Customer Engagement Transformation Conference

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Martin Hill-Wilson

Martin is a leading customer engagement and digital business strategist. Also an author and international keynote speaker. Working under my own brand, Brainfood Consulting, I design masterclasses and transformational change helping clients evolve their social and digital capabilities. Current topics include omni-channel design, proactive, low effort customer experience, social customer service and customer hubs. All themed around service innovation.

Using customer hubs  as a milestone towards full digital competency
Even service organisations that consider themselves advanced in their omni-channel capabilities face the barrier of internal silos and competing agendas. This remains a strategic weakness in terms of real time responsiveness.

Digitally empowered customers have reset the bar on acceptable customer experience. Organisations that want to prosper in this new regime have to adopt a new mind-set and leadership capabilities. But how to escape the days of siloed customer engagement and the idea that the service organisation was solely responsible for customer experience.

Today, market leadership means taking a fresh approach to continuous improvement and service innovation: re-energised through new partnerships with customers and employees. Customer hubs provide a low risk evolutionary path.

The hubs draw together a number of competencies into a new form of working relationship. This includes the front office (sales, marketing, service), analytics, change management and collaboration. Together they become a hub of innovation, improvement and competitive responsiveness for the rest of the organisation.

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Andrew Bryan

Andrew Bryan is an Executive Fellow and the Programme Director for the MSc and Post Graduate Certificate in Strategic Marketing Leadership at Henley Business School. He has had a successful career as a corporate executive, management consultant and business researcher. He is an experienced digital technology and strategy Director who has had senior roles with a range of blue chip companies. He also acts as a consultant to companies on customer management issues, customer centric digital transformation and digital commerce in both B2C and B2B companies.

Andrew’s experience covers several sectors. His technology sector expertise includes executive leadership roles with system integrators, technology product development and technical consulting companies. In Logistics, he was responsible for delivering change programmes at Exel and DHL Logistics. His has pharmaceutical experience with GSK, Novartis and Roche and was responsible for developing technology products for IMS Health. In the retail sector he has experience with many well-known high street favourites including Debenhams, Halfords, Boots, Argos, Jack Wills, Timberland and Dunelm Mills. He also has start-up experience and has worked with several private equity funds.

Andrew has an MBA from Henley Business School and has worked with the Henley Centre for Customer Management for a number of years where he undertakes research into customer experience topics on behalf of the members. He has completed a number of reports and papers on behalf of companies exploring customer management topics. These include a white paper for BT titled “Customer Effort: Help or Hype?” and the 2014 UK Water Industry Research Report “An Alternative Service Incentive Mechanism Implementation Plan”.

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Jyllene Miller

Jyllene Miller is a Brand and Marketing Strategist who collaborates with CEOs, executives and global business leaders to help them understand how to better connect with their customers and future-proof their business.  As the SVP of Marketing and Client Engagement Strategy for Concentrix, Jyllene is the driving force behind the company’s Different by Design™ brand.   Jyllene is a veteran at creating and building relationships with organizations and individuals at all levels.  With her unique communication style and passion for customer engagement, Jyllene has helped grow Concentrix into a Top-5 global brand in business services.

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Steve Grycuk

Steve joined Dow Jones in September 2014. He currently leads our global Customer Service, Customer Operations, Experience Design, Insight & Intelligence, Analytics and Customer Data teams. Over the last 10 years, Steve has worked with a number of media, broadcasting and Financial Services businesses – including The Times of London, Sky, Deutsche Bank and the BBC. Steve has a track record of delivering large-scale complex business transformation programs. He started his career at Deloitte Consulting.

Steve holds a Bachelors degree in Economics and Management from the University of Oxford.

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Nick Varney

Nick started his career at Deloitte’s UK consulting practice specializing in transformation and organization design for media clients such as the BBC, South African Broadcasting Corporation, and Thomson Reuters. In 2011 he joined News UK where he led the customer technology portfolio managing subscription platforms for The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times. In 2014 he moved to sister company Dow Jones where he has led customer transformation initiatives including the launch of a customer experience design function, the transformation of member engagement for The Wall Street Journal and most recently leading the Customer Value team – using data to improve revenues across Dow Jones

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Gerry Brown

Well seasoned, but not over cooked author, speaker, workshop facilitator and consultant with broad experience in customer service, customer experience, contact centre, & CRM, for a range of market segments in the UK, Canada, EMEA & the USA.

