All visits are subject to minimum and maximum numbers.  Early booking is essential and visits are not normally open to direct competitors.

See more details about the site visits

Alliance & Leicester (4th June in Leicester): See how a new Distribution Optimisation Model (DOM) focussed on value contribution, rather than volume, and increased average employee contribution across the Retail Bank by 16% (22% in retail stores). Already the model is changing the focus of management reviews and has been used to identify top performers, drive understanding of what ‘good’ looks like and calibrate the bonus schemes so that the top sales performers now receive half the bonus pot.  Alliance & Leicester Retail Bank provides a wide range of financial services in the UK, employing more than 4,600 staff in 260 locations. Contact centres are located over 5 main sites in 4 locations – Leicester, Bootle, Leeds and Ashford – employing 1,800 FTE and handling 30,000 calls per day. The Strategic Development team within the Business Performance Unit works across all contact centres and the retail network to improve operational effectiveness and drive income.

British Gas Services (19th June in Glasgow and September in Leicester): Learn how recruitment, training and resource planning teams at British Gas Services (BGS), joined forces to design an integrated resourcing strategy that reduced attrition, improved customer service and sales, and increased employee empowerment. In just one year, the centres have cut churn from 59% to 39%, boosted new starter quality scores by nearly 60%, and increased employee satisfaction by 6%. These results have been achieved alongside a £300,000+ reduction in the recruitment department’s annual costs, and a £252,000 cost saving within the planning team.  British Gas Services (BGS), a growing part of the Centrica Group, is the largest domestic central heating and gas appliance installation company in the UK, looking after over 3.4 million British Gas customers and providing its customers with maintenance and breakdown cover under the HomeCare range. The 8 contact centres handle around 15 million calls with 1700 (FTE) call handling staff. BGS use Aspect eWorkForce Management along with Empower and Perform.

BUPA (UK Membership) (10th June in Staines): Learn how 23% sales growth was achieved in a declining market, because a confident, skilled management team created an environment where direct sales and support sections worked together as ‘part of the sale’ and first year employee attrition halved. An operational efficiency model removed traditional blockages and created the case for investing in more staff to allow an average of 3.5 training events per person and more time to make the most from every lead. BUPA is a global provider of private medical insurance and is the market leader in the UK, with a share of 44%. From their Manchester and Staines sites a team of 150 FTE work in the Call Centre Operations team, within UK Membership, responsible for the entire customer journey from the moment BUPA is contacted by a prospective customer through to fulfilment and enrolment. The centre uses Aspect e-workforce management, and Instant Services for web-chat.

Carphone Warehouse (10th July in London): See how the Management Information (MI) team became the “engine” of the business – supporting a customer-focussed transformation based on the Carphone Warehouse five new fundamental principles, and using technology that leaves EXCEL behind. In the call centre, individual advisors are directly targeted on customer survey results, customer advocacy is up 20 points and loyalty conversion up 8%. In correspondence, advisors are measured on First Time Fix and productivity is up 37%. The new reporting platform was developed by the MI team in just 12 months, outperforming external specifications at a fraction of the cost and saving £1.5m pa in Microsoft licences alone. The Carphone Warehouse mobile business has 1200 FTE and handle about 260,000 calls per week over two sites in London and Warrington. The division handles calls, emails, letters and other contacts for sales, loyalty and customer service. They use Cisco IPCC, Totalview WFM, Witness & Kana Response. MI.NET is internally developed.

Canterbury City Council (11th Sept in Kent): See why nearly half the contact centre volunteered to work regularly from home for part of their time, one ingredient of an approach to flexible working that combines call handling with face-to-face contact and achieves Customer Satisfaction scores of 90%. Home Working and job variety help retain experienced employees and integrated planning means that the council can now measure previously unquantified back-office work. With minimal IT investment, home working supports flexible working, with absence down 20% and call handling efficiencies up 16%. Canterbury City Council is a district council in Kent, providing 74 services including Planning, Waste Collection, Electoral Registration and Housing Benefits. The 47 contact centre staff work in both face-to-face service and in telephone work – with over 20 now volunteering for working part of the week at home. The centre handles an average of 10,000 calls and 3,000 visitors and 650 emails or letters per week.

