Engage Business Media Annual Review

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What our partners thought:

New, interactive and live newsroom

A year like no other, unplanned and unprecedented

Fantastic feedback from a number of 2020 partners on recent virtual events.

A great way to deliver conference content and a real step up from the Zoom webinar gallery in terms of delegate and speaker experience.

The pandemic this year has been hugely testing and upsetting, we have seen a seismic unplanned global shift that has affected the entire planet.

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A YEAR LIKE NO OTHER, DEFINING PURPOSE WITH POSITIVES

VIEW FROM THE CHAIRS

10-33 Our Live Studio chairs provide an insightful review of our three flagship summits, a fantastic way to end the year.

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ANNUAL REVIEW WELCOME

“A year like no other, unpl and unprecedented, but ha purpose with some positiv As we fast approach the end of 2020 we now start to look back and review. The pandemic this year has been hugely testing and upsetting, we have seen a seismic unplanned global shift that has affected the entire planet. There are many words that can be used to describe 2020, most of which are not positive, Epic is perhaps one, the definition of the word defines it as “to describe something historically important, lasting and complex”.

We held our last two in person venue-based events back in March, the ‘Digital Workplace’ conference and the launch of the ‘Employee Wellbeing’ conference, both of course very prominent topics. We like most businesses have dramatically transformed from the traditional way of how we organised and delivered our conferences and pivoted to virtual. Apart from being a fast-paced journey we have learnt a lot along the way, discovered exciting new ways of doing things, some of which will stay forever and have been hugely beneficial, it has also reminded us how important in person networking and human interaction is and why it’s so important, from both a business point of view but also regarding our wellbeing.

Wellness covers physical and mental fitness, it addresses the broader spectrum of your body encompassing the overall balance of your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. We are living in times where there seems so much to worry about. The difficult financial climate, environmental challenges, welfare reform, terrorist threats, public health scares – the list is endless. We ran an Engage Wellbeing competition this year which saw the lucky winner Neil from Naked Wines win £500 Wiggle vouchers, we announced this live on the last day of the Customer Engagement Summit.

Like with a lot of things tech really has been the great enabler, it has driven us forward as a business by many years in just a few months, it forced us to generate new ideas and different ways of doing things, tech as we know creates a lot of data, that often benefits us all.

This year although a painful period has also brought us closer to our communities, sponsors and further forged long lasting relationships, we really are all in this together and if anything, this has given us an opportunity to review our purpose, strengthen our offering and streamline processes making us an even more efficient business, as always, our employees and customers really are at the heart of everything we do.

2020 saw the launch of our Newsroom studio style where we now broadcast our events live until we can safely pivot back to the venue based format, streaming events is certainly here to stay and breaks down the traditional geographical boundaries, the live newsroom format is working really well and the feedback has been excellent from all involved, our event chairs we have worked with for several years have done an amazing job at playing the role of ‘anchorman’ and have made the events really engaging and makes it feel like something a bit closer to what we’re used to.

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anned as defined ves” The International Engage Awards were also virtual this year, and although did not quite have the Westminster Park Plaza glitzy element, we were amazed and overwhelmed by both the number of entries seen this year but also the quality. We also had the pleasure of working with the much loved and recognizable voice of Roger Tilling. Our winners came from a variety of industries, but we must give a special mention to our triple winners Western Power Distribution, who were named winners in ‘Best Customer Service Team’, ‘Best Customer Contact Strategy in a Crisis’ and ‘Best Use of Innovation in Customer Engagement’. This is a real testament to the team to achieve so much in such uncertain times. An extra congratulations must also go to our 2020 finalists – during such uncertain times, these organisations have truly gone above and beyond to engage their colleagues and customers.

On the subject of awards, we also took to the ‘virtual stage’ and had the pleasure of collecting our very own award, we are absolutely delighted to have been awarded the winners of the ‘Best Development of an Existing Conference’ category in the prestigious Conference Awards.

The award has been allocated to the Employee Engagement Summit after 2019 saw a complete overhaul of the event which resulted in a 150% increase in delegate numbers, 50% more content, a 95% delegate satisfaction score and 50% more sponsors.

The transformation of the Employment Engagement Summit is testament to our team and our development approach. Not only did we listen to our stakeholders, but we also delivered a conference that met their needs. We are so delighted with this recognition in one of the 2020 Conference Awards most heavily entered categories.

Our 2021 event calendar is planned as virtual at this stage, with 12 really great events planned, but we do have dates with our venues where we hope to pivot

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ANNUAL REVIEW WELCOME

back to the much wanted and loved venue-based format next year at some point. With all the positive vaccine related news recently, this is thankfully looking more possible than ever.

This year we have seen lots of words being regularly used such as Pandemic, unprecedented and pivot, however there is one I have used myself more than ever and that is Proud. I’m so Proud of the team, more so now than ever, everyone has worked so hard and really stepped up to the plate having to quickly learn new ways of doing things and doing jobs they never dreamt of and stepping out of their comfort zones most days.

I am also proud of our sponsors who have all been so supportive of our new formats and quite often taking a real leap of faith and just taking our word on a new event format, that really is trust. Of course, our delegates who have also had to discover news ways to learn, engage with our content and make a big step to understanding new tech and new ways of watching our events.

There have been many reasons to look back on 2020 with sadness but there are also several things that have forced us to do things even better than ever and focus on the things that really do matter. The pace of change with never slowdown but perhaps the direction of focus might.

Every business is experiencing more change than ever, there never has been a more important time to come together, share our experiences. These industry conferences in whatever format they are really are platforms and the future of these industries.

We have shared with you in this 2020 review some of the fantastic kind words, complimentary feedback, and reports of our 3 annual flagship Annual Summits, we are delighted with how they went and the case study content this year is more valuable than ever, these events really have highlighted some real examples of how businesses have transformed, adapted, repositioned themselves and reflected on who they are and how they do things.

We would like to thank everyone for their fantastic support which is hugely appreciated. We wish you all a festive and safe Christmas period, and look forward to seeing you all in 2021.

Warm Regards, Nicholas Rust – Managing Director

Engage Business Media, 2 Esher Road, Hersham, Surrey, KT12 4JY. Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy in the compilation of this publication, the Publishers cannot be held liable for errors and omissions. ©COPYRIGHT: Engage Business Media Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior consent in writing to the publisher.

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2020 Speaker feedback and testimonials

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‘Thanks again for the opportunity, I really get a lot from doing this and love the events you put on’ Andrew McGuigan, Worldwide Customer Service Strategy Leader, Microsoft

‘I enjoyed the event. Great quality content and well organised. The app is excellent’ Bogdan Grigorescu, AI Platform Director, Marks & Spencer

Mary Cope, Head of HR, Learning and Development,

‘There was a lot of relevant content there for me and having access to the vendors at the breaks was also useful. Keep up the good work’

Share UK

Adrian Morley, Director of Customer and Member Services, The Co-op

‘The event was well planned and set up, the venue worked well and every speaker was clear, interesting and delivered some thought provoking takeaways. Gavin and I very much enjoyed the opportunity to present and share aspects of our recent story, and it was great to receive support for and expressions of interest in the concept of Tribes which we had outlined, among other things in our session. Overall, very worthwhile and delighted to have been a part of it. Many thanks for the efforts of everyone who, behind the scenes, helped the day to come together’

‘Thanks for having me. You guys put on very slick events, great as an attendee, obviously, but for a speaker is very reassuring on the day’ Ben Lappin, Director, Retention & Customer Experience Guardian News & Media

‘The usual brilliant standard of conference. Always a pleasure’ Ross Parker, People & Communications Manager, LV= GI Engagement & Wellbeing Lead

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ANNUAL REVIEW TESTIMONIALS

‘It was fun to take part, a bit of a different experience doing it from home but still valuable’ Patrik Edvardsson, Internal Communications Manager Corporate Affairs, Linklaters

‘Massive congratulations to you and your team.

Pulling off such a technically impressive event with the calibre of speakers you had (present company excepted – I was in awe of the line-up) is a significant achievement.’

Shaulan Chanlewis, Internal Communications Officer, Unicef

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT TRANSFORMATION ‘The event was very well run indeed and much more professionally than many others’ Dr Tracey Leghorn, Chief HR and H&S Officer, SUEZ UK

‘Thank you for inviting me and for the great support throughout the prep and during the event. I’ve got a few messages on LinkedIn with positive feedback on the session, so I guess it went really well. Finally congratulations on the event. I watched a few sessions this weekend and there was some really good content/insights’ Inara Pilatti, Head of Internal Communications EMEA, Facebook

‘Excellent event congratulations - and I loved the studio format’ Ed Thompson, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner

‘Thank you and the team for the forum and the enormous effort – great event! In my most humble opinion, it was better than the one another company organised the week before’ Lilia Dikova, Head of Digital, Bionic Business

‘I thoroughly enjoyed the event and felt it was really well organised and great variety of speakers’ Mel Fischer, Partner Customer Care, Waitrose

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‘Thanks for having me and a credit to the whole team your side for a really seamless experience.

It looked great from a viewer standpoint too’ Tim Bond, Head of Insights, Data and Marketing Association

‘I really enjoyed it – great job at taking this event online’ Clayton Ricketts, Senior Capacity-Building Manager , Save the Children International |

‘Thanks to the EBM team who made it easy. Everything worked very smoothly from my end. Also, the questions were great, from the chair and the audience. Look forward to our next interaction’ Ryan Skinner, Principal Analyst Marketing Strategy, Forrester

‘Thanks for the opportunity to be part of an amazing panel of speakers and a wonderful summit.

