Meet The judges 2018

John Barr is Customer Experience Director at Optivo (Housing Association) managing 44,000 homes in S.E. England & the Midlands.

John has 27 years’ experience in the housing sector and 5 years providing English language services to businesses in Italy. John is passionate that Social Housing is as much a necessity as good Healthcare and Education. He’s driven by the idea that (often disadvantaged) customers should enjoy a positive customer experience as professional as anything offered in the commercial sector.

Tracey is a highly experienced and successful Director within Capita Customer Management, being responsible for strategy, proposition development and shaping client solutions. Specialising in complaint handling for over 10 years, Tracey understands the value of staying one step ahead and keeping a sharp eye on the market. Covering many industry sectors, she provides clients with insight and practical solutions to ensure they are aware of regulatory and other market pressures which may affect their complaint handling and business review operations.

Michelle Roberts is Homes in Sedgemoor’s Customer Focus Officer and was the lead for their overall winning entry for the 2017 UK Complaint Handling Awards.

Michelle has several years Customer Service and Complaint Management experience and is passionate about the customer journey. Her approach is about fairness and consistency and the lessons which can be learnt from complaints.

She has been instrumental in re-launching the complaints process at Homes in Sedgemoor to ensure it truly meets the need of their customers, this led to a significant reduction in formal complaints and an increase in customer satisfaction scores.

Formerly a Customer Relations Manager, Lauren is now providing analytic and consultancy services to businesses through her own company.

Previous successes include the development of a multi channel/multi site customer relations function as well as the management and implementation of remediation projects. This experience gives her a unique perspective on the customer journey.

Lauren is a firm believer in the benefits of systems thinking and root cause analysis when solving problems, whether through complaints or pro-active problem identification.

An experienced and dedicated Construction and Customer Service professional, with 10 years’ experience at National House Building Council (NHBC), followed up by over 20 years with market leading residential brands, such as Berkeley Homes, Charles Church, Linden Homes and Crest Nicholson.

Defined by attention to detail and a constant desire to improve service management, within highly motivated teams, by empowering them to adopt a ‘can do’ attitude, that continually seeks to challenge the status quo and enhance the customer experience.

I have more than 30 years’ experience in Customer Service across a wide range of sectors. I am Head of Group Customer Service at Mulberry Company Design Ltd – the Luxury Retailer and Manufacturer. I have always been passionate about Customer Service and whilst it is understandable that things do go wrong in life, good service is best measured by the power of recovery and how far you are prepared to go over and above for the customer.

Having trained as a solicitor, Michael has been involved in dispute resolution for over 20 years. His previous roles have included leading the consumer advice service for Hertfordshire Trading Standards; Michael was also the Chief Conciliation Officer for Qualitas, the Furniture Ombudsman, where he took a formative role in its transition to Ombudsman status. As TDS’ Director of Dispute Resolution, Michael is responsible for the overall management of the Tenancy Deposit Scheme’s dispute resolution and adjudication services.

Nick Bush brings 40 years of business change experience to help companies deliver exceptional performance improvement through being genuinely customer-centric. Passionate about customer experience, Nick is a consultant and interim manager with a career including positions at leading companies including BT, CSC and RBS. He is currently Head of Delivery at customer strategy and solutions company NextTen.

For the last 15 years, Neil’s been helping complaint handling teams banish the blah, bull and bunkum from their writing – and create brilliant customer communications. Whether it’s helping Barclaycard write with empathy or getting rid of rail speak at Great Western Railway, Nell gives clients inspiring and practical ways to write like human beings, not corporate robots. Over the last 18 months, The First Word team has picked up two awards for their work in customer service transformation and tone of voice.

Andrew is Independent consultant providing services and training in workplace investigations, complaint handling and management, mediation and alternative dispute resolution. He has over 35 years’ experience as a manager in various public sector and NFP organisations including 10 years oversight of professional standards and public complaints management in 2 police forces. He introduced service delivery standards and overhauled complaints handling systems and was recognised as one of the leading national practitioners in his field.

Quite simply, we provide car insurance to UK consumers. We sell insurance directly through our website and price comparison sites. We are young, disruptive and were recently recognised in an Insurance Times report as one of the ‘Biggest Risers’ in the industry in recognition of our work to ensure customer satisfaction. Ben is responsible for regulatory compliance across all First Central Group companies, in the UK, Gibraltar and Guernsey.

