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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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Dr Nicola Millard

Dr Nicola Millard heads up Customer Insight & Futures in BT’s Innovation Team. Despite working for a technology company, Nicola isn’t a technologist and combines psychology with futurology to try & anticipate what might be lying around the corner for both customers and organisations (sadly, her crystal ball is broken).

Nicola has been with BT for over 25 years. She has done a number of jobs around the BT business, including research, user interface design, customer service and business consulting. She was involved with a number of BT “firsts”, including the first application of AI into BT’s call centres, BT’s initial experiments with home working and developing new ways to measure customer experience.

Nicola got her PhD from Lancaster University in 2005 on motivational technologies in contact centres, and published her first book in 2009.

Nicola is an award-winning presenter, with 2 TED talks and​ hundreds of conference panel, chair and keynote sessions under her belt.

When she’s not doing all that, Nicola does research, writes blogs and white papers, as well as facilitating innovation workshops with an assortment of BT’s large multinational corporate clients, including banks, airlines and retailers, to name but a few.​

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Andrew McGuigan

A senior, strategic leader specialising in contact centre operations with an outstanding record of delivering demanding targets and significant change in challenging, complex and fast paced environments. Andrew has been working at Microsoft for the past 2 years.

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Steve Morrell

Steve Morrell is the Managing Director of ContactBabel, which was founded in 2001 to provide high-quality research and analysis to the UK contact centre industry. He has written hundreds of research reports and his opinion on contact centres has been featured on the BBC, ITV, Sky, the Guardian. Forbes and the Financial Times.

He has recently become Managing Director of AboutMatch.co.uk, which helps UK contact centres find the right suppliers for them.

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Sean McMahon

Sean is a CRM specialist and thought-leader in the field of customer contact.

His client portfolio includes RBS, ABN Amro, Barclays Capital and Coutts.  He gained momentum at the height of the personal computing revolution and implemented solutions to create personalised services within traditional business models.

As CRM systems became more commonplace, Sean headed projects in CRM Case Management and Property Maintenance systems for Victim Support, Witness Service and the RCFA.  He is now back on the international trail with Belron, the brand owner for Autoglass, Safelite & Carglass.

Sean’s work is driven by a passion for service perfection.  With a new tool kit afforded by SaaS and of course, the smartphone explosion, he enjoys being at the cutting edge of service transformation.

Customer engagement, enablement and ease of use are his primary focus.  And if the old doctrines look like they may get in the way of customer service perfection, they are ripe for a shakeup.

At present, Sean is driving a global connected-customer approach.  He is forming strategies to keep customer conversations ‘front and centre’ and working with international business teams to raise their thought trajectory around voice, data and contact technologies.

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Jo Kirkham

Jo brings 20 years of retail and hospitality experience to her current role as Head of Fan Experience for Liverpool Football Club. With an eye on customer, digital and marketplace trends Jo is passionate about working across Liverpool Football Club to deliver an aspirational fan experience which exceeds expectations now and sets the standard for the future.

Jo has always had a passion for customer experience and previous roles (amongst many) as a Store Manager, Contact Centre Manager and Customer Experience Manager for M&S, as well a fun stint as Regional Pub Manager, has made her believe that the only place for a customer is at the heart of the business.

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David Rowley

David has been with Direct Line Group for 3 years and is the Artificial Intelligence Programme Manager with responsibility for owning the AI strategy, implementation and optimisation.

David has 10 years experience of Programme managing change within the Insurance and Utilities industries, specialising in business process re-engineering and the implementation of new technology, combining to improve customer experience and deliver tangible benefits.

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Peter Finding

Peter is an international employment lawyer – supporting businesses in the UK and across the world with tricky (or potentially tricky) situations involving their people. Clients  say they appreciate his feel for managing sensitive reputational and commercial issues, not just the legal detail.

Peter joined Taylor Vinters as a partner in 2018, having practiced employment law and industrial relations at leading firms in London and Melbourne, Australia since qualifying in England in 2009.

He provides strategic advice to multinational and domestic clients in a range of sectors including technology, the creative world, sport and financial services, with a particular focus on:

• protecting businesses from harm by enforcing post-termination restrictions, and designing holistic retention strategies
• managing difficult exits
• managing domestic, cross-border and multi-jurisdictional restructuring projects and site closures/moves
• dealing with sensitive grievance, disciplinary and performance management issues
• employment litigation in the High Court and Employment Tribunal
• designing innovative employment models suitable for a workplace landscape in flux

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Barry Shields

Barry has worked in the Contact Centre Industry since 2001, beginning his career as an Inbound Customer Service advisor for 121. His huge passion for everything mobile has resulted in him spending 15 of the last 18 years in various mobile networks. Having worked his way through the various Contact Centre management roles, Barry joined Three in 2012 to set up their Business Retention operation in Glasgow. During this time Barry has witnessed many changes in customer behaviour and technology which have changed how Contact Centres operate, however the current transformation programme within the commercial teams in Three UK which puts customer effort at its core, is exciting and is expected to bring significant change.