I enjoyed sharing my insights and knowledge and glad to know it went well. Look forward to more such opportunities in the future’ Raghav Gupta, Global Customer Experience Lead, Expedia

‘I really enjoyed the Virtual summit. The format was great, having more time for questions did make the whole session a lot more engaging from my perspective’ Rumyana Miteva, Head of Performance & Revenue, Secret Escapes

TUESDAY 1- THURSDAY 3 DECEMBER

‘Thanks so much for the opportunity I really enjoyed the experience. I have had a few approaches to discuss content both on linked in and through your forum’ Diane Baynham, Head Of Digital Urgent and Emergency Care (Head of Service Design

‘Thanks for the opportunity. This was the most innovative format and the best managed event I have spoken at this year – congrats to you and the team’

Digital UEC) NHSX

‘Really enjoyed the sessions’ Mark Carter, Head Of Retention & Marketing Technology, NBC/Universal

David Sturdee, Chief Operating Officer Chief Customer Officer, Yum! Brands Pizza Hut for Europe

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ANNUAL REVIEW TESTIMONIALS

‘I am happy it landed well! You had a good host for this event, made it very easy to have a natural conversation’ Thomas Reby, Head of Product Support - EMEA/LatAm Platforms &

TUESDAY 1- THURSDAY 3 DECEMBER

Ecosystems, Google

‘I absolutely got value from it and I’m also looking forward to future co-operation. I think the format of the Summit was really good, with both presentations and Q&As, made it hugely engaging’

‘Was enjoyable and useful – looking forward to the next one’ Ross Antrobus, Head of Behavioural Insight & Business

Carina Ahlberg, Head of Customer Experience,

Analytics, The Football Association

Volkswagen Group

‘Thank you for your support it was a lovely time’ Surbhi Ugra, Head of Employee Experience Excellence, Unilever

‘It was really fun! The event was so engaging and organised so well! Kudos to the team I hope to get involved in other events like these – well done’ Costanza Tobino, Internal Communications

‘Really appreciate being asked. I am sure I would have enjoyed listening into more presentations but unfortunately our system didn’t support your set up. Luckily I could do the zoom and very much enjoyed the interview.

Since then I have also had quite a few contacts on linked-in, so definitely a valuable experience’

Lead, Stats Perform

Birthe Mester, Global Head for Performance, Engagement & Culture, Deutsche Bank

‘Many thanks for the opportunity – we have had some great feedback’.

Richard Saundry, Professor of HRM and Employment Relations, The University of Sheffield

‘We had a great time.

Thanks for all your support’ Mathijs Leenhouts, Venue - Culture, Service & Performance Manager, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club

‘It was my absolute pleasure. And congrats on a successful virtual flagship event. I am sure it was no small feat. And a big thank you to the team. They made the prep and experience seamless’ Melissa Hungerford, Group Director, Talent, Leadership and Learning, Dixons Carphone

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ANNUAL REVIEW SPONSORS

What our partners had to say Enjoyed working with you all, Katie was really helpful and communicative throughout.

The platform and studio concept was great, the studio chair Jo Moffat did a great job!

The Virtual Customer Engagement Summit was a great success for us. The quality of the event and in particular the quality and seniority of the delegates created excellent lead generation opportunities for us at Contentsquare.

Loved the Studio BBC concept, it felt very relevant, really enjoyed working with Engage and as always you always came back to us straight away and so easy to respond. It really felt like a partnership and we look forward to seeing the ROI from the event, already we think it went really well.

Best virtual event we have ever attended, lots of delegates! The virtual platform was great, networking wasn’t as great as in person events, but that is the same everywhere.

Great event and platform!

Thanks for the opportunity Steve.

This was the most innovative format and the best managed event I have spoken at this year – congrats to you and the team.

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Although a bit early to give detailed feedback on the quality of the leads, our initial feedback is that the format of the presentation and how it was hosted was great, the numbers of viewers of the presentation was also very pleasing, so initially looks good from my perspective there at least! That was probably a lot to do with the time of our presentation slot, so thank you for getting us such a prime time on the agenda.

It was the BEST virtual event we have ever done, you guys really ‘pulled it out of the bag’!! You have all done a great job, Poppulo will definitely work with EBM in 2021.

Well done EBM, we have done a large number of Virtual events in recent months and the Customer Engagement Summit was by far the best event. You have clearly built the virtual event from the ground up and it showed. The newsroom studio format is excellent. We look forward to working with you in 2021.

Thanks for inviting me.

I certainly gained a lot of insights.

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ANNUAL REVIEW VIEW FROM THE CHAIR

CX Marketing Summit 2020 This year I had the pleasure to host Day One of the virtual CX Marketing Summit, broadcasting live from the Engage Business Media studio. The interactive newsroom format delivered the same engaging content as effectively as it did in the traditional venue-based conferences in London, showcasing a feast of inspiring case study presentations, interviews and panel discussions from some of the biggest brands in the global marketing industry. Not surprisingly, this year’s topic was ‘Transforming CX marketing strategies in times of turmoil’, which focused on how the pandemic acted as a catalyst for profound change and brought to life highly relevant examples of how leading organisations emerged in the ‘new normal’.

Day One: Thursday 8 October Manuela Pifani, CXellence Consulting

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irst up on stage was Ryan Skinner from Forrester, who put the spotlight on how, now more than ever, customer obsession is key to win in fast changing environments. However, his research on content marketing and content strategy highlighted that only 7% of brands are Advanced in customercentrism, against a backdrop of organisations who remain hung up on promotional strategies that were developed during the era of mass media marketing and digital marketing.

Ryan’s analysis highlighted that four key competencies underpin customer obsession in marketing. Firstly, having a Mindset that prioritises customer needs, putting the customer in the driving seat for all decision making. Secondly, employing Talent with an ability to step outside the core focus on marketing to bring new perspectives. Then, following a Process that allows teams to work together collaboratively to focus on customer engagement and on fixing customers’ problems.

Lastly, using Insights to change the business and redesign products and processes around the customer. His keynote conclusion perfectly set the scene for the CX Marketing Summit, by stating that Advanced teams have three key things in common: a strong link between marketing and CX, a clearly defined CX vision and strong customer journey mapping adoption.

In fact, the rest of Day One showcased a rich series of best practice case studies and interactive discussions perfectly choreographed by the Engage Business Media team to take the audience deeper into these key elements.

Next on the agenda was Richard McCrossan from Genesys, who built on those points by highlighting that the lack of insights into the entire customer journey has left organisations unable to accurately detect and act upon crucial moments to convert leads into opportunities and improve customer service. There is still a data divide between sales and marketing on one side and customer service and operations on the other, impacting how the brand promise gets fulfilled. Richard believes that joining the dots between those two domains is essential, as CX only exists when businesses share data and use it in the moments that matter, i.e. at the point of interaction, to engage with customers in a human and personalised way across touchpoints. This is where the new partnership between Genesys and Adobe is focused, helping organisations leverage AI powered predictive engagement to improve digital outcomes by an average of 49%.

Amit Kumar, Head of Marketing Technology at Photobox, took the stage next to share a perfect example of how they managed to deliver that personalised customer service by using automation. While 89% of companies are struggling to drive revenues from their personalisation and segmentation strategies, Photobox is on a mission to “Provide the best possible customer experience by enabling clear, consistent and contextually relevant personalised communications throughout the customer journey”.

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They follow the example of big brands like Amazon who use personalisation to create a self-reinforcing cycle of truly one-to-one customer experiences and increase brand engagement, delivering value to both customers and the business.

Matter-of-factly, Amit said that personalisation is easy: they do research, analyse the journeys and the pain points, then prioritise and act on them systematically, communicating the solution back to the customers who faced the problem in order to close the loop and build trust. He added that a test & learn culture is essential to succeed, supported by 5 key capabilities: integrated data, marketing automation, marketing attribution, strategic partnerships and specialist skills. As an example, Amit shared that Photobox used to follow up only on 10% of abandoned baskets, while now they managed to increase revenues by 200% by implementing an integrated campaign to send customers reminders using exciting images through email, SMS and social channels, which increased reach and conversion.

Picking up the baton next, the lovely Danielle Malvern from RedEye focused on the importance of engaging the c-suite behind the personalisation strategy. Her experience of working with some of the biggest B2C brands in the UK proved the need to be aligned to what matters to the Board, ultimately demonstrating the impact on the bottom line.

Relevant and personalised campaigns drive 18 times more revenue, but marketeers not only need the right tools to deliver the best personalised experiences to their customers, but they also need the data and insights to prove it and build an effective business case

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for change, in order to obtain that essential Board sign-off.

For example, RedEye helped Nike calculate that it costs 7 times more to acquire a new customer than nurture an existing one. Using the correlation of Csat and LTV, they also understood the relative value of happy and unhappy customers and were able to build a business case to increase revenue by using AI to help with tailoring messages, choose when to show a discount or identify when customers are at risk of churning. They also achieved cost reductions by introducing a Fit Assistant to reduce the effort and costs associated with returns. In the case of Travelodge, they delivered personalised campaigns focused on what mattered most to their customers, driving higher click-through rates and revenue.

Danielle’s concluding message was clear: what you can’t measure, you can’t improve and you can’t use to get approval from your Board.

After the break, Lauren Drew strengthened the importance of using the right data in her in-depth case study on FT Specialist. She took the audience through the seven key considerations which help her optimise the subscription funnel from awareness and acquisition through to engagement and retention. Just like previous speakers, she agrees that the first consideration needs to be about defining the target audience and their needs, in order to focus the business goals and strategy on the right USPs. Lauren stressed the importance of a customer-focused access model which leverages different stages of free content to attract the customer, encourage registration and build engagement, before committing to a subscription. Key to strengthening this engagement is the ability to capture the right information at key stages of the journey to understand customer behaviour online and tailor the overall strategy in a personalised way, from pricing to onboarding and retention. Her final consideration reiterated the importance of measuring success through KPIs, in order to trial campaigns across different channels based on acquisition performance.

Next up on the virtual stage was Gavin Laugenie, who shared the in-depth analysis of marketing hottest trends captured in dotdigital’s ecommerce benchmark

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report Hitting the Mark. Through a data-driven analysis of 100 ecommerce brands, based on user experience and other metrics, they discovered those brands who are going over and beyond to improve customer experience and those who continue to neglect best practice marketing tactics. For example, Gavin said that 66% of online retail brands are not making use of preference centres to drive engagement and usage, 80% do not have loyalty programmes, only 33% have adopted live chat (of which only 64% respond within 60 seconds) and only 18% have effectively integrated omnichannel capabilities.