Prerna is the Head of Operations, responsible for both building and running the bank activities for ClearBank®, UK’s first clearing bank in more than 250 years. She is passionate about building agile and well-controlled processes and has dedicated the last 12 years of her career to delivering strategic business outcomes by building customer-centric operating models.  She champions the use of digital channels to service customers and is focussed on leveraging technology to improve end to end customer experience.

Rebecca’s love affair with outstanding service delivery began 30 years ago in the financial sector as a customer champion and complaint handler. Since then she’s worked with a wide range of organisations both in-house and as an external trainer and coach.

Rebecca supports service professionals with their daily challenges - particularly ‘those’ difficult conversations. She also works with the strategists, leaders and line managers that shape policy, processes and delivery. Her view? Whatever your job title, you’re in customer service.

Jim is a seasoned Financial Services Consultant who has work for leading Consultancies and more recently providing interim support to firms facing regulatory challenges.

In his career Jim has worked on some of the largest remediation projects which have all included significant elements of customer complaint handling which has given him a fantastic insight into what good looks like.

Denise has over 20 year’s management experience within the customer service and complaint handling sectors.

In her current role as Quality Assurance Manager at Zen, she is passionate that complaints and customer feedback is regarded as a positive opportunity to ensure the customer experience is enhanced, and that business improvements are delivered.

In her previous role as a Complaint Manager with Ombudsman Services she committed to delivering a fair and reasonable resolution for the Complainant and participating Member Company

Part of Barclays Bank PLC, Barclays Partner Finance (BPF) is one of the largest providers of point-of-sale finance. We currently work with leading business partners across the UK, providing trusted, competitive personal finance options to thousands of happy customers.

David currently heads up the Customer Relations area and is passionate about helping BPF be flexible, always innovative, always keeping our business partners a step ahead of the competition and our customers happy.

Hayley has 17+ year background in Q & HSE Senior Leadership roles across different sectors. From experience, she identified that businesses often struggle to develop robust quality processes and management systems, so she created The Quality Atlas® Methodology, a logical and structured Quality Programme that reflects the way the business works and supports staff in working together to deliver on time, on budget products and services.

She is a Chartered Member of the CQI, a certified RCA Leader/Instructor and a LEAN Six Sigma Black Belt.

She is an advocate of promoting the need for businesses to recruit independent and impartial Quality Advisors that encourage businesses to positively challenge and disrupt ways of working to truly deliver Continuous Improvement.

I am an ICA Diploma qualified and level 4 advisory qualified risk and compliance professional with over 35 years’ experience within Financial Services, as an adviser, as a Training and Competence Supervisor and as part of a compliance team.

I have been running my own consultancy for over 13 years and in that time, have assisted a variety of organisations ranging from large multi-national asset managers to regional and local IFAs. I specialise in the retail side of the market, particularly conduct of business, supervision and complaints handling.

Danielle manages the Compliance and Legal recruitment team at Alexander Lloyd, working with mainly financial services companies across the UK from SME’s to PLC’s. She has 8 years experience placing candidates in Compliance and Legal roles at all levels of seniority, including complaints handling, quality assurance, remediation and litigation.

Prior to her career in recruitment, she worked in an insurance call centre handling complaints.

Dave co-founded Sagaciti Consulting with 30 years’ public-sector experience providing excellent customer service, leading people, delivering strategic change, handling complaints, and innovating service delivery. This helped Dave create their intimate, client-focused consultancy delivering practical, evidence-based solutions for private and public-sector. Dave also brings 12 years’ Registered Charity experience.

Dave understands people put the heart, trust and integrity into organisations, believing complaints provide crucial opportunities to continuously inform and improve both their own approach and, more importantly, their customers’ experience.

www.sagaciti.co.uk

I have worked in many organisations, who are recognised as customer experience leaders in their field, for over 30 years. My focus has always been putting the customer at the heart of everything we do. Using strong insight data across all channels has encouraged loyalty but more importantly advocacy for not only our customers but also our people. Being a strong leader, and ensuring clear line of sight, from the front line role, to the corporate objectives, has acted as a catalyst in driving overall performance of the organisation and creating a culture, from which high performing teams evolve. Developing emotional intelligence has been challenging but rewarding in ensuring the customer experience goes from good to great. Mapping the customer journey, understanding the key touch points, the drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction has ensured continuous improvement of overall satisfaction.