Outside of work life, Barry’s 2 main passions are travel and football which he tries to combine as much as possible, much to his wife’s annoyance.

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Richard Atkins

Richard joined Fidelity International in January 2018, as Head of Pension Services. Richard overseas the inbound contact generated by all of Fidelity’s pension customers, across both its workplace and retail pension products and from all different mediums.

A strong believer in continuous improvement and customer feedback, Richard is driven as much by Net Promoter Scores (NPS) as he is with traditional time bound SLA’s. Following the formation of a virtual ‘Close the Loop’ team, across the customer front line areas, a number of initiatives have been implemented – to the benefit of the customer as well as Fidelity.

Prior to joining Fidelity Richard managed Legal & General’s Mastertrust Pension Scheme and Independent Governance Committee (IGC) boards. This required Richard to act as an intermediary between the Non-Executive Directors, the employers, pension scheme members and the Service Provider to ensure a scalable, well governed and value for money pension scheme. Richard reported to the independent Chairman of the Trustees and IGC.

Richard has worked in the pensions industry since 2000 where he has held a variety of senior leadership roles in both the defined benefit and defined contribution environments.

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Trish Roberts

Trish joined Fidelity International in November 2014, and is now the Voice of the Client Manager for the UK. Trish supports our End Investor and Workplace Investing Voice of the Client programme, and plays a lead operational role globally for the programme. In 2017, when Fidelity moved to a global Voice of the Client programme, Trish was a key contributor in the creation and roll out of VoC across the UK business.

A strong believer in partnering with the business to achieve client centric initiatives, Trish has helped to increase the NPS of her respective areas over the last four years and continuously works to embed a world class voice of the client programme. She has created and supported a range of new programmes of work to provide a well-rounded view of the customer journey

Prior to joining Fidelity Trish worked on continuous improvement programmes and call centre initiatives at Westpac New Zealand, bringing change that supported the client being at the heart for Westpac.

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Adrian Morley

I am a customer centric strategic thinker with 20+ years experience delivering results in a variety of Marketing and Operations roles within Utilities and Financial Services sectors.

My Mission:
• To profitably orientate business activities around the needs of target customers
Skills Profile:
• Customer-orientated strategic and operational planning
• Cultural change and brand delivery through people and process
• Customer Experience programme development and leadership
• Expertise in analysis across a full range Voice of Customer sources
• Customer Outcomes development and management of conduct risk
• Team development and agency selection/management

Key Achievements:
• Proving the commercial value of Advocacy to get exec buy-in for strategy
• Maintaining and improving a market leading NPS of +43
• Delivering quality insight into a robust governance structure that demonstrably drives action and manages risk

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Nick King

A consumer psychologist and expert in digital media and marketing, possessing the experience to analyse and interpret trends in consumer adoption of technology and develop strategies for customer acquisition and retention through digital and traditional offline channels. 

Nick joined Auto Trader in January 2007 running Business Intelligence and in 2010 built the retailer insight team running master classes and webinars, He also makes short films to evangelise about data, insight and marketing and speaks regularly at conferences round the world.

After graduating from Loughborough, Nick spent 3 years in advertising and planning at Dorlands and Lintas, 3 years as a rock star with Great Northern Electrics, ran a music production company, was a publisher on High-end HiFi magazines at Petersen/EMAP for 7 years and a Marketing Manager at Superscape for 3 years.

He then spent 4 years, as the Director of Research at Diffiniti / Carat Interactive, responsible for a team of researchers advising a range of Blue-chip clients (AOL, Auto Trader, Coco-Cola, Diageo, Disney, Kodak, Renault, Halifax, Aviva, and Orange) on the development of their marketing and communications strategies in the Digital arena. And from here, joined Auto Trader.

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Zane Rudovska

Areas of expertise – Customer care, direct sales, telemarketing and operations in Fintech companies. Has been in Customer care over 10 years.

Cooperated with several markets to assure Customer care business goal achievement, improving processes for customers and agents, created standards and main KPIs. Launched operations in several markets across Europe, Asia and Latin America. Developed direct sales as a great channel to generate more money by using Customer care teams who can deliver millions across Group markets. Has always found a potential in existing customer portfolio and showed to markets how to utilize it in a smart way!

Believing that Customer care is the key for sustainable business. In love with new strategies, CX improvements and innovative technologies how to drive customer care and make it more effective.

Passionate about challenges ahead & being sure that openness and communication within the team is the best tool to make things happen!

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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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Scarlett Bayes

Scarlett is dedicated to providing insightful and practical research to the service desk industry through investigating trends, analysing data, and engaging with the IT service community. You can find more of Scarlett’s work on the SDI blog and can follow her on Twitter @SDIScarlett.

