2021 National Conference

Workshop: Redefining Scheduling

Originally broadcast on Tuesday 17th March, 13:30

To prepare for the future of AI-driven scheduling, organisations must shift from control to design, from discretion to governance, and from firefighting to readiness, developing planners as system stewards, leaders as culture architects, and employees as responsible participants in a shared, transparent workforce ecosystem

Workshop: Redefining Real-Time

Originally broadcast on Tuesday 17th March, 15:30

Organisations that invest only in automation will create faster operations. Organisations that invest in people + AI + learning cultures will create smarter, fairer, and more resilient systems.

Keynote: Redefining Operational Improvement

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Knowledge and Continuous Improvement must evolve for a new era of customer operations, moving beyond legacy habits and outdated metrics toward adaptive frameworks, evidence‑based readiness and human‑centred performance that can thrive in the complexity of 2026 and beyond. 

Technology Showcase

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.

Workshop: Automated Quality

Originally broadcasted on Wednesday 18th March, 15:30

Automated Quality gives us the chance to reset what QA exists to do. This session looks beyond automation as efficiency, and instead explores how redefining the QA role can unlock greater value, shifting focus from checking interactions to shaping performance, insight and outcomes.

Keynote: Redefining Data, Analytics & Insight

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.

Workshop: Data Principles in a CCaaS World

Originally broadcasted on Thursday 19th March, 10:30

This session highlights the essential principles needed to manage, govern, and activate data in a cloud‑native environment and discussed the differences from how data is presented from on premise platforms. 

Workshop: Opensource Tooling & Methods

Originally broadcasted on Thursday 19th March, 13:30

Whilst Excel remains the original example of “Open Source Tooling” in our industry it does come with its limitations. In this session we will discuss how tools such as “Python” “R” and “Shiny” can be utilised within planning and insight and the benefits they can bring. This session will feature expert input from Phil Stubbs from Atlantic insight.

Workshop: Why a ‘reset’ in vulnerability customer service is necessary now

Orginally broadcasted on Thursday 19th March, 14:30

In this session, Helen Pettifer will explore why traditional approaches to vulnerability are no longer fit for today’s customer landscape. Vulnerability has not simply increased — it has changed in nature, complexity and visibility.

Reset | Redefining Outsourcing

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.

Benchmarking Sickness: Resetting How We Read the Numbers

Our latest shrinkage benchmarking survey shows average sickness absence at around 8%. At first glance, this appears higher than last year’s 7.6%, suggesting an upward trend. That conclusion would be misleading.

RESET | REDEFINING

Across Customer Operations and Resource Planning, there is a growing realisation: we are still relying on outdated assumptions, legacy habits, and inherited “best practices” that no longer fit the complexity of today, let alone the volatility of tomorrow. To prepare for 2026 and beyond, organisations need more than incremental  improvement.
 

Agentic AI in Practice: Transforming Contact Centres and Beyond

Agentic AI marks a new era in enterprise automation. Unlike traditional bots or scripted workflows, Agentic AI introduces autonomous digital agents that can reason, adapt and act independently within defined boundaries. These agents are not just reactive tools; they are proactive collaborators, capable of navigating complex tasks, learning from interactions and driving measurable outcomes.

This article explores how Agentic AI is reshaping contact centres, from customer experience and service delivery to planning and operational improvement. It will also highlight broader applications across sectors.

Customer Strategy & Planning

Breaking the Failure Loop and Building a Sustainable Path to Success

A joined-up approach to customer strategy is the difference between firefighting and sustainable success. This article explores how short-term performance measures, long-term performance indicators and a culture of learning can break the failure loop and position Resource Planning as the strategic brain, cultural heart, and operational nerve centre of today’s contact centre.

Customer Expectations: Resetting Our Assumptions

In a recent networking group, customer experience professionals were asked to reflect on their own expectations as customers and how these compare with the expectations of the customers they serve. The themes that came back were consistent. They show what people really value in service interactions, and where organisations most often fall short. This article explores those insights and the practical lessons they offer for designing experiences that meet customer expectations reliably and effectively.

Be Bold & Transformational

How to start doing something differently today through preparedness, luck & the power of resetting.

Workforce Leadership: Building a Future- Focussed Culture in Resource Planning

Workforce leadership is about more than managing schedules and hitting service targets. It’s about keeping the future in mind while navigating today’s pressures, breaking free from firefighting, building a culture of learning and leading with a solution mindset that drives innovation, resilience, and long-term success.

The Evolution and Future of Resource Planning: From Ratios to Strategic Enabler

As Resource Planning evolves from an administrative function to a strategic enabler, organisations must look beyond ratios and benchmarks to design teams that deliver value today while preparing for the future.

The Power of Invisible Wins

We often celebrate the fires we fight, not the ones we prevent. Yet true operational excellence lies in the quiet victories, the failures that never happened. These Invisible Wins reflect foresight, planning and good decisions. They form the hidden backbone of high-performing operations and recognising them means looking beyond the noise and valuing the work that stops issues forming in the first place.