Michael has worked on projects, around the world, helping organisations to gain when customers complain. His experience covers a wide range of sectors including insurance, travel, transport, leisure, manufacturing, automotive, consumer lending, mortgages, property management, healthcare and government. He has also written many articles on how companies can gain from complaints.

Michael’s latest book on complaint management was published by British Standards (BSI - to support BS ISO 10002 - the International complaint handling standard.

His other roles include being a committee member for the British Standards Institution's Customer Service Committee (SVS/0).

My obsession with customers and their experience started 12 years ago. I have a passion for making sure we deliver the very best first time, learning from when things go wrong and continually pushing the boundaries. I’ve experienced the complaint journey from handling individual complaints to creating business and country wide complaint strategies that are genuinely customer driven, inspiring people to put the customer at all decision points.

Neli is a procurement expert, responsible for advising on and delivering complex healthcare procurement projects for the NHS. With a degree in International Commercial Law, Neli’s experience includes working at the European Commission on novel procurement legislation and cooperating with the United Nations on updating public-private partnership regulations. Neli’s recent project – to procure community services in Nottinghamshire – will improve service quality and will generate efficiencies of £12m and has won both CIPS Best Public Procurement project and HCSA Collaboration awards.

With a passion for delivering a personal customer experience, Ben has worked in diverse roles and industries, driving improvements across multiple business functions, delivering end to end customer fulfillment, working within brokers, both B2C and B2B, driving sales, training, recruitment, management, product and service development, coupled with 5 years leading a complaints management operation.

Helen Pettifer is passionate about Customer Service, having been a Customer Service Manager in the security industry.

She now runs her own training company based in Buckinghamshire, bringing advice and support to companies on both internal and external Customer Service. She designs and delivers training, covering a variety of topics on customer engagement and is a public speaker on the subject.

Helen is a Member of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), Toastmasters International and a Young Enterprise Board Member.

Cathe Gaskell is a Director in the Results Company Healthcare complaints are an area we provide extensive expertise in, training staff to understand patient and family needs and working with complainants to provide win-win solutions. We work with teams to better understand the patient experience and de-escalate the chance of a complaint, based on growing staff’s emotional intelligence and developing empathy with complainant’s needs, wants and experiences.

I have several years Customer Service experience in public and in private sector. I am the Operations Recruitment and Training Manager at Verisure Securitas Direct. Verisure is Europe’s leading provider of monitored security solutions because we take our customers' trust and security very seriously. We believe everyone has the right to feel safe and secure. As a recruiter and trainer, I insist on the utmost quality in customer service because it is our mission to protect and serve them.

Ollie spent several years at the Financial Ombudsman Services as a Senior Adjudicator, investigating and resolving banking, consumer credit and general insurance complaints. Ollie was specifically assigned to handle complex and novel complaints and partake in developing the Service’s approach and also took responsibility for complaints referred by vulnerable customers. Ollie now works for PwC for three years, assisting Financial Services clients with a range of Compliance and Risk issues, but primarily as a complaints handling Subject Matter Expert.

A senior operations leader with 23 years experience leading and evolving contact centre, customer service, customer experience and outsourcing operations. Fortunate enough to have worked in and gained extensive knowledge of different industry sectors during this time, including; subscriptions, manufacturing, distribution, retail, education, publishing and insurance. Developing and empowering teams, nurturing and coaching talent into future leaders. Currently employed at Capita Insurance Services as the Head of Operations for the Sittingbourne office, with overall site responsibility.

Irene is the compliance leader at Simplyhealth and is currently leading the team supporting the development and embedding of sound compliance practices and good conduct across the business units.

Irene has a strong background in compliance, having also worked at the Financial Ombudsman Service and as a Risk and Compliance Manager for Home Assistance UK. Irene has a diploma in Law and is a member of the CII.