Dell (8th July in Dublin and 9th Sept in Glasgow): See how the newly formed operations planning team turned around traditional performance shortfalls in the busiest periods of the year, by introducing new performance measures and paying particular attention to the execution of the resource plan. Specialist reports focused on interval performance and best/worst day and teams were held accountable for productivity as well as customer satisfaction. In 2007 agent productivity rose by 25% points across Europe and Dell achieved target customer satisfaction across the year, with service level up 25% points in the busy 3rd quarter.  Dell are global manufacturers of PC and related products, providing technical support to customers ranging from the home user to the larger corporate clients in a variety of industries. Dell have approximately 16 call centre across 10 countries handling circa 125,000 calls a week in 12 languages using 2,500 FTE (excluding Outsourced Partners). They use Aspect eWFM workforce management and six sigma techniques were used as part of the process improvement scheme.

EDF Energy (1st July in Brighton): Learn how analysing the root causes of customer contact led to reductions of 50% in direct debit queries and 60% in the billing helpline – increasing customer loyalty by 80% and freeing up time for 1:1’s and team meetings. The planning team apply this methodology across the entire service organisation, helping New Customer Acquisitions grow sales, creating benchmarks for validating investment decisions and developing a back-office planning model that supports a pioneering end-to-end service for new customers. This pre-empts incoming calls, by tracking back-office processes, resolving issues and calling the customer proactively.  EDF Energy is one of the UK’s largest energy companies, employing around 13,000 people, and is part of the EDF Group in Europe. The Customer division supplies electricity to over 5 million customers and operates 6 main contact centres in Hove, Worthing, Exeter, Plymouth and Sunderland handling approx 12m calls pa with 3,300 FTE. The contact causation team is part of the planning function within Customer Services and has developed its intranet-based survey tool in-house.

Firstsource Solutions (10th September in Belfast): See how resourcing, quality and operations managers at outsourcer Firstsource worked together to reduce call length for their client, Vodafone, from 532 seconds to less than 400 in just six months, saving an estimated £3/4 million a year. Results were achieved by having one of their Six Sigma black belts map the call life cycle to document the components of handling time. At the same time, quality scores increased and a cross- and upselling campaign has generated 17% conversion against a target of 12%. A simultaneous initiative has reduced IT downtime from 2,400 hours to just 300. The processes that achieved this success in Firstsource’s Belfast centre have now been rolled out in Vodafone’s other centres. Firstsource Solutions Ltd is an Indian-owned business process outsourcer employing more than 17,000 people globally including 2 sites in Northern Ireland employing over 900 staff. This project highlights how they provided quality to one of their clients from the first day of implementation. Firstsource use IEX’s Totalview workforce management system and share skills with their sites in India, US, Argentina and Philippines to ensure consistent quality globally.

Guinness Northern Counties Housing Association (11th June in Manchester): Learn how the ‘Voyage of Discovery’, created by the customer service centre staff for their colleagues, helped the customer service centre develop its role as the ‘shop window’ for customer service within the organisation, by providing a series of training modules in which advisors continue to develop their skills and knowledge. One of the largest in the housing sector, the 45 seat centre was set up in 2006, to provide a central focus for customer service and free up local staff in working with residents and communities. Guinness Northern Counties has a vision to really make a difference by achieving excellence and creating neighbourhoods where people want to live. Increasingly GNC provide homes to residents with special needs,    as well as general housing, in a large area, from Carlisle to Shrewsbury, Nottingham and Grimsby to Harrogate. Created in March 2006, the Customer Service Centre, with 45 seats, is open from 8am to 8pm, 6 days a week, and is the first line of contact for all customers.

Metropolitan Police (25th September in conjunction with the Public Sector Seminar): Learn how employee engagement, through the ASPIRe programme, brought life to the new Central Communications Command that replaced 37 units and redeployed 2000 staff. ASPIRe champions from each site work together on tasks to create an environment that works for people – raising employee satisfaction to 80% and caller satisfaction by 10% points. ASPIRe-driven initiatives include new quality standards, open days, newsletters, DVD and the Responding Safely Together project that links the centres with front-line police.  The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is the largest police force in the UK, covering 32 London boroughs with approx 45,000 staff. A single Central Communications Command (CCC) is the largest command in the MPS. With around 700 seats and 2000 staff across 3 centres in Lambeth, Hendon and Bow, it handles around 2m emergency and 10m non-emergency calls each year – representing about a quarter of all police 999 calls nationally. The project, stemming from the Home Office funded C3i programme, was first approved in 2004 and the final roll-out completed in January 2008.