Then I had the honour to lead the audience towards the lunch break with an unprecedented interview with Vanessa Bakewell, Global Client Partner at Facebook and a big name in the world of music, entertainment and the creative industry, and with James Kirkham, Chief Business Officer at Defected Records and one of the world’s foremost media industry speakers, widely acknowledged as an authority on all things marketing, public relations and content creation – both of whom have a very impressive list of top brands experience and personal achievement accolades, far too long to quote here, but which I highly recommend you check out online. Venessa and James shared with me the back-stage story on the recent partnership between Facebook and Defective Records, which drove a fundamental evolution in the way the music industry globally markets its releases and events by leveraging the explosion of video consumption on mobile across Facebook and Instagram. A couple of examples of this collaboration are a series of live streams which started with a 12-hour performance broadcast from Ministry of Sound and a virtual festival using Facebook as part of a broader media campaign, which had huge success with music fans and drove outstanding business results. A fascinating story by two equally fascinating people.

After lunch, Rachel Thomas was first back on the virtual stage to share a case study on The Royal Mint’s communication strategy. While known mainly for making the coins in your packets, The Royal Mint makes much more, from commemorative and collector coins to gold bars. Rachel shared how their communications always aim to take people behind the scenes, focusing on telling the brand story in a visual and helpful way, emphasising the craftmanship and bringing in a human element to stories, in order to inspire and excite people.

In March, The Royal Mint also joined the fight against Covid-19, switching some of its manufacturing capabilities to produce 1.9m visors to help protect front-line NHS staff.

Suzanne Ford and Danusia Szczerkowska, respectively Head of Customer Experience and a Marketing Manager at Arval UK, moved the discussion from the marketing angle to using the customer experience as a driver of differentiation. Working for an organisation which fully believes in customer centricity and creating a purposeful culture, their focus is on gaining customer insights and designing the experience around their needs. This implies that four CX foundations need to be fully aligned: a clear vision, an outcomeoriented culture, employees trained and empowered to deliver the right

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ANNUAL REVIEW VIEW FROM THE CHAIR

Manuela Pifani Founder and Managing Director CXellence Consulting

experience across touchpoints as the ‘journey makers’, and the right governance, with goals and KPIs linked to the customer.

Then Gareth Main, Director of Growth & Marketing at Elder, a live-in care start-up, shared a moving example of how having people’s problems at the heart of the strategy is the most impactful way to disrupt a market. Despite the care home market in the UK is worth £16bn and the live-in care market only £200m, the truth is that 97% of people would prefer to receive care in their own home. Against a backdrop of misinformation, Elder is trying to demystify the care market and enable people to get old in their homes as part of their founder’s vision to ‘reinvent what it means to age’. Their aim is to normalise care as an enabler of life, not a signal of the end of life.

Gareth shared how their focus at Elder is on addressing some endemic issues in the market by increasing diversity and inclusion of carers, removing the fear factor linked to care and re-introducing a human touch in communications and interactions. For example, introducing black carers everywhere on the website led to a 13% jump in conversion rates, and building a community-based Facebook page and starting to do nice gestures like sending flowers on birthdays reduced churn by 18% and generated ROI of £19 per £1 spent, driving an overall 35% growth year on year.

Joe Rice, the charming leader of Twitter’s Data & Enterprise Solutions, then turned the spotlight to the impact of lockdown, which he believes will shape consumer behaviour for years to come. By analysing billions of tweets over these months with the help of a panel of experts, they identified seven key behavioural themes that brands should consider in their future strategies. The first is emotional (tw)eeting, reflecting the use of a much more emotional language and a 21% increase in emotional descriptions and emojis, which implies that brands should revisit their tone of voice to be closer to this state of mind. The second theme was closer communities, exemplified by social waves like ‘clap for carers’, ‘be kind’ and ‘BLM’, which increased the expectation on brands to do the right thing, support local communities and take a clear stance on social issues. Physically distanced, socially connected was another one, as people reacted to lockdown by increasing their virtual closeness and social media engagement, which should encourage brands to design for participation and create online experiences that bring customers together – without worrying too much about the perfect production quality, as people are now very relaxed about that in favour of immediacy and authenticity. Creativity unleashed indicated a general surge in creativity, reflected in 54% of people finding new ways to make money and a new appreciation for content that engaged and entertained them during lockdown.

Another theme was #TheOtherEpidemic, referring to the renewed focus on mental health and self-care, with 70% of people willing to boycott a brand if they showed they did not look after their employees, which puts a higher onus on organisations to care and provide support. The theme of embracing the slowdown showed that these months became an opportunity to recalibrate life and made 42% of people see working from home as the silver lining.

Finally, messy ethics highlighted the dichotomies between a marked

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increase in shopping locally in the name of sustainability and revitalising the local economy on one side and the parallel exponential Amazon sales growth on the other, or between more talk of cleaner living conditions but less of climate change.

I was then joined on the virtual stage by a panel of some of the most well-respected marketing professionals to share their thoughts and experiences on how CX Marketing had to adapt to customers with new priorities. Richard McCrossan from Genesys returned on the stage, joined by Deborah Owen-Ellis Clark, Director of Marketing & Communications at Places for People, Matthew Myerson, Marketing & Communications Manager for Chiswick Park Enjoy-Work and Michael Plimsoll, from the Product & Industry Marketing team at Adobe, to answer a wave of questions from the audience. They discussed the impact of recent times and how they have evolved their marketing strategies to enable effective, innovative and successful campaigns to suit the needs of the ‘new norm’.

Rumyana Miteva, Head of Search at Secret Escapes, closed an insightful day by reminding the audience about the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence in marketing, with 64% of businesses trying to leverage it to gain a competitive advantage and to solve issues pragmatically. She shared how Secret Escapes moved from ‘early adopters’ to ‘early majority’ to succeed in an online market which continues to grow and become more complex, where the help of machines is now essential in order to process higher amounts of data faster than humans and make better data-driven decisions.

They use AI to forecast, analyse and recommend tailored communications and deals and for journey personalisation in order to increase conversion and remain competitive.

To conclude, I would like to personally thank all those people who are passionate about the customer and joined me on Day One of the Virtual CX Marketing Summit to gain inspiration from market-leading brands – and hope you took away a long list of actionable insights to help you achieve your business objectives.

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Day Two: Friday 9 October Martin Hill-Wilson, Brainfood Consulting

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took over second day duties. It was a fast-paced day. In fact, I learnt something new within the first ten seconds of introducing my first speaker Tim Bond. That bastion of direct marketing the DMA now calls itself the Data & Marketing Association. A sign of the times.

Tim’s title was ‘We are not normal’. This refers to the notion that marketers should not selfreference their own communication habits and assume customers act in the same way.

DAM research shows that brand discovery still encompasses traditional channels such TV, friends and family. In fact, the core challenges of effective marketing remain the same. Using customer data in a way that generates trust and is experienced as relevant engagement by the customer.

Next up was Victoria Nickless from Reading Borough Council who told the story of how her social team stepped up in the aftermath of a terrible random incident mid-summer that left three dead and a further three wounded.

Throughout that unprecedented time, her team had to engage with the needs of local, national and global audiences on top of existing demands from the pandemic which had put the team into homeworking mode.

Response was orchestrated by the team and promoted over social. A virtual vigil was held over YouTube and Facebook allowing the Council to offer a way for mourners to pay their respects.

Behind the scenes, the platform they used allowed everyone to remain focused on priorities, manage misinformation and coordinate with other teams across the council.

Moving on, Mark Evans from Direct Line took over talking about their evolution. From seeing the growth in digital channels over eight years ago to next developing an agile based digital services function over the next few years.

This walled garden approach was then reintegrated back into the mainstream business albeit still as a ‘mono functional’ business unit. Nonetheless. the rest of the business started to notice the impact of agile.

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Over the next few years, this evolved to the point of federating all teams at head office into autonomous cross functional teams with their own missions and end to end ownership. This boosted the number of squads from 10 to 100.

By this point the focus on digital became contextual as opposed to functional.

According to Mark, the biggest challenge has been mindset and new behaviours. T shaped competency development challenges traditional career paths and is not attractive to everyone. It also changed senior leadership’s role from command and control to coaching and support. All in all a brave move within a traditional business. One that challenges everyone comfort zone. But necessitated by a fast moving world.

Next up was Rebecca Harvison from EE who talked about her quest to enable a more human centered approach when responding to customer complaints. This was modelled on the ambition of providing a consistent standard regardless of channel or functional team.

The way in which written communication is

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ANNUAL REVIEW VIEW FROM THE CHAIR

crafted shapes customer experience. Letters are typically stuffy and formal. Emails can sound technical and impersonal in tone. So, a more personal way of writing was targeted. One that was closer to the way people talk in everyday conversation. All teams and departments became involved and aligned with the aim of a more personal way of communicating. It worked! Customers liked it.

The programme is being rolled out to BT as a result, My special congratulations to all those in legal and compliance teams for being willing to adapt and embrace new way of doing things.

We then pivoted to a conversation with Matthew Ford from Hawksmoor restaurants about the challenges faced by this sector during COVID. His message was a need to go back to basics during a very reactive period. His team concentrated keeping their long-term customer base loyal with carefully personalised communication.

Nonetheless innovation was also needed. As a result, the brand opened up to home delivery. An idea which would not have been contemplated a year ago. A demonstration that the leadership team is resilient, pragmatic and willing to adapt to survive. Essential qualities.

Moira Clark from Henley Business School then took over and explored the importance of rebuilding consumer confidence. She started with a slew of stats that showed the economic devastation caused by the pandemic. It has impacted consumer behaviour in a number of ways. A shift to value and essentials. A flight to omni-channel and digital. Greater propensity to try new brands and switch loyalty as a result. And finally a heightened expectation for in store hygiene and personal safety.

In response, brands need to invest in digital and be effective online, enable click and collect, focus on local shopping and invest in al fresco eating. And be seen as operating with zero waste with sustainability credentials and a strong community focus.