Over that that time I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. I take a unique approach that eschews the newest shiny toys as a starting point and focuses on four fundamental principles that must underpin and drive a successful customer experience strategy, Culture, Commitment, Communication and Community.

As a vocal and demanding customer myself, I truly understand the frustration, anger and disappointment that characterize many customers’​ experiences with businesses. I’ve been involved in the customer service business in one form or another for over thirty years in strategic, operational and logistical roles. I’ve worked with some of the best customer experience “gurus” and some of the best and worst companies, all of whom have been vibrant, creative and life changing influences.

I help customer service directors, customer experiences leaders and MDs to develop actionable insights, drive value and improve profitable customer retention by focusing on Customer Inspired Thinking that will help them in:

• Evaluating what customers really think of them & why
• Quantifying how much bad service really costs them
• Identifying & addressing areas for improvement
• Engaging, involving and inspiring their employees to find their inner customer
• Introducing & integrating the right technology at the right time for the right reasons
• Measuring what matters – to customers

By doing this successfully, and consistently, I hope to avoid undignified impoverishment in my later years and grow old gracefully and gratefully.

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Andrew Richards

Andrew joined Metro Bank in early 2013 to lead and manage regional store growth with a concentrated focus on Customer Experience.

Andrew is passionate about retail banking and developing talent. He joined Metro Bank from TD Bank in Washington DC, where he was the Senior Vice President of Retail Banking.  Andrew began his retail banking career in 1985 when he joined Commerce Bank as a drive thru cashier. Over a 23 year career with Commerce Bank, America’s Most Convenient Bank, Andrew worked in a number of prominent roles culminating with expanding and building the revolutionary, service-driven model in both existing and new markets.

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Sally Earnshaw

With a 20 year track record working in senior positions, Sally has developed and executed sales and service transformation programmes in a wide range of operational environments. This lends a depth of understanding to all sorts of client situations with resultant gravitas to the messages she shares. She has recently published her first book. Crack the Code: Upgrade your customer experience, one conversation at a time about the human code, called conversation, that’s undergoing a revolution thanks to cutting-edge research in neuroscience. But because it’s a people, rather than a tech, thing it’s being neglected by all but the super-smart few.

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Julia Barbosa

Julia Barbosa is a marketing and business effectiveness specialist, with a consistent track-record of leading people and organisations through change, equipping others with tools and skills to thrive. She is currently Special Projects Lead at Save the Children, where she leads strategic projects, focusing on driving engagement, CRM and customer experience. Julia speaks and writes about personal development, the learning power of failure and happiness in the workplace.

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Steve Kato-Spyrou

Steve is helping develop (and enabling the development of) a content strategy that will utilize John Lewis’s USP’s. He has also designed the components for the componentization the John Lewis and Sky.com sites, in order to create a consistent customer experience and drive production efficiencies. Steve’s current passion is creating ways to facilitate leadership level workshops, in order to push things forward and not just create circular debates.

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Stephen Green

Experienced Digital Strategy professional. Specialising in developing strong, positive teams that go further to grow revenues by applying focus, data and user centred design thinking.

Passionate about people, system architecture and getting the most from technology to enable colleagues to deliver great customer experiences at scale.

Business-minded digital leader with background in delivering £m+ digital marketing, online strategy and optimisation work streams.

Specialisms include:

• Digital Strategy
• C-Level stakeholder management
• Change and Transformation
• Data, Analytics and visualisation.
• Conversion Optimisation / Continuous Improvement – Test/measure/learn processes
• Digital Marketing – Inc. Group Structuring across PPC, CRM, Email, SEO, Display and Affiliates.
• Business development

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Anna Wilcox

Anna is an established marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience in a wide range of sectors from the motor trade, pharmacy, and most recently within health care.