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Sascha Evans

Sascha is a theatre producer and creator of immersive experiences. Sascha has collaborated with some of the UK’s leading theatres companies including the National Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Punchdrunk, Kneehigh, Battersea Arts Centre, as well as leading West End producers.  She is a creator of mass participation games including escape room experiences for 350 people at a time, as well as city-wide treasure hunts.  She has raised over £1million for charities and advises charities on donor journeys and communications.

Sascha is currently working in education, using an innovative immersive theatre process she has developed. This approach has improved employee engagement, formed better relationships with new families and, crucially, improved the bottom line.

Because of this approach, Kent College Pembury was a finalist in the international Engage Awards under the category ‘Innovation in Customer Engagement’, is a finalist in the Times Educational Supplement Independent for School ‘Marketing Campaign of the Year’ and Sascha was commended in the Women in Marketing Awards as an ‘Inspiring Leader in Customer Engagement’.

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Llaura Hughes

Llaura joined Motability Operations in October 2016 bringing with her over 11 years of experience within the financial services sector and eight years as a Learning & Development professional. She manages a team of trainers and communication specialists who are responsible for the knowledge management and communications within the organisation via an internal facing virtual agent (Ask Mo). Over the past 12 months her team have launched an external facing customer virtual assistant combining it with pre-existing live chat functionality and are utilising the findings from speech analytics to ensure that any interaction with a customer focuses on emotional intelligence rather than concentrating solely on business process. Llaura is currently undertaking an MSc in Occupational Psychology with an avid interest in building psychological capital and the prevalence of neurodiversity within the workplace. This has enabled her to consider how her teams can continue to support the organisation to maintain high levels of both customer service and high employee engagement.

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Mark Billingham

Mark is currently a Financial Services Board member & Group Customer Operations Director at Shop Direct Group, the UK’s second largest online retailer which owns very.co.uk and littlewoods.com, he has had a varied career spanning 15+ years across Operational management, Transformation and Customer Experience. In 2018 Shop Direct were recognised as industry leading by the European Call Centre awards for their Customer transformation programmes which in just 12 months improved tnps by 70 points, first contact resolution by 22 points and reduced overall customer contact by 30%.

Previously, Mark has been responsible for major customer changes at British Gas and Vodafone, most notably as Customer Experience Director at Vodafone, improving TNPS by 70 points, first contact resolution by 20% points, reducing complaints by 60% and driving a 40% reduction in call volume. While at Vodafone Mark also led the implementation of AI (Tobi) and the growth of Digital Customer Service through web chat and messaging which now makes up over 40% of overall service.

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Ian Webber-Rostron

A tenacious leader with a strong track record in managing the end to end lifecycle of contact centre operations: in house and outsourced, onshore and offshore. Ian has been the Head of Outsourcing and International for N Brown Group for over 3 years

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James Sandberg

James is the founder of Customer Devoted which is a customer success consultancy that delivers customer experience, marketing automation, CRM and loyalty strategies, enabling organisations to accelerate their growth and maximise customer profitability.

James’s previous experience as Managing Director of customer engagement agency Ogilvy One in Mumbai and Strategy Director for customer loyalty agency ICLP has given him an international perspective on data driven customer engagement which he has developed for brands such as Vodafone, HSBC, Royal Canin, Carlson Hotels, Vespa, Dove, Smirnoff and tech startups such as CoInvestor and The Villa Collective.

James believes that marketing needs a new paradigm. One where businesses partner with their customers and prospects in a long-term value exchange. To survive the next wave of disruption, organisations need to move beyond marketing operations to become indispensable in the lives of customers whilst leveraging data and technology to drive operational efficiency.

Customers expect more and have more choices today than ever before. Delivering remarkable experiences, tailored services and being useful in the lives of customers means that brands need to create partnerships with their customers and look beyond the short-term transaction.

James is a regular speaker and mentor for The School Of Communication Arts, Capital Enterprise and Enterprise Nation.

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David Craggs

Dave is the Director of Banking Operations at Metro Bank with responsibility for Contact Centres and a number of back office operations.  He has over 20 years of Financial Services contact centre management experience starting with the launch of Barclays very first centres.  He has directed centres servicing products including current account accounts, SME banking, mortgages, savings and specialist lending.

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Gerry Br0wn

Gerry is a highly experienced digital and CX technology industry analyst and strategy consultant. He works with global software and services vendors, tech start-ups, and enterprise CX leaders. Competencies include CX platforms and design services, digital transformation, CRM, digital and content marketing, omni-channel, customer-facing AI, analytics and personalisation, and online advertising.