Sarah has gained a wealth of experience and knowledge having worked within the Operations and IT Service Management sectors for over 25 years. Now working with Constant Power Services, a specialist and reliable turnkey UPS Solutions provider within the UK, *in the role of Operations Manager, Sarah is pivotal to the company’s growth plans.

Having been on several Judging panels for the UK Awards previously, Sarah’s aptitude, experience and knowledge make her a perfect Judge

Highly experienced customer service professional with vast knowledge of contact centres and customer centric business operations. I have successfully created new contact centres, from concept to fully functioning, award winning businesses, for 3 different products and customer audiences.

I was delighted to join Echo-U Ltd, a leading outsource service provider, as Customer Service Director in June 2017 to lead the expansion plans for our now fully functioning second outsource contact centre in Bournemouth.

Nothing makes me smile more than delighting customers and seeing colleagues reach their full potential; my work is about creating and revelling in the success of people!

www.echo-u.co.uk

Suzan is the Odeon Cinemas Guest Experience Manager, with over 15 years in the industry. Odeon is part of AMC the world’s largest premier entertainment company. She has lead Odeon’s contact centre entry into the Top 10 Retail Sector for customer service and she is passionate about the customer journey, the evolving culture of the contact centre, employee engagement and turning detractors into promoters. She has also judged at Call North West Contact Centre awards for several years.

I’m a Customer Experience Professional and have worked in Customer Experience Operational Management roles for over 13 years before joining the Rank Group in November 2016 to lead the Customer Experience Team where our customers recognise us as Mecca Bingo and Grosvenor Casinos.

Having redesigned the complaint processes across both digital and retail, my team have delivered a significant improvement in the complaint resolution timescales and implemented reporting to enable innovation and service improvement across the business.

Nick is a highly experienced senior Customer Service and Contact Centre professional with a track record of achievement and expertise gained from 32 years in roles at British Airways, NatWest, Cap Gemini and T-Mobile and 13 years as a Consultant. He is a champion of customer centricity and architect of a Service Excellence Model designed to transform service delivery, promote change and provide an enhanced customer experience.

He has lived and worked in 26 countries and speaks 4 foreign languages.

Parminder Shubh is a BSc graduate from Brunel University who has a wealth of experience in Financial Services since 2000. She has held various posts in Complaint Handling, Customer Service and Operational Risk /Compliance.

Effective Customer Service is key to any business and is where her skills lie. Her roles consist of providing advice and guidance to the business on successful management of complaints processes, systemic and root cause issues. Also has experience to manage business risks and controls and identify/mitigate weaknesses.

Robbie is Head of Innovation at Ombudsman Services, the UK’s largest multi-sector alternative dispute resolution (ADR) provider. Since 2004 Robbie has worked across key areas related directly to independent complaint handling, including making final decisions on individual cases. As part of the leadership team, Robbie has led on Ombudsman Services' certification to several Competent Authorities as an approved ADR Body under the terms of the EU ADR Directive Regulations 2015.

Robbie plans to complete his MBA studies this year.

Juliette is a customer insight professional with 18 years’ experience in managing client-facing relationships in B2B, Leisure and Tourism, and Financial Services – she has a particular interest in driving customer-centric approaches. Currently she is leading several B2B customer experience programmes in addition to the annual Captains of Industry survey. Juliette is also part of the team coordinating the CX Council (bringing together customer experience leaders).

Anthony has over fourteen years’ experience working specifically within the complaints and feedback software sector. Having implemented well over 70 complaints and feedback systems across the banking, insurance, government (local and central), travel and transport and social housing sectors, Anthony now helps firms review their current complaints processes and identifies possible areas for system improvements, whether that is in the initial capture, ongoing complaint management, quality assurance checks, identifying root cause analysis/learning opportunities, or the meaningful MI a dedicated system can provide.

I am passionate about service and all that it encompasses. I am an independent consultants whose focus is always on the customer. With over 25 years’ experience I has been fortunate to have had the opportunity to have worked in some of the top FTSE 100 organisation in the UK and worldwide.

My main areas of focus People development, Service Excellence, Continuous Service Improvement and Complaint Management. I truly believe every customer deserve great service!

German national and 13-year Permanent Resident of Singapore, Marcus has more than 25 years in the Sales and Service Management Industry.