North Warwickshire Borough Council (13th June in Atherstone, Midlands in conjunction with the Public Sector Seminar): See how a small rural borough council, with limited funds, ‘hits above its weight’ to create a customer service focus that is extending from the contact centre and one-stop shop into the wider council, where stakeholder satisfaction is 98%. Partners include a local credit union the Registrars, the NHS and the Warwickshire Direct partnership with other councils. Creative approaches to funding means that the council is always trying new things, with first time resolution up from 45% to 80. Part of the Warwickshire Direct Partnership, with the other 5 public authorities in Warwickshire, the contact centre and one-stop-shop at North Warwickshire Borough Council (NWBC) employs 16 staff and handles 12,000 contacts per month. The rural council covers 106 sq miles, 26,500 council tax accounts and a low level of government funding. Services include Housing, Revenues & Benefits, Planning, environment and other services and the switchboard. Warwickshire Direct use a shared Northgate CRM system and McFarlane telephony.

Orange UK (5th June in Darlington): See how Orange reduced schedule inflexibility by a third and halved the proportion of new-starter attrition. Your Time created new lifestyle shift options, to attract and retain a deliberately diverse mix of employees, increasing the ratio of part-timers from 9% to 29%. A cross-functional team targeted the reasons behind attrition and created a coherent strategy for managing working hours that offers a genuine balance between the needs of employees and the business. The project involved radical changes to recruitment, induction training and management practices on the operational floor. Orange – part of the France Telecom group – was named ‘Best Mobile Operator’ at the World Communication Awards 2006, for the 2^nd year running, and operates in 220 countries.  In the UK, over 8000 advisors offer sales and service support for fixed line, internet, and TV offers as well as mobile – across 10 contact centres, in-house, outsourced and offshore covering around 50 separate virtual call types.

Royal Bank of Scotland (IT Workplace Services) (4th Sept in East Midlands): The implementation of an intranet self-service helpdesk dramatically reduced employee downtime (time when IT users cannot access their systems) by 66% in just one year, giving a monthly average of 227.5 days worth of employee time back to the business. By identifying opportunities to improve online services, capacity was created in the helpdesk to take on additional specialised work. Optimising the use of online resources has reduced turnaround time for resolving customer requests and provided helpdesk advisors with more opportunities to develop new skills and boost job satisfaction. RBS ServiceLine is the internal technology helpdesk for the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, providing first point of contact technical support for 140,000 employees across banking and insurance. ServiceLine express offers intranet-based self-service and is based in Kegworth, East Midlands.

T-Mobile UK (18th June in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales): See how a project to rationalise two small specialist teams became a local success story, by involving agents and team leaders, as well as planners, in streamlining customer experience – reducing call transfers by 19% and billing investigations by 40% – by taking ownership of customer issues, combining technical and customer skill-sets and analysing the reasons for calls. The merger reduced costs by 40%, improved first call resolution and the team has a 65% lower employee attrition rate than the company average.  Part of Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile is a leading mobile operator, with more than 100 million customers worldwide. In the UK, T-Mobile has almost 6000 employees , with over 17m customers and 10m contacts per week – many handled by automation via IVR (65%) or SMS (20%). 9 call centres (in-house and outsourced) handle over 500,000 calls per week. The specialist registrations and billing (R&B) department is now approx 50 FTE, part of the 700 FTE Merthyr Tydfil centre in South Wales.

Vodafone (26th September Prague): Learn how the call centre resource planning team in Chrudim near Prague, helped Vodafone in the Czech Republic plan resourcing for their 62 retail stores, to improve sales as well as efficiencies, in a project that is now being rolled out in the UK also. A 2.4% overspend on the staff salary budget was eliminated in the first year and the average increase in schedule efficiency was 10.1% within 6 months. Revenue was increased by matching resources to demand, avoiding lost business and providing phone links to the call centre for service activity in peak periods.  Vodafone – the world’s leading mobile telecommunications company – has over 250 million customers worldwide including a presence in 33 European countries. This project shows work in the Czech Republic, to increase the new customer revenue from the 62 stores and 390 employees, by using resource planning expertise from the call centre operations in Prague. This approach has since been extended to the 340 UK stores, with 1,500 advisors. Vodafone use Q-matic systems to track queues in-store along with Aspect’s e-workforce management in Czech Republic and IEX Totalview system in UK for planning. Simul8’s simulation tool has also been used in the UK.