Forecasting: Embrace the Unpredictable

Effective contact centre forecasting is often about eliminating uncertainty but it doesn’t have to be; it can be about deliberately planning for it. By viewing demand as a probability rather than a promise, you have the option to transform ‘residual noise’ from a source of failure into a strategic buffer that stabilises your operations.

The Power of New Perspectives: How Rising Stars Help Shape Change

Every year, we see through our awards programme, new waves of emerging talent. They show us that being fresh to a role is not a weakness but a catalyst for progress. These individuals step into unfamiliar territory and use their curiosity, learning agility, and instinct for improvement to reshape systems that have gone unchallenged. Their stories reveal a common truth: when someone is unburdened by history, they can see possibilities others have stopped noticing.

Rethinking Skills in the Age of AI

As organisations move into a new era of work, we are being pushed to reset long-held assumptions about what capability looks like. Much like customer operations, our own skills and habits carry legacy thinking that no longer fits the world we now work in. AI is accelerating this shift. It challenges the skills we grew up with, changes how expertise is built and forces us to redefine what great looks like. This article explores that reset. It looks at the concerns people have today, the skills we may need to let go of, the new skills that will matter most and how we can use AI intelligently rather than passively. If we want to stay ahead, we need to rethink not just the tools we use, but the foundations of how we learn, decide and create value.

But to shape the future we first need to learn from the past...

Shrinkage Revisited: From Benchmarking Numbers to Understanding Time

Shrinkage has always attracted attention, across our industry. It remains one of the most frequently requested benchmarks, often driven by a simple question: how do we compare to others? But as with many measures, that question can easily lead us in the wrong direction.

Using data from our latest shrinkage survey, this article builds on our earlier benchmarking work and takes the conversation a step further. Rather than asking what the “right” shrinkage figure is, we explore what the data reveals about how organisations use time, what they prioritise, and how well prepared they are for the complexity ahead.

This is not about redefining a new industry standard. It is about resetting how we interpret shrinkage and what we expect it to tell us.

Benchmarking Sickness: Resetting How We Read the Numbers

Our latest shrinkage benchmarking survey shows average sickness absence at around 8%. At first glance, this appears higher than last year’s 7.6%, suggesting an upward trend. That conclusion would be misleading. A closer look shows the apparent increase is driven by sampling rather than worsening performance. As with last year, there is wide variation across organisations, with sickness rates ranging from around 3.8% to just over 20%. That spread matters far more than the headline average.

The value of validation: How your capacity plan earns its credibility

Validation is the discipline of testing whether your capacity planning model reflects operational reality. Without it, errors can persist unnoticed, leading to overstaffing or understaffing by 10% or more, costing organisations in unnecessary spend or lost revenue. In a year where many teams are resetting and redefining how they plan, forecast and allocate resources, validation becomes more than a technical check. It is how confidence in decisionmaking is built and sustained. In this article, I explain what validation is, how to perform it effectively and why embedding it into your planning process is essential to keeping capacity plans credible and fit for purpose.

Resetting AI Adoption in Customer Operations: From Tools to Capability

AI adoption in customer operations is not a technology problem. It is a capability, governance and mindset challenge.

Redefining QA in a Modern, Automated World

Automated Quality Assurance is becoming more accessible, and many organisations are asking how and when to adopt it. Yet the more fundamental question is not “Why automate QA?” but “Why do QA at all?” Unless we revisit the purpose of quality, automation risks scaling outdated processes rather than unlocking new value.

Capacity Planning: The Mindset We Need to Reset and Start Redefining

Capacity planning has always looked cleaner on paper than it behaves in real life. We like to imagine tidy relationships between inputs and outputs, a straight line between demand, resource, and performance, even though queues react sharply, people behave unpredictably, and averages only tell part of the story. What makes this even harder is that much of the organisation still interprets planning through these linear assumptions, shaping expectations, decisions and pressure in ways that simply don’t match how operations function.

Breaking Down Complexities in Scheduling Multi-Skilled, Multi-Channel Agents

Managing contact centres used to be hard. Now, it’s even harder.

Forecasting With Foresight: Resetting and Redefining How We Look Ahead

Forecasting has always been about more than numbers. It is the disciplined art of looking ahead, balancing uncertainty with insight, shaping decisions at every level, and helping organisations respond with confidence rather than react out of pressure. In a world of volatility, shifting customer behaviours and increasing operational complexity, forecasting is no longer simply a technical function. It is a strategic capability, a cultural anchor, and a critical enabler of organisational agility. Yet, many organisations still view forecasting through a narrow lens: a model, a spreadsheet, a monthly cycle. This mindset limits its potential. To unlock the real value, forecasting needs a reset, and in many cases, a redefinition, so that it matches the scale of influence it was always meant to have.