My last pre-lunch slot was an interview with Brandie Deignan, Managing Director for Marco Pierre White Restaurants, an inspiring role model both within her own organisation but also within the wider business community, inspiring others to believe in themselves and go for their ambitions. We talked about the need for agile CX strategies within the hospitality sector, the importance of ‘servant leadership’ and a long term people agenda, being prepared to think about the box and faith and optimism that things will work out.

After lunch Clayton Ricketts talked about how Save the Children has reconnected the public with their core charity mission and grown contributions despite a static giving market. This required them to review how they and the broader charity market present their issues. It a move from sympathy to empathy. It is also about tapping into new channels to reach new givers. This new world is subscription based, cause based, offering an authentic voice and being willing to speak out and learn from commercial peers such as Lego. The most recent fruit of this new mindset is the subscription-based book club called Wonderbooks - a great example of how to execute on the new trends.

Next up was Phil Szymala a research leader from PayPal. His work is focused on improving sales conversion which is highly competitive. Physical retail has strongest conversion rate. Desktop online conversion is twice as effective as mobile which is just 2%. . So how to remove the friction and reasons why consumers fail to convert?

Research shows multiple issues at payment stage. Such as a lack of preferred payment options, a mistrust of entering personal payment details or being unclear if payment protection is available.

In terms of solutions, further Paypal research showed consumers prefer digital wallets because they help mask personal details. They like choice of which card to use especially with younger cohorts.

By addressing these concerns, it is no surprise to learn that Paypal customers are twice as likely to convert when a Paypal option is visible and offer an NPS that is 8% higher than the norm.

Raghav Gupta from Expedia Group then explained how they measure customer experience. They

Martin Hill-Wilson Founder Brainfood Consulting

use a three step process. Achievement of outcome, effort and resulting emotion. They view this in terms of end to end journeys as well as a more detailed view of journey stages such as the use of coupons on a particular web page.

The potential value of developing a metric at this point is tested by exploring whether it can be subjected to root cause analysis, actionable insight and improvement. If not then a metric is not developed. This disciplined approach has worked well and allowed Expedia to drive continuous improvement and encouraged cross functional teamwork to fix things.

Maria Fernando from Santander Asset Management provided the last topic of the day: strategic content. This involved focusing on the most impactful content based on what customers find most valuable.

In Maria’s case, this turned out to be educationally based to help customers be more effective in their asset management. The content programme she developed serviced to gain trust and position the brand-customer relationship in a positive context even before anything is bought.

The approach resulted in a 30% increase in traffic which validated the focus on value.

And that was the end of a fascinating day on CX related Marketing.

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29 April 2021 Martech originally comprised of marketing software such as marketing automation platforms, social media management and monitoring tools, website, and SEO analytics.

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Virtual Employee Engagement Summit 2020 As Chair what a privilege to be ensconced, in Engage Business Media’s new, interactive and live newsroom. A great way to deliver conference content and a real step up from the Zoom webinar gallery in terms of delegate and speaker experience.

Day One: Wednesday 4 November Jo Moffatt, Woodreed

T

he opening keynote from Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School, and author of Grow the Pie, set the tone and business case not only for Day 1 but the whole event. 'Why Employee Engagement is a CEO-Level Issue' pointed to 28 years of evidence to show employee engagement is fundamental to organisational success – and not the other way around. Delivering an additional 89-184% cumulative stock return over the period employee engagement certainly ‘grows the pie’ for all stakeholders.

Nic Marks, Founder and CEO at Friday Pulse and heralded as a “statistician with a soul” was up next and segued seamlessly from Alex’ data to build his case that ‘Happiness and positivity build resilience’ key to bouncing back in a covid world. Don’t misunderstand what’s meant by ‘Happiness’ in the workplace. It’s far from being weak and wishy-washy. On the contrary it’s a powerful gateway word. Happiness leads onto and encourages all the positive behaviours and outcomes leaders want to encourage in the workplace, not least productivity.

Jody Lewis, Head of Internal Communications at Lloyds Banking Group, and recently confirmed Engage Awards finalist, told the story of how his team developed and delivered a rapid response comms solution to 65,000+ colleagues over the pandemic crisis. At the heart of their response to COVID-19, termed by Jody as ‘the great leveller’, was a mobile app. Jody shared their secrets for massive increases in adoption rates and significant growth in trust.

Berno Landau and Jenny Merry from Kincentric shared the next slot to talk about change management – change in general but also specifically in our current climate. Change is a great opportunity to revisit and reinforce an organisation’s values and what the organisation stands for.

They argued that people aren’t necessarily resistant to change, it’s just that generally our organisations aren’t very good at delivering it - or communicating it. We also need to realise that change can be messy and doesn’t always have a clear beginning and end.

Change was still the theme after the break when we were joined by Birthe Mester, MD Global Head for Performance, Engagement and Culture at Deutsche Bank. She claimed that more often than not 40% of the potential value of any change is ‘left on the table’. This is due to three things; 1. short term focus 2. siloed and competitive parties involved and 3. the propensity for people to be distracted by the next shiny new thing. Berthe shared an eminently simple and easy to apply model to address these challenges. Called ICE – Inform (What, Why), Connect (Who, Why), Engage (How, Why) and at each stage of ICE always segment audience rather than apply a one-size fits all approach.

Tim Wheeler, VP EMEA at WorkJam spent his session sharing a range of case studies which focussed on the frontline employees. Employees who are traditionally harder to engage and who don’t have access to work PCs or work email addresses etc. Tim’s case studies showcased work with TKX, Starbucks, Avis, Shell and the use of WorkJam to deliver a range of interactions around internal communications, learning and development as well as work tools such as scheduling and rosters.

Next up, a highlight for me as Chair, was to interview Regina Borda, Managing Director at Pizza Hut. Regina told the story of Pizza Hut’s experience of the pandemic, the rapid response to changing conditions and trading environments and the engagement challenge with a decentralised franchise model. Surely one of the highlights in terms of employee and community engagement with the organisation’s purpose, and something which Pizza Hut’s people took great pride in, was the delivery of 250,000 free meals to NHS workers and other vulnerable communities?

Pizza Hut, lunch break and then Hello Fresh. Great themed scheduling by the organisers!

Freya Steffen, International Associate Director Employee Experience talked about the Hello Fresh approach to engagement of their people teams around the globe. She shared with us their engagement journey and had some particularly interesting things to say about their approach to the beginning and the end points in terms of induction and leaving. Personally a big fan of podcasts for internal audiences it was great to hear her talk of the Hello Fresh podcast for new joiners.

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Jo Moffatt Co-Strategy Director at Engage for Success and Managing Director Woodreed

Jessica Roberts from CoachHub took over the interview style approach next when she spoke with her client Rachel la Maire from BNP Paribas. Rachel shared her experiences and use of the CoachHub model to deliver coaching digitally. Not only is this a practical solution to the issues of face to face coaching during a pandemic but also provides considerable flexibility to meet individuals needs and adapt the support to their personal preferences.

Mark Simpson, Senior Manager of Employee Engagement at University College Dublin told the story of how they set out to become a university and employer of choice.

Mark shared their approach and the not inconsiderable challenges of moving a largely offline, in person programme of employee events to an online environment. A particular favourite for me being the Oskars event judging 10 minute films made by employees.

With Scott Northcutt, Senior Vice President, Human Resources at Bacardi we added ‘primos’ to our vocabulary, Spanish for cousins and the Bacardi word for its 7,500 employees. Scott delivered not only a new word but a plea to stop talking about a new normal and instead think about how to create a ‘new better’. We need to learn from the pandemic (just a dress rehearsal for the next crisis after all) and adapt. Scott shared his New Better principles including trust and empowerment, being more outcome focussed and innovative.

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The panel debate followed with Emma James from Moto Hospitality, Joanne Tyler from Whitbread, Phil Day from Police Federation of England & Wales and Emma Bell from Innovations for Learning. They debated 'How we can engage our people in such uncertain times'.

With two panellists from hospitality, one from the frontline and one from volunteering it was an interesting mix. There was agreement and a shared optimism about the contribution of pride and purpose to engagement and the part that volunteering and community involvement could play in helping employees view their roles as less transactional.

We closed day one with Surbhi Ugra, Head of Employee Experience Excellence at Unilever.

Her team’s purpose is to define and drive consistent, high quality experiences for all Unilever workers by partnering with colleagues across all areas of functional expertise and draw on the combined strength of HR, IT, Finance and Workplace Service. Surbhi’s approach of applying marketing principles to employees was music to my ears, something I’ve been advocating to Woodreed clients for many years.

Equally her actively listening to employee voice and using employee volunteers to test and contribute to new ideas of course chimed with the Engage for Success enablers of Engagement (https://engageforsuccess.org/the-fourenablers). The Digital Ninjas, the largest group of volunteers in Unilever, sounded especially intriguing.

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Day Two: Thursday 5 November Jo Moffatt, Woodreed Day 2’s opening keynote was ably delivered by Catherine Morris, Group Head of Internal Communications (Engagement and Change) at the Home Office. Catherine told the story of COVID from a Government department point of view and much more besides – it’s easy to forget all the other agendas which still have to go on alongside the crisis. Cheering though to learn that COVID has pushed internal communication to the very top of the agenda – where Catherine is determined it will now stay.

Zora Artis from Artis Advisory and Janis Cronin from Poppulo up next and sharing the concept of ‘glassbox’ brands. Where transparency is key and what you say you are on the outside is easily judged and checked as your culture and way of working is open for all to see.

What goes on inside is shared outside with the great example of Coles (an Aussie grocery chain) leadership team appearing on breakfast TV to talk not just to customers but their own people too, through the same channel. Reference too to topics later in the day and the value of putting content out through employees’ own devices.