Anna has worked for Bupa since 2009, initially managing the marketing activity across the 300 Bupa care homes. Then in 2013 she turned her attention to the Bupa UK Health Insurance business and over time this responsibility widened to include their Health Clinics and Dental Centres.

Despite her passion for marketing, she found she really wanted to make a difference for the customer.

So when the opportunity for a new challenge arose she grabbed it with both hands. She now heads up the newly formed customer experience team within Bupa.  This role really lends itself to her first love – which is to lead and inspire people and teams to achieve their potential and deliver outstanding results for an organisation.

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Machaela Shepherd

Machaela is an established business to business sales leader with over 16 experience years at Bupa.

At Bupa Machaela initially worked within the SME sales channel, but in 2010 she turned her attention to Corporate sales where she successful led a department with a portfolio of 980 clients and a net worth of 95 million.

In 2017 Machaela’s passion for the customer led her to take on a new challenge and move into the newly formed customer experience team at Bupa.

Machaela now uses her expertise with B2B clients and intermediaries to improve the Bupa experience for these key customers

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Lee Dance

Lee Dance is Head of Water Resources for South East Water, 22 years of experience in the managing water resources, demand management and strategic long term planning. In his role he has recognised the important role that customer engagement can, and must, play to support the water industry’s long term planning and decision making.

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Rob Sheldon

Rob Sheldon is Accent’s MD. He has a postgraduate degree in econometrics and 35 years’ experience in market research. Rob is an internationally recognised expert in the field of stated preference and was instrumental in introducing the technique to the UK, for a project for British Rail in the 1970s. Since then he has developed many pioneering applications of the approach in a broad range of typically regulated sectors.

He has a strong track record in utilities starting as a consultant to Midlands Electricity during development of their marketing strategy for the emerging privatised over 1MW sector.  He has worked extensively in the water sector since PR99 and has been instrumental in defining the shape of this regulatory engagement programme. He performs a similar role in other regulated sectors such as energy, transport, post, finance and health.

He is a Fellow of the Market Research Society

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Moritz Dinger

Moritz is currently Market Director at Capita Transformation, the consulting and advisory business of Capita plc. Prior to this he spent over 10 years in creative and digital agencies in London where he lead the design and delivery of innovative digital solutions and experiences. His work focusses on the optimisation of customer engagement and experience levels and the impact this has on business performance. Moritz is a highly experienced digital strategist and service design expert with significant experience in how to maximise the opportunities and benefits that digital channels and solutions can bring. A particular emphasis for his work lies in transforming organisations by combining creativity, technology and insight to deliver optimal experiences for customers and better outcomes for businesses.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moritzdinger

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Rumyana Miteva

As Head of Search at Secret Escapes, Rumyana has a deep understanding of the current Paid and Organic search ecosystem. With over 8 years of experience in the Digital Marketing she has worked for various brands and managed a portfolio of over a billion keywords. She decided to pursue a career in Performance Marketing because it is constantly evolving, which makes it equally appealing and challenging. Rumyana is a regular conference speaker – SMX, IAB Search, Hero Conf London and a judge at the UK Biddable Awards.

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Joris Wigger

Joris has a degree in International Hospitality Management and he has been working in Digital Marketing for the past few years. He is currently PPC Manager at Secret Escapes and one of his main responsibilities is managing a large portfolio of campaigns across multiple markets. Joris has experience with complex data integrations such as Google Hotel Ads. His interest in Performance Marketing mainly derives from the fact that results are based on data and that the digital landscape is ever evolving, which makes it an exciting environment to work in.

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Wally Brill

Previously a music producer in the US and UK, Wally Brill’s fascination with voice interaction began in 1999 at Nuance Communications where, as Director of Persona Design and Production he created the process for designing, testing and developing branded, humanlike personas for enterprises and governments worldwide. He co-founded the first VUI consultancy, VoicePartners in 2002 to deliver speech recognition systems designed around user needs and brand values. As Director of Global Self Service for eBay, he led a team on three continents assisting millions of eBay members daily. Now as Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Education at Google, he’s helping to create 21st century magic with the Google Assistant.

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Karim Sidaoui

Karim Sidaoui is currently a PhD researcher at the Alliance Manchester Business School in the Management Science & Marketing division within the University of Manchester. His educational background comprises a Bachelor in Computer Science, and a Master’s in Business Administration.

