CCMA Seminar and UK National Contact Centre Awards 2016

Last week we headed to the CCMA Quarterly Seminar and UK National Contact Centre Awards at The Brewery in London in London.

The Seminar featured a number of speakers from across the industry; first up was Richard Kenny, Head of Global Contact Centre Marketing, Plantronics.

Richard talked about the disparity between the global marketing spend, approx £500bn vs the £9bn spend to the Customer Service industry. Yet Marketing is no longer working.

With the rise of the Chief Customer Officer role, more organisations are bringing marketing and customer services together.

Richard also talked about how calls are now already escalations, as self-serve and digital have probably failed, making phone calls more important, longer and more complicated.

Customer Experience is key and there are 3 key pillars to enabling effective Customer Experience: People, Workspace and Technology, with employees more likely to have more confidence in their employee brand and delivering the right customer message based on the workspace they are asked to work in.

Next up it was Peter Wilson, Strategic Consultant, Customer Analytics at Verint. Peter was talking about the future of customer analytics and how we are busy analysing piles of data without actually knowing what we are looking for, or knowing what to do with it!.’The Devil is in the detail but the information is in the Data.’

The ‘IGens’ are almost born with Ipads and Iphones in their hands and 79% of Millenials when surveyed said they would be willing to move banks for a better mobile banking app.

Peter went on to say that there are ‘Only two sources of competitive advantage –

1. Learn more about our customers faster than the competition.
2. Turn that learning into action faster than the competition.

After a short networking break, we heard from Alison Hanson, Director of Contact Centre Strategy at Homeserve about their journey deploying speech analytics and how it is helping them put the customer first and improve coaching across the contact centre.

Clive Martison, Director and Senior Head of Contact Centres at WebhelpUK shared how through the effective use of analytics and insight in their recruitment and attraction strategy has helped improve operational effectiveness and develop better ‘leaders and not managers’.

Finally, it was Pete Sanderson from  Endsleigh Insureance, who talked about their early journey and first steps in deploying robotics and automation.  By bringing legacy systems together, this project has already realised significant efficiencies across their operations and released their Advisors from time consuming data entry and administration tasks to allow them more time to focus on the customer.

Overall it was an interesting seminar with some great speakers and sessions.

So on to the UK National Contact Centre Awards 2016; Over 700 people joined the Call Centre Management Association to celebrate 21 years of the UK National Contact Centre Awards. A fabulous event highlighted the achievements of this years winners.

and the winners are:

• Lifetime Achievement – Becky Simpson, VP Contact Centre Operations, Carnival UK
• Contact Centre Support Manager – Shanice Goldspink, Direct Line Group
• Recruitment Manager – Bryan Horrocks, Rentalcars.com
• Learning and Development Champion – Martyn Bullard, Sage
• Customer Relations Manager – Phil Hansborough, British Gas Metering
• Resource Planning Manager – Sobaan Afzal, Sky UK
• Quality Manager – Lindsey Cordes, Minster Law
• Business Improvements Manager – Sadie Norman, Screwfix
• Social Media Champion – Kit Webster, RBS
• Customer Experience Champion – Sally Weir, BUPA
• Team of the Year – OVO Energy
• Team Manager, Webchat – Phil Redman, Tesco Bank
• Team Manager, Rising Star – Abs Ahadi, Close Brothers
• Team Manager, Outbound – Nikki Harper, BUPA
• Team Manager, Retention – Claire Henderson, Sage
• Team Manager, Sales – Louise MacLean, RSA
• Team Manager, Service – Jess O’Halloran, AdminRe
• Contact Centre Manager (Outsourced) – Catherine Rosso, Sykes Global
• Contact Centre Manager (Small contact centres) – Alexandra Marsden, Royal London
• Contact Centre Manager (Medium contact centres), Darren Gibbins, Barclaycard
• Contact Centre Manager, (Large contact centres) Paul Dalby, Direct Line Group

CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!

Sharing best practice and developing the skills and abilities of their members are just some of the benefits of the CCMA.  Over the coming months the CCMA will be organising member best practice visits to the award winners contact centres. (Visit www.ccma.org.uk for details)

If you are interested in entering your team in next years Awards and playing a part in what has become the highlight of the year and the “Oscars” of the Contact Centre industry, then you can visit the Awards website: http://www.ukcontactcentreawards.co.uk