increase customer satisfaction.

2023 Insight Awards: Desktop analytics in the back office at Firstsource

2023 Insight Awards: Desktop analytics in the back office at Firstsource
The team have leveraged data analytics for back office operations. They have integrated many data sources with existing desktop analytics tools. This allowed them to identify many opportunities for improvement. Small transformations are delivering significant benefits.

2023 Insight Awards: Empowering people to help themselves at NFU Mutual Agencies

2023 Insight Awards: Empowering people to help themselves at NFU Mutual Agencies
Connecting data to processes has allowed the team to drive insight-led improvement. Understanding variation across their network is highlighting opportunities. Projection based dashboards then allow stakeholders to do “What if?” analysis to predict the outcomes of their decisions.

2023 Insight Awards: Focussing MI on what matters most to do more with less at FedEx

2023 Insight Awards: Focussing MI on what matters most to do more with less at FedEx
Resource challenges made the team think differently about MI. Making life simpler for their audience, they have removed the noise and produced automated Power BI Dashboards. This allowed the team to do more with less resources.

2023 Insight Awards: Holly Smith at Macmillan Cancer Support

Holly Smith used skills she had developed to automate reporting at Macmillan Cancer Support. Building simple excel based robots, she is making it easier for her colleagues to log and update work, saving time and reducing errors.

2023 Insight Awards: Isha Saxena at Firstsource

Isha Saxena has been a driving force behind the team success at Firstsource. Setting up the right data architecture and frameworks has enabled her to quickly produce automated Power BI dashboards. This has built trust and helps business leaders with strategic decision-making.

2023 Insight Awards: Lauren Magee at North Yorkshire County Council

Lauren Magee has used data to tell stories and bring together colleagues at North Yorkshire County Council to work towards a common goal. Regular collaboration sessions pulled together different skills, knowledge and ideas, to develop a self-service portal and chatbots, driving a channel shift for their customers.

2023 Insight Awards: Maritza Soto Vasquez at Legal & General

Maritza Soto Vasquez left a successful career as an astrophysicist to join the team at Legal & General. She identified transferable skills and introduced a scientific approach to insight. Maritza is now sharing her skills training her colleagues in tools such as Python.

2023 Insight Awards: Megan Hutchens at L&Q

Megan Hutchens looked outside planning for solutions to a planning challenge at L&Q. High handle times meant that they were unable to answer calls within agreed service levels. Analysing the data identified opportunities to improve and effective coaching has improved efficiency, reduced costs and improved service levels.

2023 Insight Awards: Stuart Marr at RSA

Stuart Marr has played a key role in introducing Interaction analytics to RSA. Aligning to company values and putting equal emphasis on speech and text he has built an automated QA model. This allows the QA team to focus on coaching and improvement.

2023 Planning Awards: Darren Harvey at Firstsource

2023 Planning Awards: Darren Harvey at Firstsource works on very varied accounts but always looks to deliver proactive plans to improve performance across these clients. He has worked closely with them to improve efficiencies and standardised reporting which has delivered significant savings.

2023 Planning Awards: Planners have interrogated their data to thoroughly understand issues at Hoover Candy

2023 Planning Awards: Planners have interrogated their data to thoroughly understand issues at Hoover Candy
Challenging their software vendors uncovered issues that also impacted other customers. They’ve built relationships with stakeholders, who now trust the information provided. And a new Pathway to Planning offers advisors new career choices. Participants have even become informal planning champions in their teams!

2023 Planning Awards: See how data scientists are transforming customer journeys at Legal & General

2023 Planning Awards: See how data scientists are transforming customer journeys at Legal & General
Gathering information form front-line staff has mode possible automated workflows for 27,000 customers per month and led to greatly improved customer journeys. This has increased engagement with the operation. And it’s reduced repeat contacts, increasing the value that advisors can add to each call.

2023 Planning Awards: Tabitha Cantrell at Hoover Candy

2023 Planning Awards: Tabitha Cantrell at Hoover Candy interrogated the data supplied by their systems to uncover errors and gained the trust of both operations and the supplier.

2023 Planning Awards: Tom Hammond at Aviva

2023 Planning Awards: Tom Hammond at Aviva devised an Allocation Framework that works as a structure for all the transformation modelling he has undertaken. The framework has really improved messaging with key stakeholders who may not be data orientated.

2023 Planning Awards: Vanessa Jossi at Lifeplus

2023 Planning Awards: Vanessa Jossi at Lifeplus has focussed on her learning. She learns from others in her organisation and network groups at The Forum, as well as from industry articles. She has redesigned many reports and dashboards across Lifeplus.

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