Marcus conducts Customer Experience-based Mystery Shopper programs, Customer Satisfaction Survey programs and Focus Group discussions to inspire & improve Client service delivery across all touchpoints to help people & organizations to make their Customers’ lives better.

In training sessions Marcus gets people inspired, motivated & skilled to improve their performance, while sharing real-world experience gained working with organizations around the globe.

Since 2017 he is Associate Faculty Member of the Othman Yeop Abdullah Graduate School of Business in Malaysia.

Having worked across Financial, Retail and Housing within an analytics background, understanding Customer Experience has been one of the key components within my role.

From improving the customer experience through direct feedback or complaint analysis, and providing qualitative and quantitative reporting to make recommendations on how best to improve the Customer Journey and in turn the Business Reputation. Currently introducing a Quality Framework and a new website to better improve the Aspire Customer Journey.

Mark is now leading the growth of the BPO Industry disrupting, Home Working specialist ‘Arise’ across the UK and Europe.

Mark has been involved in growing businesses all of his career and has specialised in the BPO, Customer Contact & Direct marketing sectors for the past 15 years, working with major brands in the telecoms, mobile, utilities and financial services sectors. He was a Director at HEROtsc for six years and led its spectacular growth from regional player to market leader, recording a turnover of £100million and subsequently two Private Equity buy outs.

In 2007 Mark, founded Aquira the UK’s market leading end to end direct marketing delivery and data compliance business.

Rob is a partner at customer communications consultancy Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. The lorries help organisations improve customer experience through better communications. He’s managed customer engagement, cultural change and tone of voice communications projects for leading financial, retail, utilities and manufacturing clients. He has a background in public relations, branding and communications gained in technology companies in the UK and USA.

Donna O’Toole is an experienced awards expert who has helped hundreds of household brands, businesses, and leaders to grow their profile through winning prestigious industry awards. As founder of ‘August’ a unique recognition agency that helps business leaders and their companies to raise their profile, Donna has proved her expertise through an outstanding success rate in The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise competition. Donna has now launched a unique digital training platform designed specifically to help small businesses, comms teams, and entrepreneurs to win the awards they enter.

Legally-trained, Saskia is a Management Consultant with over 10 years experience of remediation and regulatory change within the banking & wealth management sectors. Saskia works for the boutique consultancy Leading Point Financial Markets. She has developed leadership skills as a subject matter expert during several past business reviews. Her experience covers extensive stakeholder management, interviewing and training candidates, an acute focus on quality, as well as business change. Having previously worked in Paris, Saskia is currently a practitioner in London.

Emma is Head of Complaints and Regulatory Oversight for Sigma Financial, a provider of white label outsourced services including complaints handling, contact centre, collections and sales across the financial services and utilities sectors. Her specialties include leading strategic change in large complaint functions and delivering transformative approaches that delight customers, and staff alike. With over 12 years’ experience, and holding her ICA UK Diploma in Compliance, Emma is a subject matter expert across key disciplines including Ombudsmen complaints, and Redress and Remediation programmes.

Steve is a highly engaging and successful Strategic Partnership Director who is incredibly passionate about creating cultures where individuals feel inspired to engage and achieve outstanding results. He has extensive knowledge and skills in running large scale customer experience transformation programmes, based on his operational background as a performance coach and facilitator within telephony and face-to-face environments. Steve’s ability to lead and manage high profile programmes and create strong operational and senior stakeholder relationships leads to a highly collaborative approach.

Energetic leader with 15 years strategic and operational experience across large corporate and SME businesses . Strong personal impact with proven ability to create, develop and deploy exceptionally high performing teams whilst nurturing individuals career success. Career achievements demonstrate an ability to instigate and manage significant cultural shifts in expectations and performance. Passionate about building customer advocacy through trust, delivery and continuous improvement. Complaints management experience over the last 6 years, liaising directly with the Ombudsman services and FCA.

15 Years experience in complaint handling across a number of firms, including 5 years working for the Executive Team at RBS. The last 3 years have been spent ensuring the RBS complaint policy is fit for purpose. Working with the regulators and internal franchises to focus on reducing complaints, overseeing the implementation of various regulations complaint elements. The design an annual pan bank complaint module and other training and competency aspects and a focus on external benchmarking.