His academic experience ranges between topics of customer experience and engagement, data mining and machine learning, big data analytics, and social media.

He possesses multidisciplinary corporate and start-up professional experience ranging from software development and IT project management to retail category management and business development. His involvement with international brands such as Samsung, LG, Philips, Toshiba and others in multinational settings enabled rapid and successful business expansion in the MENA region. From a customer perspective, Karim has managed customer retail strategies pertaining to product design, marketing, sales, cross-departmental liaison, and customer feedback & support in both online and brick-and-mortar settings.

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Jonathan James

Originally from an Environmental Health background Jonathan has the unique experience of working within a cross section of public roles spanning a range of service areas and Councils, including strategy development, programme and project management, customer service and operational management. Over the past 14 years Jonathan has successfully led significant organisational and cultural change and developing and implementation channel shift strategies over the full breadth of public services.

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Claire Sporton

Claire has specialized in customer feedback for well over 15 years. Claire has run programs in the Financial Services sector, and more recently supported a wide range of organizations in the development and implementation of programs that not only drive improvement in customer experience but deliver measurable business results.

Claire’s passion is to ensure that Confirmit’s clients’ programs help to build a truly customer centric culture, breaking down the silos and empowering individuals across the organization to do the right thing for both their customers and the business as a whole.

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Sarah Metcalfe

Sarah joined Sure Petcare six years ago, taking responsibility for the company’s customer service and guiding it through an extraordinary period of expansion and growth. She now leads a talented multi-lingual team who deliver outstanding customer service and happiness to all Sure Petcare customers around the world. Sarah is passionate about happiness in the workplace, and she knows the positive impact this has on the customer experience. Through continuing to innovate and improve the customer journey, Sure Petcare now has an amazing Net Promoter Score of 95+% with an increase in customer contact of over 50% over the last 12 months.

Originally from British Columbia, Canada, Sarah brings a wealth of customer service experience from a background that includes charities, logistics and manufacturing. Inspired by the teachings of great customer service companies like Zappos and Happy Ltd, she wants to share her experience and the success of Sure Petcare with others including her strategy for supporting Sure Petcare ’s new connected suite of pet products within the Future of Intelligent Pet Care.

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Nicholas Brice

Nicholas helps all levels of leaders and staff achieve success by truly living their values, with a strong focus on Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employee-based development across all customer touchpoints.

He is ‘Team Brighton Lead’ for the American Express Community Stadium, since 2010 helping them develop a multi-award winning fan/customer experience, team culture and record revenue increases.  His programme winning the first ever triple-gold National Training Journal Award for change, leadership development and learning partnership for his work for Brighton & Hove Albion FC, his home club.

He has helped lead a wide array of major blue-chip customer experience, culture change and transformation programmes across 5 continents since 1983, when he adapted the British Airways ‘Putting People First’ Programme for financial services, helping American Express achieve significant increases in profits through enhanced customer experiences. He also runs a multi-award winning theatre production company.

A Professional Member of the Professional Speakers’ Association and a Speaker and Masterclass Facilitator with the Academy of Chief Executives.

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Holly Devonald

Holly has been a part of the contact centre industry for the past 31 years; she is currently the Head of three products across Sales & Service – Home, Travel and Landlord at Liverpool Victoria. Holly has worked at Liverpool Victoria for 10 Years and prior to LV and previously worked at RSA for 21 years.

Holly ensures world class service is achieved across two main sites and overseas the performance of a headcount for over 300 employees. She has considerable experience of achieving demanding service levels, driving efficiency within the business.

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Martin Taylor

Martin Taylor is Deputy CEO of multi-channel cloud communications provider Content Guru. A forerunner of communications technology since his early twenties, when he co-founded Content Guru’s sister company, Redwood Technologies, Martin’s role now centres on strategic market development and analysing the future of digital engagement.

Martin is an elected member of the CBI South East Council, an Advisor to the Common Sense Collective socio-economic think-tank and a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Management at King’s College, London, where he lectures on strategy and entrepreneurship and presents the annual Content Guru Prize for Strategic Management. Martin’s charitable activities include the British Red Cross, the Berkshire Community Foundation and the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy.