Richard Saundry and Paul Latreille from the University of Sheffield outlined their current research programme exploring how we can close the evidence gap between skilled managers and productive workplaces. They’re particularly exploring the soft/people skills necessary to resolve conflict and the impact of this on engagement and productivity. Organiations who might want to contribute and get involved in the study were encouraged to connect on LinkedIn. Nick Walker, Chief HR Officer at Paysafe leads a team of 65 professionals globally supporting 3,000+ team members around the world with their values at the heart of the culture. Nick shared his case study for how Paysafe have used the Glint platform to engage their people, drive value and more recently safeguard teams and enhance wellbeing. Nick was a great advocate of the importance of evidence-based decision making, with intel being drawn from Glint. A plea for HR people to use data effectively and efficiently with a measurement strategy that goes beyond a single annual or biannual survey.

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Jorgen Pederson, Vice President Compensation & Benefits and International Mobility for the Saint-Gobain Group was another advocate of treating employees like customers, bringing more customer focus to the HR function. Not only a great story from Jorgen of the company history going back to the Palace of Versailles Hall of Mirrors, but then bang up to date with a scheme to encourage entrepreneurship among employees with share ownership.

Charlotte Mosley, Senior People Scientist at Culture Amp and Jessica Barlow, Director of HR and Talent at Foundry delivered a double-hander around the importance of employee feedback in turbulent times. Far from stepping back from this in these times, this is one of the most powerful things an organisation can harness during periods of uncertainty or crisis.

Jess shared her own experiences of using Culture Amp to do just this at Foundry and reinforced Nick from Paysafe’s point about the importance of using data rather than assumptions to make decisions.

Day Two’s 1 to 1 interview was with Fiona Hunter, Head of Employee Engagement at BrewDog. Brewdog have hit the headlines for all the right reasons during the pandemic and I was keen to hear more. Fiona talked of the challenges of living up to the expectations people have of such a high profile brand. The trick is getting a lot of the general basics right – internal communications, looking after people’s mental and physical health, listening to employee voice to drive decisions. But there were some lovely insights too, into Brewdog specifics like their pawternity scheme and the challenges of switching gin production over to hand sanitiser for the NHS. An upbeat and positive story and yet another delegate optimistic about 2021 and what lies ahead.

Jonathan Ruff, Senior Global Project and Engagement Manager at DHL Express, a global logistics leader. As part of the Global Employee Engagement and Experience team Jonathan is shaping the digital agenda of employee experience, helping to increase engagement across a highly diversified population. If anyone is struggling with the concept of putting employer content on employees’ private devices (100,000 of them) then this was a masterclass in how to do it – with a 91% employee engagement score and a recent accolade of #2 Best Workplace in the World.

Idriss Bentoumi VP Product and Strategy at Lumapps focused on a case study from FM Logistic to demonstrate the answer to the challenge of communicating with and engaging frontline workers – who after all make up 80% of the global workforce. How do you give them the same experience, as office-based workers while at the same time only giving them the information they really want? Respecting the different audience needs. Idriss picked up on Jonathan’s point about the value of using employees’ personal devices – they’re often using them anyway for work communication in the form of ‘shadow IT’ like What’s App. Making the Lumapps product available on personal devices replaces shadow IT and at FM Logistic 80% frontline workers took it up.

Stephen Quest joined us next, literally flying the flag from Brussels in his role as Director General at the European Commission. A truly people focussed leader Stephen stressed three key points he’s learned about ‘Leading change in the public sector.’ 1. It’s all about your people, you must invest in them 2. It’s OK not to have all the answers, it’s an opportunity to ask open questions 3. Understand your constraints, don’t fight the machine but expand your universe and see how far you can go. He talked of his blog posts which have become a vital internal comms tool to share his leadership journey and helped him earn and retain trust along the way.

Mark Heywood, Head of Performance and Recognition at Lloyds Banking Group was our second great story from Lloyds Banking Group in two days.

Mark talked about leveraging recognition to build Lloyds One culture. A culture with four pillars – leadership, engagement and communication, skills and ways of working. Lloyds Valued recognition scheme is all about reinforcing the right behaviours and 98% of the interactions in the scheme offer simple recognition rather than anything tangible to achieve this.

Day 2’s Panel brought Carlo Beschi from Treatwell, Constanza Tobino from Stats Perform, Rachel Credido from Aster and Veronia Minano from

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Kwalee together to discuss “Working from home (WFH) through the pandemic – will we ever go back to the office?”

Another optimistic panel debate with the consensus that the crisis has brought out the best in people, made them stronger and encouraged (forced?) us all to adapt and become more agile and to do so quickly – as individuals and as organisations. Most importantly we all agreed on replacing the terms working from home, remote working or flexible working with the much better Smarter Working. Thanks to Constanza for that one!

Day Two came to a cracking end with David Blackburn, Chief People Officer at the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

He made the point that employee engagement is a response to the culture you create and set about telling us exactly how they have achieved that. We had a smattering of superheroes (the 4 P’s) to help do that and a reinforcement and strengthening of employees’ connection with the end customer and the work they do. One of David’s take outs was clarity of message and his three word mantra Simplify, Inform, Engage. For me he delivered a masterclass in practising what he preached with a clear presentation that simplified, informed and engaged his audience.

Two days of great speakers. Two days of optimism. Two days of great insights shared. What a pleasure to be a part of it, but my work was then done and I handed over to Gerry Brown for the third and final day. Looking forward to being back in the chair again at the next Engage virtual event in March 2021!

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Day Three: Thursday 6 November Gerry Brown, The Customer Lifeguard

A

s day three of the Employee Engagement conference hit the airwaves, it was clear that the energy and themes that characterised the previous days were waiting in the wings ready to inspire the speakers who were going to take to the virtual centre stage.

Our previous chair Jo Moffatt is always a tough act to follow but I was delighted as our guests brough the same level of passion and enthusiasm and the conversations flowed brilliantly to provide another day of exciting and thought-provoking content.

Chris Thewlis, COO at npower, got us off to an engaging start with his passionate and insightful story of the positive changes at npower, where they shifted their focus to people not systems or processes. This was driven by an employee influenced five-point plan focusing on fixing the fundamentals via a cultural transformation programme. This included doing the small things well, supporting their people to have brilliant conversations with customers by getting the basics right, and focussing on data, systems and processes that was incredibly successful. It brought some amazing result. Over £30m in cost savings, 200 processes optimised and 50% reduction in processing time. By focussing on their customers and engaging their people, they had fixed the basics and regained control, the results looked after themselves.

Next up was Catherine Ward, British Council’s Chief People Officer, who shared some of the benefits and learnings of the roll-out of a dynamic staff engagement process for more than 12,000 employees based in over 110 countries. She told us how they had introduced a more dynamic and engaged feedback culture and as this had coincided with the lockdown caused by COVID-19 19, it had provided some very revealing and valuable feedback. In particular that despite most people working from home, the upside was an increased collaboration, efficiency, and flexibility. The end result being that they have been able to create a culture of choice for colleagues, greater work/life balance, enabling high performance, motivation, and personal satisfaction – A true win for all stakeholders!

Then a new team took to the field in the shape of Matt Leenhouts from Tottenham Hotspur FC & Nicholas Brice from Soul Corporation, who took us on a tour of the new Spurs stadium and the culture they have helped create that they call the Spurs Way. They shared the importance of making every fan being made to feel welcome, whether home or away, and the importance of a great offfield performance as well. But as Nicholas pointed out, the stadium is not just for football matches and other vibrant businesses such as catering, hospitality, conferences, and other attractions also bring the fans in. The One team, One vision approach that all colleagues live every day, and helps them manage all these different journeys, is clearly working. It’s obvious that Spurs are league leaders in employee engagement and all the key metrics such as awards, retention, engagement, and overall fan satisfaction that are the true measures of success.

No employee engagement conference would be complete without a contribution for the NHS and Penny Richards and Helen Hartley from NHS Digital who shared their strategy for internal communications to maintain engagement during COVID-19: working closely with HR partners to ensure colleagues are cared for and take care of themselves; creating connections across the organisation between senior leaders and the wider organisation and between colleagues. They based their strategy on three guiding principles: Celebration, Connection and Care. Penny and Helen showed some wonderful examples how the Care principle had focused on employee wellbeing via a colleague information hub; then ensuring that colleagues were connected to key organisational messages and to each other by featuring senior leaders in video newsletter to share a little of themselves. Then Penny introduced us to both personal and organisational celebration that provided an opportunity to than people to show the pride and accomplishment of the organisation. What came shining through and as no surprise was the strength of teamwork and the shared passion that is, and always will be the hall mark of the NHS. Next, Melissa Hungerford Dixons Carphone dialled in to share the employee and customer engagement journey at Dixons Carphone at a time of huge disruption to the retail/telecoms marketplaces in 2020 and look to the future as upheaval continues. Her overriding theme was “Our priorities change but are values are just as relevant”, and she went to on to show the effect those values keeping colleagues and customers safe, helping customers and securing their future, have made on their transformation strategy. This led to working in a whole new way by accelerating their omni-channel strategy, implementing their winning together operating model and reimagining the future of work. This resulted in Dixons Carphone really changing from looking at transactional engagements to having customers for life – learning what matters most, building relationships over time, and always starting with the customer first.

We the seamlessly teleported to Germany where Gabriele Oehlschlaeger from Bayer Crop Science outlined the challenges the Bayer Crop Science faced in the early days of the pandemic and how throughout these challenges, she and her team helped bolster employee engagement throughout the organization. They did this by focusing on protecting employees, enabling, and empowering employees to be successful and capturing learnings to plan for the future. To achieve this employees were given trust and flexibility; they increased employee engagement and satisfaction with the end result being an increased awareness of customer and colleague needs that will propel to the next level as the pandemic subsides and Bayer Crop and their customers can grow again.

Keeping up our travel theme we stopped off in Amsterdam for an exclusive interview with Mariya

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Gerry Brown Chief Customer Rescue Officer The Customer Lifeguard

Findzhikova, from Tom Tom who told us about her role, recent projects, and future plans. As Mariya pointed out while they are known for their great Sat Nav solutions, they are also making big strides in the Autonomous Vehicle market, driving towards safer, cleaner congestion free world. But this didn’t just apply to the road.