Anu is a highly experienced financial services executive with vast knowledge and expertise in Customer Operations, Complaints handling and transforming Customer Experience.

Anu has successfully led and transformed numerous high value operations across the financial sector and is extremely passionate about customer and colleague excellence. She excels at helping organisations identify their critical differentiator, helping them think and act around their customers and colleagues whilst driving economic value.

Anu is a member of the Institute of Directors and is looking forward to completing her certification in Company Direction this year.

Bruce has more than 25 years experience within the financial services sector with over 20 of these dealing with complaints. He has worked as a complaints consultant, has worked at the Financial Ombudsman Service and is now a Complaints Manager within the pensions and employee benefit sector. He is passionate about delivering fair outcomes and ensuring that both the customer experience is enhanced and business improvements are delivered as a result of lessons learned from complaints.

Zuzana began her career in insurance and financial services in 2001, working for a premium finance house and managing a division specialising in school fees finance. Later in her career she moved into insurance broking, managing a niche brokerage specialising in litigation finance and after the event insurance.

Currently Zuzana is a member of the senior management team of 1ST CENTRAL, leading a number of diverse operational functions and focusing on delivering an excellent customer experience across the omnichannel platforms. She’s passionate about continuous improvement, problem solving and the analysis and elimination of root causes of issues and has an excellent track record in delivering operational enhancements to further develop 1ST CENTRAL customer experience.

Renee Kalia is Medicine Access Director at Clinigen Group plc, a specialty pharmaceutical and service company dedicated to meet the unmet medical needs for patients around the world. Awarded with the coveted ServiceMark accreditation through the Institute of Customer Service, Renee believes that company-wide staff engagement, aligned with customer expectations brings a class leading operational team delivering outstanding world class customer service. Renee has 25 years of experience in both outsourcing and in-house environments.

Dale Smith, Creative Director at Bridge began his business learning with event companies such as Marketing Week/Centaur Publishing and was Director of Seminars for Euromoney Publishing. However, he also attributes his success to practical life skills and experiences gained across many interesting jobs in his teens as well as extensive backpacking around the world following University. Embracing these experiences, he later turned his interest to behavioral sciences, Employee Engagement, Training and building organizational cultures that best reflects the brand promise.

Mike is an Associate Director at FCA compliance specialists, TCC. He has 20 years’ experience of advising financial services firms on regulatory and conduct risk, and in that time has worked extensively with complaints departments on process re-design, staff training and awareness, complaints decisioning policy and procedures, final response letter template design, complaints handling quality assurance, reviews of redress levels awarded, and customer outcomes testing.

Kath is Head of Customer Experience at LV=, a modern financial services business whose core focus revolves around creating value for its members. Kath team of 250 people across the Customer Experience function, deliver a market-leading and award winning service proposition to LV=’s customers and advisers. Prior to that, Kath has succeeded in multiple leadership roles within customer experience, strategic operations and relationship management. A role- model leader, empowering teams to deliver great customer outcomes and to continuously improve the customer journey.

Gordon has over 25 years of Technology, Marketing and Business Development experience gained from working with companies like Microsoft, BOC, Hogg Robinson Financial Services (15 years) and innovative technology distributor Steljes who specialised in collaborative working. Gordon has held positions such as Marketing Director and Director of Technology Enabled Relationship Management where he looked after all the touch points across his organisation in financial services, including social media and how you use technology to enable and deliver exceptional customer experience down a variety of channels.

In May 2014, Francesca joined NewDay as Director of Customer Services & Service Delivery where she is a member of the Senior Leadership team running the teams across Customer Service, Complaints, Underwriting and Fulfilment to drive a transformation of the business following the re brand of SAV Credit to NewDay and the acquisition of the Santander UK portfolio of co-branded cardholders. Prior to that Fran worked at GE Capital, Axa Life, Telefonica O2, Cable & Wireless Worldwide and BT. An experienced Leader who has lead successful transformations and created award winning customer service experiences and teams. Her strengths lie in customer focus and insight, transforming service experience in a cost effective way, engagement, customer experience and implementing technologies and applications to enhance the journey.