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Mark Harrison

Proven ability in global business to deliver Change leadership, Customer experience, Leading diverse communities, Integrated customer operations, Value delivery and Agile technology. Keen endurance athlete undertaking a variety of long distance triathlon/ running/ cycling events for charity.

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Mark Grainger

Mark Grainger is Vice President of sales in Europe at Engage Hub, the global technology provider of mobile, data-driven customer engagement solutions. He has a successful career in the marketing services industry, having held key decision-making roles within marketing agencies for over 12 years. As such, he is a highly qualified marketer with a particular focus on digital marketing and customer relationship management solutions. At Engage Hub, he works with some of the world’s largest and most innovative companies such as Bank of Ireland, MBNA, KBC, and the AA, to deliver effective solutions that enable businesses to strengthen customer engagement and operational efficiency.

With an academic background in both technology and management studies, Mark has a wealth of knowledge on the technical details involved in digital transformation and, more specifically, providing mobile, data-driven customer engagement solutions to customers across retail, telecoms and financial sectors. This wisdom, coupled with his in-depth understanding around the requirements of client brands and providing engaging customer experiences, expertly positions him to deliver on expectations and produce positive results.

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Orinta Gaucyte

With 10 years experience in customer focused roles, from large corporate teams to early stage startups, Orinta has been leading the Customer Experience Team at tails.com since its launch in 2014. 

Tails.com is on a mission to change the world of pet food for good by providing dogs across the country with food individually tailored to their unique nutritional needs. Part of Future Fifty, they have a long list of awards in their arsenal, including 

Silver for Team of the Year and Customer-Centric business at CXA. Customer Experience Team at tails.com is part of their unique product offering and at the very heart of the business.

Orinta has built the team from two people to an empowered part of the business with 20 Customer Experience Specialists coming from all walks of life. Their strengths lie in non-traditional ways of working with the rest of the business, fresh team structure and freedom to make things happen. Team help launching new features, own a strong feedback loop and are loved by their customers (reviews here). 

Orinta’s set to offer a truly personalised service with a human touch and do it at scale. In 2018, she’ll be driving even more growth and focusing on effective service with automations and expert knowledge in dog nutrition.  

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John Upton

With extensive experience of multi-site consumer-facing retail, franchise and commercial activities, John is part of the senior leadership team at LEON, the fast growing naturally fast food chain.

In his role, John divides his time between restaurants and looking for ways for LEON to accelerate its mission – to make it easier for everybody to eat and live well.  Over the past 12 months, John has led significant growth in LEON’s reach and scale through opening up new channels like delivery and entering into new UK & international partnerships.

Before LEON, John has enjoyed a broad-ranging career spanning the past 20 years, starting out professional life as an M&A lawyer in the late 1990s.  Having joined McDonald’s UK in 2002 as an in-house counsel, John decided to change his career path completely so that he could get closer to customers and the restaurant teams.   He began a new life in operations as a crew member in a London Drive Thru and then moved through a variety of operational, franchise and senior leadership roles.

These roles included managing a region of company-owned restaurants which included  P&L accountability for £100m annual sales and 3,000 crew & managers.  In his last role at McDonald’s, as a Senior Director, John led the development and implementation of the major people change programme (for 100,000 employees) to support the role out of the new Experience of the Future restaurants across the UK.

John is a passionate developer of people and strongly believes in the value that humility, training and positive role modelling can make to an organisation.   John’s first ever job, in his school holidays, was a gardener and grave digger.

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Arkin Salih

Arkin is a Consulting Director at NKD. He has 20 years of experience working in retail, hospitality and talent development. During his time at NKD he has helped transform the customer experience for brands such as Tesco, DHL Global Freight Forwarding and The Accor Hotel Group. He was previously Head of Learning & Development at Harvey Nichols group, and Learning & Development Manager at Harrods, where he was responsible for sales and service training and developed the U.K.’s first BA (Hons.) Degree in Sales exclusively for the luxury retailer.