With over 405,000 employees she told us how important it was to have an open, inclusive, and safe work environment. She went on to describe how corporate social responsibility was vital to both attracting and retaining talent as well as creating an environment where altruism and giving back to the community can thrive and prosper. By aligning their colleague social actions with their corporate values will ensure that Tom Tom are not only successful commercially, but reputationally as well.

After a swift lunch and tour of the virtual sponsor booths, we got back to business with a captivating and compelling presentation from a true engagement champion, René Carayol, talking about “Inclusive Leadership” and how we need to get close to everybody in the organisation, everybody in, nobody out and not just because of and during COVID-19 19, but as a way of life.“ He showed us how our world has changed and we need a different and more inclusive and empathetic form of leadership for these extraordinary times .

He identified three key elements that all colleagues were seeking Clarity, Certainty, and a lot more hope. He referenced George Floyd and the BLM movement as examples of the importance of needing to leave despair and find hope and shared some of his life stories of working with leading global companies. In closing he wanted us to know that diversity and inclusion weren’t strategies, weren’t movements, but a way of life. It will be hard to forget that.

We then went travelling again stopping in Barcelona where Lena Tsvetinskaya from PepsiCo told us about a new focus on empathy, inclusion, support, and connection that they call “Take Care” that created a new support structure for employees at all levels –that helped unite

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ANNUAL REVIEW VIEW FROM THE CHAIR

people, to keep then energized and engaged despite the challenges. They introduced a number of initiatives that actively involved and inspired colleagues to keep their energy and enthusiasm levels high despite many COVID-19 -19 challenges, with the end result being very impressive survey response numbers showing how much people really cared and the difference that it made to their lives.

We kept the European vibe going with a fast-paced presentation from Julia Herpel from Deutsche Telekom (DT) introducing us to Skills – the currency of the future!

DT started a company-wide initiative to develop a new culture of learning within the group. With the help of AI, digital and mobile learning platforms they have created a completely new learning experience and an environment where their people feel encouraged to take responsibility of their individual learning journey. This was supported by DT’s three pillars of learning: Orientation, Platform and content and Informal learning. This resulted in a very human centred training approach which has proved to be successful, sustainable, and ultimately beneficial to all stakeholder.

Then one of the highlights of the day with our panel debate entitled, What does the future hold for Diversity and Inclusion?

Our panel of passionate and knowledgeable guests included Amy Priest Experian, Nathalie Lam, Philips, Pamela Brown, West Midlands Ambulance, and Nzinga Orgill, Heathrow Airport. All related how they had seen or experienced negative experiences due to racism and/or prejudice in one form or the other and how important it was for senior leaders to listen, take seriously, and more importantly, act on the feedback. In particular all panel guests stated that it was vital that within an organisation people tasked with D&I responsibilities acted as a focal point for all strands of diversity. Making sure there was a platform for all colleagues to raise issues and that this was connected directly to the senior leadership team. The resounding conclusion that came through loud and clear was that while conversation was important, that it’s now time for action and that D&I wasn’t just a strategy or a department, but must be on every board agenda and is sustainable and embedded in the DNA of the organisation for all time.

Although we now reached the final presentation of the day, the energy levels and passion didn’t drop at all and Kate Jones from Tarmac brought the day to a fitting conclusion with her story about Values in a Covid Climate. As she very clearly articulated “If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values – they’re hobbies.” For Tarmac this meant being Proud, Ambitious and Collaborative, which were not mandated from above, but crowd soured within the organisation. Kate went on to identify Collaboration as the most important of these in the current climate and that this had been at the heart of Tarmac being able to understand and support their colleagues through the crisis and making

the emotional connection had been what had helped both employee and employer to emerge better equipped to deal with whatever came their way.

Well, that was some day and while we all missed the personal contact that live events bring, there was no doubt that the energy, enthusiasm, and willingness to share experiences surged through the airwaves just as positively and impactfully as if delivered from the stage. It’s a virtual certainty that these types of events are here to stay, especially with such a passionate and willing group of presenters and the behind the scenes team from Engage who all made the day so memorable.

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ANNUAL REVIEW SURVEY RESULTS

Overall how satisfied were you with Employee Engagement Summit?

73% Very ssatisfied

12% Might

How likely would you be to attend future virtual events from the organisers of Employee Engagement Summit?

Considering the total investment of your time spent how would you rate the value you received?

84% Definitely will

34%

Overall how would you rate the delivery of the virtual event?

Excellent Value

54% Good Value

44% 14% Average

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35%

Good

Excellent

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Which speakers were your favourite?

Mathijs Leenhouts

Surbhi Ugra

Stephen Quest

Chris Thewlis

Tottenham Hotspur FC

Unilever

European Commission

npower

Alex Edmans

Scott Northcutt

Mark Heywood

Nicholas Brice

London Business School

Bacardi

Lloyds Banking Group

Soul Corporations

The Conference was rated EXCELLENT in the following aspects:

Registration Ease of use of the online platform Sound quality Quality of images / video Quality of the speakers Ability to participate in sessions Availability of assistance / support Speakers at the event Quality of the event studio

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ANNUAL REVIEW VIEW FROM THE CHAIR

Customer Engagement Summit 2020 Another year. This time virtual. Starting to feel like it is a normal way of chairing a conference. But in truth it remains extraordinary times. Quite uncertain. This year’s theme reflects the mood. ‘The importance of trust and transparency at a time when our customers’ priorities, preferences and behaviours are continuing to evolve.’

Day One: Tuesday 1 December Martin Hill-Wilson, Brainfood Consulting

M

ark De Bruijn from Smartly.io captured some of the new mood in his opening keynote. He began with a story. The enduring memory of travelling to hospital for the birth of his son.

Everyday details which are normally lost over time remain etched in his memory. Our brains have evolved to remember only the most important events in life. These can be joyful or quite opposite. Either are likely to be emotive at root. Customer experience management is built from such psychology.

In this sense, starting with a deep understanding of what matters to our customers becomes increasingly important amid the accelerating technology transformation now taking place. Mark’s advice is take some time before leaping into the latest technology. Be clear how it can create memorable experiences that customers will value.

Next up was Natalie McLeod, Head of Marketing at 15below. A brand focussed on keeping airline passengers up to date pre and post flight. Obviously, the massive disruption to air travel caused huge problems for them especially since their main lead generation tactic were f2f events which were now cancelled. On top of that many of their previous decision maker contacts had been made redundant.

They had to pivot however their web site was not fit for purpose and did not allow them to be agile, change messaging, personalise user journeys. It needed an upgrade urgently. They turned to a low code, Drupal platform with site and page building tools to enable non-technical users of the platform to quickly showcase the brand story and many powerful use cases. It was up and ready within ten days! The outcome has been positive and new campaigns have generated vital opportunities.

Following Natalie was Stanford Swinton, VP of Global Care and Customer Experience at Deliveroo – one of the brands that clearly benefitted from lockdown. They can deliver to any London address within 30 minutes! So, what lessons can we learn from this pioneer?

They did what many did and adapted to a new world. They offered a financial backstop for any of their 30,00 riders who needed to self-quarantine. They enabled several thousand contact centre agents to work from home. They revised policies for contact free delivery, and hygiene guidelines for restaurant partners. All this happened at speed during the outset of the pandemic.

Such responsiveness obviously generated customer trust. And yet eight months later Standford was honest enough to voice his frustrations with week long delays getting new messaging (about fraud) inserted into the app from over capacity internal engineering teams.

Stanford characterised this entropy as the emergence of cracks in the customer experience that requires immediate and ongoing remedy to prevent them expanding into more serious expectation gaps. It is never ending responsiveness that keeps customer trust.

He uses an acronym to help his teams focus on this. Its called ICE. Identify cracks. Senior leaderships read all inbound emails, analyse them, and keep a log on progress. Other teams also take customer enquiries to learn what currently matters. He uses verbatims from VoC to add to his understanding. Close things fast. Do short term fixes which are low risk and help close the crack.

Experiment - a lot. Such as testing policies on fraud and compensation.

Overall takeaway. No silver bullets. Just lots of things that need actioning every day. Winners are those who do this best. And Deliveroo is one of the best at making decisions fast.

Next to tell their story was kiwi.com who faced a classic growth challenge: to ensure support headcount does not grow in line with revenue growth. The way to do this is self-service. Initially using natural language-based voice assistants since 2018 and more recently via a text based virtual assistant able to function across web, app and social channels. This allows a customer to be seamlessly redirected as needed to complete their outcome (e.g. from social into app) Services provided by the virtual assistant range from intent capture, customer verification, self-

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Martin Hill-Wilson Founder Brainfood Consulting service, and contextual agent transfer. Compared with IVR, drop off rates reduce from 40% to 15%. Selfservice now absorbs 25% of intents delivering a daily saving of 8 FTE who can focus on more complex customer needs.

New intents are identified through the strong analytical capabilities built into the self-service platform. New pandemic related issues in February allowed Kiwi.com to rapidly design a new intent to meet this information need. A simple FAQ takes a few days while a cancellation intent could take up to a month given the need for API integration.

After a quick break I welcomed Millie Gillon, Global Head of Client Experience at Standard Chartered Bank to the virtual stage. She started by exploring the links between empathy and customer experience.

This is put into practice through ‘signature actions’ which manifest the ability to relate to another’s situation (empathy) and help those in need. For instance, during COVID, working parents endure ‘triple hat’ responsibilities as caretakers / employees / teachers. Elderly customers face heightened health risks leaving their homes to access cash.

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This mindset can also extend to future scenarios. What happens when the pandemic has subsided, and everyone is facing the economic consequences of rebuilding? How can the bank empathise in tangible valued ways?

More broadly Millie talked about mindset and methodologies. Being influenced by considering what’s human and what’s right. Using service design to kick start the process of identifying customer needs. Understanding a day in their life. Always starting with the customer before the solution.

Developing best in class experiences by adapting what influential brands are already doing.

Evoking change is the toughest challenge. Being willing to win agreement for a new reality. One colleague at a time.

Connecting them to the customer reality. Feeling their pain.