Previously Gerry was a senior analyst with Ovum and at Bloor Research. Gerry has also been a lecturer for the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) on its Masters-level course in strategic marketing management. Earlier in his career Gerry was Marketing Director at Hyperion and MicroStrategy and founded three research and consulting agencies advising hi-tech companies. Gerry is a CIM Fellow, has a CIM post-graduate Diploma in Marketing and a degree in Business Studies.

Follow him on LinkedIn: /gerrybrown

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Linda Yeardley

A passionate advocate of excellence in customer service, with a special interest in Knowledge and AI, Linda has more than two decades’ experience of implementing and exploiting eGain solutions to transform customer service for a wide range of clients. In her current role as a Digital Transformation Director at eGain, Linda combines this experience of deploying omni-channel solutions, her knowledge management expertise and a focus on delivering tangible business benefits to guide eGain customers through operationalising digital transformation strategy

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Ido Bornstein-HaCohen

Ido is an experienced cloud computing and software-as-a-service leader focused on sales, customer success, marketing, go-to-market, and general management.

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Paul White

Paul White, Director of Customer Engagement at IFS, joined mplsystems as CEO in May 2005. Paul has spent the last 25 years working in the customer service industry and is one of the pioneers of the creation of affordable CRM and contact centre solutions. Prior to joining mplsystems Paul was the founding CEO of BT Contact Central, which, over 4 years, grew into a global business across UK, Europe and Asia Pacific. Whilst at BT, Paul was responsible for designing some of the largest CRM and Customer Service solutions in Europe and had major roles in systems architecture, product management and sales.

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Philip Rogers

Phil Rogers is an Account Director at [24]7.ai, responsible for driving strategic applications of products and solutions that allow organisations to elevate their customer engagement efforts and effectively achieve their business goals. He collaborates regularly with Fortune 500 companies undergoing digital transformations to deliver the most innovative omnichannel, cloud-based technology solutions on the market.

Prior to joining [24]7.ai, Phil worked at SalesCycle, where he helped define and build sales and lead generation strategies to drive growth across retail, finance, telco, and travel industries. He’s also worked at Nice Systems and Microsoft, where he managed enterprise client relationships.

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Matt Hooper

Matt is an experienced senior enterprise software marketer and general manager, with over 20 years in international marketing and customer experience spent in the UK, US and Australia. He joined IMImobile having spent the last 16 years helping to grow enterprise technology businesses that drive digital customer experience improvement. Matt has held senior roles at Qualcomm, HP, BT Global, Orange and Parametric Technology. He is a chartered marketer and a certified RFU rugby coach.

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Alex Klose

Alex is an experienced and accomplished senior marketing executive with over 15 years’ experience in delivering international award-winning marketing and communication strategies, product launches and new business growth initiatives.

He is a confident team leader with a unique blend of strategic thinking and planning as well as hands-on pragmatism, having a proven track record of driving tangible business impact.

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Noel Lavery

Noel has been the Business Development Director at IMImobile for the last 2 years.

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Charlie Snedden

Charlie Snedden leads Solution Consulting in EMEA for Calabrio. Charlie joined Calabrio in 2015, bringing over 20 years of contact centre experience and extensive knowledge of workforce management, quality management and analytics. He oversees pre-sales engagements to help customer contact organisations define their planning and quality strategies to deliver great service and customer experience

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Chris Angus

With over 10 years operational experience running Contact Centres and Sales teams of all shapes and sizes I have gained extensive knowledge in operational efficiencies and call centre optimisation through technology and people management.

I am committed to providing the right solution, not just a solution, through consultation and assessment my clients and I discover how we can make their life easier and improve how they use their communication tools.

Outside of business, you will see me on the side of a football field watching my sons play, on a slide with my daughter or enjoying good food and red wine with my wife.

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Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson is the General Manager at Freshworks UK. He joined the company in September 2014.

Prior to Freshworks, Simon was the Global Head of Sales for Redgate Software and was responsible for growing teams across the UK, the US and Singapore. Simon began his career as a hardware and software Pre-Sales Engineer in the post-production and animation industry.

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Teon Rosandic

Experienced Vice President with a demonstrated history of working in the computer software industry.Strong professional skilled in Enterprise Software, Sales, Entrepreneurship, Business Development, andSales Management.

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Tony Smith

Tony’s experience in customer management and IT spans over 25 years – years that have been shaped by rapid change, the rise of digital channels, the emergence of cloud computing and a re-writing of the rules for customer engagement in an increasing regulated environment.

Tony joined PCI-PAL in November 2016, as Sales Director for EMEA. PCI-PAL is a suite of solutions designed to help run your customer contact operations in adherence with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). All solutions have been developed for the contact centre market by a team of contact centre specialists.

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Mercedes Barbuti

Mercedes Barbuti is Sales Director for the UK and Ireland at Diabolocom.

Experienced in SaaS and Customer Experience platforms, she helps Diabolocom’s customers improve their customer experience thanks to its innovative contact centre solution.