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Sarah Davies

As Customer Service Manager for Oliver Bonas I have led the Customer Service team through exciting changes and rapid growth in the last couple of years. Before joining Oliver Bonas I led teams providing great service in a variety of industries across private, government and charity sectors. I never stop asking questions of myself, the industry, suppliers and the teams I work with in every situation which helps us to keep evolving to fix the problems and answer the questions we receive every day

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Toby Poulsom

Toby started his career as a scientist but it wasn’t long before his passion for people (and the promise of a better salary) pulled him into the more engaging world of sales. He quickly established himself as a consistent top biller before starting his own consultancy and using the freedom that offered to diversify his skill set into the realm of linguistic and behavioural analysis.

Over the last 12 years Toby has coached, trained and consulted for a diverse range of blue chip, SME and start-up organisations. His focus is on using the correlations between language, thinking and behaviour to develop very simple models business leaders can immediately use to enhance team performance and leverage superior engagement with customers.

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Ross Lane

Working from the ground-up, Ross has nearly 20 years’ experience working in customer service and digital transformation for a range of high-profile BPO’s, both “home and away”, implementing multiple client solutions across vertical sectors.

His passion is founded on deploying strategies that focus on improving the customer experience, streamlining customer journeys and constantly innovating to provide more touchpoints with customers. The success of this approach has been seen in multiple, award winning digital deployments.

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Depesh Nathwani

“Pesh” has over 20 years’ experience working in the Global BPO & IT space, across a variety of sectors. His broad experience across Operations, Service Delivery, Account Management and Sales arms him with invaluable insight into client challenges and a versatile skill set to incept end-to-end solutions.

His approach to business is always client centric with a focus on sustainable business growth that will benefit all stakeholders and the customers at the heart of every conversation.

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Richard Spencer

Richard Spencer has been the Director of Promoderation for nearly 4 years.

Our role at Promoderation is to help open-minded and progressive organisations ‘do more, with less’ by transforming their approach and putting the supporter at the heart – as opposed to focusing solely on the money or the management.

Charities, public sector and social enterprises must deliver more impact and public benefit with fewer resources and increasing demand. Under these conditions, the familiarity and security of reporting tangible financial outcomes to managers is a seductive and reassuring habit. This really must change.

We have 20 years of experience developing and delivering practical approaches and techniques to make the shift and put the supporter at the heart.

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Peter Evia-Rhodes

Pete E-R is the Head of Engagement, Retention & Operation at The Times and The Sunday Times. His key responsibilities including engaging 500,000 subscribers through a programmatic customer lifecycle, exclusive content and award winning contact centre. They’re achieving their best ever retention rates and delivering record growth. His focus is on bringing together a customer centric approach with innovative solutions to new-age problems.

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Wil Lynch

Wil Lynch is VP, Business Value Consulting at Thunderhead where he leads the team responsible for client strategy, support and service. With over 15 years of online experience, he has led international marketing teams charged with driving customer acquisition and retention and headed product development teams focused on customer centric experiences. Wil engages closely with brands across many verticals helping them digitally transform their businesses to achieve greater customer acquisition, satisfaction and retention though the power of customer engagement.

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Liam Page

Entrepreneurial and customer focussed leader with over 15 years experience in digital, ecommerce, business development, digital strategy & customer experience.

Commercially minded with proven ability to drive growth across venture backed startups, SMEs and large organisations – brands include BT, Waitrose, Electrolux and Hotpoint.

Effective leadership skills and a track record of setting digital strategy and direction; finding solutions to drive marketing, CRM, self-service, brand and commercial goals.

Full marketing budget responsibility, conducting analysis to measure online activities and return on investment.

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Chris Barbour

Chris Barbour is a Business Development Manager at Content Guru, a world-leading provider of cloud communications services. Responsible for managing the accounts of several global organisations, Chris is invested in driving growth across Asia-Pac and the US. With a background in Geology and a Master’s in Reservoir Engineering from the University of Aberdeen, Chris is now an expert in customer lifecycle management, facilitating mission-critical customer services for blue-chip organisations. His passion is founded upon the impact of disruptive technologies such as AI and the IoT on the evolution of the contact centre industry.