Directly experiencing the customers frustration kickstarts the ability to empathise and then resolve.

Moving on, Hazel Morton from Critzr shared their research on how the retail customer journey has changed during COVID. The headline is widely appreciated: a huge growth in online sales at the expense of decreased store visits. Maybe less appreciated is the fact that grocery and DIY stores saw greater footfall.

With fewer customers entering stores, retailers have concentrated on an improved customer experience. M&S’s version was widespread cleaning stations, improved click and collect services, door and escalator hosts. The restaurant sector has had to build social distancing measures within f2f dining while also reinventing their home delivery services.

Listening matters to picking up on these changes.

Interestingly Hazel referenced the lack of relevance in some customer surveys. For instance, why ask about changing rooms when most are no longer open? More pertinent is the queuing experience and its impact. How can that be improved within the goal of maintaining safety?

The research showed that being responsive to these new needs and adapting journeys impacts loyalty. This is increasingly important as customers react to the new demands of daily life by trying new brands and shopping more locally.

The final significant trend from the research was the acceleration in omni-channel choice and services. For instance, a one-hour home delivery capability or local shops using Instagram as a sales channel.

After Hazel, I interviewed Thomas Reby, head of product support at Google. He is based in Dublin. As a scene setter Thomas summarised his core focus as moving away from satisfaction metrics to focussing on helping customers accomplish their goals. Using service design to reduce friction in getting something fixed.

We then moved onto how customer data can be used and the value we can generate from it for their benefit. Thomas’ approach is to leverage what we know about customers and how they use products and services to calibrate service journeys to each customers’ unique needs. This reflects a return to the way service used to be delivered. Personal brand equity was at stake between people who knew each other. This was lost as it scaled and became impersonal and volumetric based. Instead we count scores as a proxy.

But even with smart technology, service remains a people business. Employees certainly don’t just want to be a metric.

They want to be empowered. Able to exercise judgment on what works in the moment. They also want to extend and improve themselves and the service they are part of. So, knowledge sharing is also important which encourages collaboration amongst the teams. Empowerment and knowledge sharing are core to Thomas leadership style. This extends into freedom to

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experiment and to share afterwards what has and has not worked. Giving people to chance to try new things.

This led into a discussion about trust and transparency which Thomas argues is built by remaining true to your standards. Especially around what you stand for such responding to the level of disinformation now dominant in the world today.

We then moved onto Technology and how it is deployed. For Thomas, automation and machine learning is an enabler not a reducer. He uses it to reinvest rather save cost. While the impact of automation is not new in our daily lives, the ability to customise experience in the moment using what is known about a customer’s need and situation certainly is.

This changes the way we think about omni-channel. Once I know who the customer is and their goals then instead of simply offering choice and letting them figure out the best route to their outcome, I can now proactively recommend the best channels for certain outcomes using a combination of personal and channel performance data.

For instance, only offering verification options that the customer can use at the time of asking. Or recognising an urgent need leads to the offer of a phone call. Or if the situation is less urgent maybe email is better for sending certain documentation. It all depends on recognising the use case.

After lunch we heard from Pete Markey, CMO at TSB who talked about the brand’s sponsorship of Pride of Britain - a national televised awards event that celebrates and rewards the extraordinary actions of everyday people right across the UK. This provides the brand with multiple story-telling opportunities that stretch beyond the timing of the actual event.

After just four years, the partnership already provides excellent brand recognition and sentiment uplift relative to other high profile, national events.

There is a strong consumer association between TSB and Pride Of Britain values which reinforces the TSB brand.

Pete’ team have also won two national awards for the partnership. Finally, positive brand perceptions for the 2019 campaign were at their highest relative to the previous twelve months.

Next was Francisco Pedro Marques, AI & CRM Platforms Manager from Portuguese conglomerate Sonae FS. He proved a strong advocate for using AI throughout his contact centres in

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terms of triaging and routing, outbound campaigns, self-service, agent assist and analytics. The greatest transformation for him is that AI influences real time decision making with the ability to react to customer needs as they occur.

He also forecasts a change of customer facing roles as self-service grows and resources are redeployed to managing the digital labour force and algorithms that increasingly drive todays customer contact.

David Sturdee, COO of Pizza Hut then talked about the transformation he has been involved with over the last two years. This involved taking a 62 year old brand and re-enabling its ability to compete in todays world of food aggregators and new customer lockdown expectations for rapid service. The result was an AI infused tech stack that provides real time decision making to optimise customer experience, just in time pizza making, driver route optimisation and profitability.

The new stack also provided the foundation for new operational practices. For instance, computer vision enabled cameras in kitchens allowed for inventory management, recipe adherence and other best practices. Delivery as a service allows automated decisioning whether to choose Pizza Hut’s own delivery capability or opt for Deliveroo when 30 minute thresholds are threatened.

With this transformation came a realisation of the need to also upgrade the culture. They remodelled using cultural precepts in The Culture Code written by Daniel Coyle.

Did it work? A 22 point uplift in highly satisfied customers. A 20 point improvement in pizzas delivered in under 30 minutes and a 76% uplift in franchisee satisfaction.

My penultimate session was a roundtable on the topic of CX and EX synergies. This was powered by four guests. Sarah Lander Scott from Barchester Healthcare,(care homes) Rebecca Kemp from Citizens Advice, Emma James from Moto Hospitality and Richard Murray of Cambridge University press.(higher education) All four organisations experienced significant disruption in their respective sectors from the pandemic and lockdown. Care homes, university life, motorway travel and orchestrating help for those affected by lockdown or being furloughed.

Often issues were emotive and in high volume, creating a highly pressurised environment for staff. Over time this impacts the resilience of frontline workers in terms of maintaining energy and motivation.

To counteract this we heard examples including listening closely to the front line, providing the same support material and technology assistance as offered to customers, being more proactive and frequent in internal communications and integrating well-being slots in daily work routines. And all confirmed they was close planning between CX and EX teams and alignment between strategies.

My final interview was with Diane Baynham, head of service design at NHSX. She started by talking about how important service design is in the NHS. Albeit often invisible to the end user.

In other words, health services are deliberate, iterated and optimised.

Customer appetite for technology supported experiences has accelerated during COVID across all cohorts and this has translated into more technology enabled health services.

Over half of GP appointments during lockdown were mediated via technology. NHS hotline 111 now delivers 19,000 assessment daily. 99% of GPs can offer video consultations. 90% of population can access their GP online. Over 2 million isolation notes were issued digitally. The speed of adoption has been extraordinary.

All innovation is underpinned with agile methodology – iterate, iterate, iterate using prototyping and moving on fast within cycles of innovation. Then optimising and improving what has been launched.

Trust and transparency is vital in this type of work. The strength of the NHS brand helps maintain customer trust in accepting either accelerated changes in service delivery or trusting the health advice being offered by a GP. In this respect consistency is crucial enabler of trust.

During the pandemic, the emerging advice offered by NHS online and 111 were kept aligned by a team curating the content in the background.

What would be next after the pandemic has passed? Diane looked forward to the chance of visiting front line operations to hear views and confirm her priorities and the pain points.

Secondly, she wanted to focus on deeper integration between services and interoperability standards and launch a bevy of new services.

And with that, the first day was done.

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Day Two: Wednesday 2 December Nick Brice, Soul Corporations

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t was a great pleasure to host the second day of the Customer Engagement Summit in the superb virtual studio the team at Engage Business Media have created.

It must be said that they have surely led the way when it comes to pivoting a customer experience through COVID. Day Two was brilliantly put together by Steve Hurst and his team with the overarching title of ‘The importance of trust and transparency at a time when our customers’ priorities, preferences and behaviours are continuing to evolve’.

Building trust and accountability in our post COVID (hopefully soon) and post Brexit world will surely be a central theme for 2021. With so much business now being relatively invisible, it’s of course vital we pivot in many ways – both for customer and employee engagement.

HBR Research has shown, for example, that managers who cannot “see” their direct reports end up sometimes struggling to trust that their employees are indeed working.

When such doubts creep in, managers can start to develop an unreasonable expectation that those team members be available at all times, ultimately disrupting their work-home balance and causing more job stress. The PwC CEO Panel survey suggests that over 80 percent of senior leaders believe a high trust culture is critical to attracting and retaining top talent, building customer loyalty, and achieving sustainable bottom-line performance.

Colin Shaw, Founder & CEO of Beyond Philosophy, kicked off the day with a brilliant keynote. Firstly, he claimed that COVID has changed the world and digital transformation hasn’t worked. Well, certainly not as well as was the ambition in over 70% of cases, according to Colin. He explained how the fusion between digital, behavioural science, and defining what really drives value for us as customers was where our focus needs to be.

He spoke about the value of digital nudges. These are literally experiential moments that shift our perception of a brand. Colin suggested three rules we need to follow: 1) Evaluating whether your nudges are good or bad. Colin demonstrated this with a hilarious demonstration of a customer journey with his online optician, who failed to deliver his new glasses on time. This left Colin to check through emails to find out what had happened. It turns out the company needed more data to complete the process. They needed to know how far apart Colin’s eyes were. The next process had Colin using a credit card stuck/placed on his forehead to provide a picture of that would inform the design of his glasses by enabling people to accurately gauge the distance between his eyes. He also shared an example of his local GP sending him a text offering the COVID vaccine. This nudge led him to call in to ask whether he had been classified as a vulnerable person, and if so, why. The surgery had apparently been inundated with similar calls – a testament to the bad digital nudge they had engineered.

As an example of a good nudge, Colin shared how a charity appealed to him for a donation and offered three levels: £150, £50, and £20. This approach leant on the decoy effect and our aversion to extremes, encouraging us towards settling on the middle option of £50.

2) Focus on want is driving value for the people involved. Disney’s research with customers often comes back with a desire for a healthy salad option in the parks. In practice, people almost never order it!

3) The vital role of testing. The importance of trying out, testing, and reviewing all digital touchpoints to find the best ways of creating value.

