2021 National Conference

2021 Insight Awards: Ember

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 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: David McGhee at PokerStars

2021 Planning Awards: Severn Trent Water

The planners at Severn Trent Water work in geographically separated teams, looking to establish best practice planning discipline, data and processes. They have consolidated 44 different local working practices for in-day planning, alarm handling and jeopardy management, in this field engineering operation, dramatically reducing the number of outstanding jobs. 

Capita Regulated Services - Planning Team & Innovation Awards Case Study 2021

At Capita, transformation for clients in life or pensions services is being made possible by a common operational excellence framework that charts a transformation journey of maturity for back office and end-to-end process operations. The award-winning, central planning team works across multiple sites 
and clients, in both front and back-office work. This Service Modernisation builds planning and operational maturity, in a consistent and deliverable manner.

2021 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Hoist

At Hoist Finance an ambitious roll out of a new pan-European omni-channel platform, was accelerated into a few weeks, to support working from home with lockdown. This huge logistical challenge was overcome by their award-wining partnership with Aspect and by a host of approaches to engage people and support colleague wellbeing, not least a wonderful, virtual, pan-European “Eurovision Contact Centre Contest”. 

2021 Innovation & Quality Team Awards: Loop (Yorkshire Water)

At Loop (part of Yorkshire Water) the role of the Development Centre team has been pivotal in a transformation of recruitment and induction, from formal training to daily interactions, as part of the wider Learn-Grow-Transform programme. Where once team leaders were focussed on managing leavers and new starters, now a new approach to coaching is being pioneered, starting with critical areas like the complaints team. With COVID, much of this is now delivered virtually, some of which will be part of the new learning model going forwards.

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 Innovation & Transformation Awards: FIS Group

Learning Culture at FIS Global
Career progression is now at the heart of this organisation’s culture, with a passion to drive learning and development. A playbook of next steps is embedded into their operating model, with metrics and review points, putting colleagues at the centre of their strategy for customer service.

2021 Innovation & Transformation Awards: Serco

Collaborative Planning at Serco
This award winning transformation demonstrates how planning can initiate collaboration beyond their own organisation, in this case working with new partners to deliver services at an exceptional scale and pace within days, creating common cause with competitors and those in quite different sectors.

2021 Innovation & Transformation Awards: North Yorkshire County Council

Collaborative Innovation in North Yorkshire
The Innovation of the Year 2021 is won by a team who showed outstanding focus and determination. Engaging stakeholders led them to clear goals and fresh insight. Lack of budget did not deter them from making huge changes in a very short period of time and making future changes simpler for everyone.

2021 Innovation & Transformation Awards - Sensée

At Sensée, the homeworking specialists, the purpose built digital workplace and team environment, originally designed for their own homeworkers, has now been opened to client’s in-house teams. Invaluable when lockdown hit, this can also drive long-term value in creating a really engaging team environment, as well as a different way of scheduling time, to reflect the different needs and priorities of home working or hybrid working operations.

2021 Innovation & Transformation Awards: NHS BSA

At the NHS Business Service Authority, multiple operations were set up to support the UK government’s COVID response. They have onboarded new work with transformation in the 111 Contact Centre, brand-new services for keyworkers (eg PPE Hotline), support for the COVID App and Test and Trace. This team has stepped up, worked together and been relentless in their approach to helping their customers. Operational transformation has been key to many finalists, sometimes accelerated due to COVID but always building a sustainable framework for excellence, that delivers a strong colleague and customer experience.

2021 Quality & Improvement Awards: Susan Drape & The AA Quality Team

At The AA, Susan Drape-Comyn has developed her team of ‘check the checkers’ as a centre of expertise, as coaches within the business. They rose to the challenge of lockdown, early on, establishing ways in which virtual engagement and coaching offer new, if unexpected, benefit in time and impact. They’ve also seen a real shift in consistency of support across the different operations, key to their role, and explored bespoke calibration approaches focussed on need. All told, there’s been a marked boost in morale and engagement.

Technology Showcase: Verint

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.

Technology Showcase: Aspect

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?

Keynote: Returning to Work

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.

Technology Showcase: Sensée

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.

Technology Showcase: QStory

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

Keynote: Investing in Real-Time

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.

Workshop: Tactical Planning

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

Conference Endnote

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.

Partner Article: Sensée Creates 500 New Work-from-Home Contact Centre Roles

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.

Moment of Truth – The Forum Community App, live stream exclusive

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.

Why simplicity in contact centres matters in an era of complexity

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

2021 Partnership Awards: QStory x Domestic & General

The Domestic & General partnership with QStory on real time automation led to a step change in colleague empowerment, transformation in the real time planning team and a remarkable, rapid ROI. Like many of the partnership, this stands out as an easy and open working relationship that enables learning and evolves
the technology in an agile way. 

2021 Partnership Awards: AXA x Pega

AXA Insurance and Pegasystems pioneered the use of desktop analytics as workforce intelligence during lockdown. Using this data in entirely new ways, with practical dashboards, drove action and supported operations teams, who faced rising AHT and slow systems at home. Downtime dropped 70%, AHT by 10 seconds and colleague satisfaction rose by 13 points. 

Standards and Business Accreditation

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.

Free Webinar: TEDx Talk: Curiosity Cured The Fakeaholic - Lou Carter – Founder of Rising Vibe

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…