Next up, Neil Titcomb, who heads up the UKI business for Odigo, explained how customer expectations, needs and behaviours are changing faster than ever before, accelerated by the pandemic. One of his core messages was how through COVID, digital interactions were already establishing a foothold as an alternative to other more traditional channels. But, together with the surge in customer demand, there were constraints on offline availability as physical premises closed and as contact centres migrated advisors to work remotely. Neil explained how a recent research programme, conducted by the CCMA, and supported by Odigo, described some key discoveries for contact centre leaders:

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• Phone and email are still dominant, although both slowly declining as social, apps and chatbots increase year on year, as we become increasingly time-poor and our lives no longer conform to the ‘old’ 9-5 model. Some sectors rely on these modes more than others – e.g., 60% value the phone for automotive service, whereas only 39% want the phone for consumer electronics – many more customers favouring online/chatbots. Customers’ willingness to self-serve also varies between sector – 39% in automotive at one end of the scale, 71% for grocery/supermarkets.

• Waiting time is a key factor: 30% of customers reported that they had to wait “too long” to interact with a brand. Some big variations depending on the channel too. According to this research, we find it ‘acceptable’ for the phone to be answered within up to 3m 17 secs, whereas with email we’re happy with 6 hours or less. Social media and Twitter come in at 2 hours 51 minutes, and Chat is just 49 seconds.

• Neil shared how different demographics, such as Baby Boomers, Gen X etc, have different emotional biases toward effort/ease of doing business. He shared the key priority of moving from reactive experience design to a much more proactive offer: automated, predictive, contextual, 1:1 personalised with a seamless interplay between channels – human and automated. This includes matching agents with the customers who are most likely to appreciate them. Agent knowledge comes out as most important factor (65%) and customers being moved between channels with not need to repeat themselves second (47%).

Neil concluded with the important priorities for matching queries with a suitable response: • Contextual routing – based on global customer knowledge • Personalisation – thanks to customer card and interaction history • AI - for smart qualification • Integration with CRM - or other tools • Automisation – when relevant One of the role model organisations for putting the customer at the heart of customer experience design is surely First Direct. Our next case study was from Alison Jaap, Customer Services Director and Head of Change at First Direct. Alison is responsible for delivering pioneering service across the business and she spoke on tackling the dual challenge of maintaining First Direct’s existing Number One position for customer service while adapting to meet the demands of a new generation of highly demanding digital customers. Alison reminded us that pivoting quickly to address these is critical in our fast-changing current environment.

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Nicholas Brice CEO Soul Corporations

Core to her work is the creation of the Money Wellbeing Index to understand customers’ attitudes to money. Alison spoke about how customer demand has changed across a whole range of customer groups and how First Direct are addressing these challenges…at pace. Some key insights have included the discovery that some of the changes we’ve seen through COVID are positive. Many people are keener to get on top of their finances – paying off debts, saving for a holiday for example. The over 55’s had the highest scores of wellbeing, whereas young adults scored much lower.

Three key themes are coming through from customer verbatim and behaviour: 1) Big upsurge in customers keen to use digital channels, including both digital savvy customers as well as many Baby Boomers who have decided to get on board with new technology. The bank has spent a lot of time helping educate people to do business in new, technologically evolved ways.

2) Money anxiety is fuelling more vigilant behaviour across the board.

People were getting in touch much more to scrutinize their finances – including many who hadn’t called in years. One customer had called in over 140 times in one day!

3) Social isolation. Many more customers are becoming isolated and the bank was their only contact in a day. Wider issues such as mental health and domestic violence meant the bank continued to evolve their services including a range of key initiatives; a bold decision to truly be there for customers 24/7; additional support for vulnerable customers; focusing on understanding what

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customers really needed – which meant re-introducing human interrogation of calls in addition to more frequent normal data analysis; stopping new customer acquisition to focus on existing customers; getting their people working from home in just three weeks; experimenting more to evolve the right customer experience over time; and centralising complaint handling.

Jacopo De Simone is a Solutions Consultant at Moxtra. They provide a platform powering one-stop client portals, under his clients’ brand, to deliver white-glove service in today’s mobile world. Jacopo spoke about how we can approach reimagining the customer journey through digital challenges in the new mobile era. He spoke about just how much the new digital landscape and changing customer expectations have affected businesses over the last 10 years. This has given us all the challenge of understanding the challenges organizations face in today’s world in building a customer-centric digital strategy and how leveraging digital means to deliver a personalized, premier customer experience and build persistent customer relationships is a key trend. Jacopo revealed the benefits of embracing digital channels for increasing customer engagement, revenue, and loyalty, as well as redefining brand value and reputation through digital presence.

As a big Brighton fan, not to mention my work with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, I was excited to meet Ross Antrobus of The Football Association. Ross is Head of the Behavioural Insights & Business Analytics team, tasked with provoking and inspiring positive change in football by helping The FA better understand the needs and challenges faced by those playing, coaching, refereeing, administrating, and watching the game - ultimately helping to inform business decision-making to support, govern and grow football in England. Ross described the FA’s process of digitisation of grassroots football. A three-season journey to remove paper-based administration from grassroots football, leading to the development of a digitised end to end customer journey for those administrating, officiating, and playing the game.

Ross talked us through how The FA used insight and analytics throughout the ideation, development, and deployment stages of its Match Day app and how this has had a game changing impact on and off the field.

Mike Migliore of The Modular Analytics Co. (TMAC) was joined by colleague George Hartshorn to share with us how data, technology and empathy can manage the customer experience. Mike and George demonstrated, with some great real-life examples, how next best action, speech analytics and data-led team coaching working in tandem can be used to drive revenue and create positive experiences for customers and agents alike. Mike shared with us the focus of their work: accelerating marketing effectiveness through Playbook, which aims to sell the right products to your best customers and reducing waste; accelerating the customer experience by understanding what customers say and feel right now; and accelerated learning and development to help agents perform at their best. Mike took us through the case if an insurer who used this technology to drive up retention rates (5-8%) as well as driving more efficient calls as agents became adept at using the technology. George went on to share how Fonetik is helping decipher customer needs through speech and text analytics. This means identifying emotions such as feeling vulnerable, happy, angry as the stimulus to upgrading the CX by predicting what is likely to happen in subsequent calls.

Now, the practice of mapping the customer journey is now quite common practice in the modern organisation. The concept of Moments of Truth and Touchpoints originated way back in the late 1970’s/early 80’s when Jan Carlzon achieved a spectacular turnaround at SAS, with a wall-to-wall development programme that was also used at British Airways with Putting People First. These great industry standard development programmes were of course way before the idea of engaging customers through digital touchpoints became a new reality. In a presentation by Nikhita Iyar, Strategic Business Development Team at Moxtra showed how their Customer Collaboration Platform powers offers their client a One Stop Digital Channel in every customer's pocket. She explained how Moxtra-powered private digital channels can provide a one-stop experience for customers to reach into an organisation and get premier service, anytime, anywhere. Nikhita spoke about why and how organisations can re-imagine their customer journey. Some key factors in designing the right customer journey in these modern times include: • New ways of engaging with brands have quickly evolved in recent years, with the latest platform shift to mobile – offering any time, any place service. This has given rise to a new delivery model for service using apps. Even older people are more and more using applications to receive service – often in an instant e.g., Deliveroo.

• In a high-touch business interactions matter. So, a business needs to Uber-ise their business in a way that still retains a human element. We can easily overload the customer with tools, but still not provide what they really value.

Private, personal, and persistent were Nikhita’s key words for developing a one-stop shop application for mobile that can include, for example, online topic-based video conversations, meetings, and simple processes for getting business consents. She highlighted the value of working towards authentic reciprocity in customer engagement through good app design. This means focusing on enabling customers to pull the service they need and desire through technology while also even collaborating amongst each other.

Taking us up to lunch was an exclusive interview with Andy Hancock, Chief Operating Officer at Money Supermarket.com. Andy answered questions around the changing priorities and behaviours of our customers and how those changes are manifesting themselves at Moneysupermarket Group. He shared how important it is to understand the link between organisational culture, the employee experience, and the customer experience. We discussed how organisational silos are often the Achilles heel of many businesses aiming at delivering a great CX. With saving customers’ money, the stated aim at Moneysupermarket.com, Andy shared how his organisation has achieved this during what has been a difficult and challenging year for our customers and some of his priorities in 2021.

Saving households money is the core purpose that informs a range of products and services. Consumer behaviour has changed over the year as how people manage finances in different ways. For example, this year, people forgot about car insurance for a period, before rushing to renew as lockdown ended. Normality is slowly returning, although finance is right at the top of peoples’ minds, and the level of delinquency is low given the

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government’s support schemes. Andy spoke about how people often put off working on finance, and so helping people identify and take the simple small steps that make a difference is valuable to them – such as turning the heating down. He observed that the COVID crisis has driven the organisation to be much more agile than before. Changes in advertising, tone of voice, messaging has evolved fast and these pressures have influenced the culture as people have needed to build collaborative relationships featuring diverse groups of people (gender, ethnicity, and background) to drive innovation in a context of both home and work offices. Diversity of thought is a must-have claimed Andy, if organisations are to create relevant products and services, as well as challenging people in a good way to break out of internal silo mindsets. Creating seamless customer experiences is often about balancing the need for specialisation, with work communities that foster collaborative effort towards great end-to-end experiences.

Andy spoke about the priority for leaders to learn from what has worked, for example with the new home-work flexibility and continuing to be fleet of foot in responding the emerging demands. Digital evolution has made customers much more demanding. What were hygiene factors have become must-haves, such as a brilliant mobile experience, continually making things easier to build long term relationships with customers. Online customer experiences must be better than they were even 12 months ago, if customers are to not vote with their feet. This is against a backdrop where many services are still very much analogue, getting a mortgage for example still requires many documents to be read and signed. It will need to be digitised as people more and more value instant gratification.

We then enjoyed lunch meetings with sponsors Acquia, Content Square, Critizr, Genesys, Intercom, Lucidworks, Mitto AG, Moxtra, Nice Incontact, Nuance Communications, Odigo, Quadient, Talk Desk and TMAC. Back in the studio, we now heard from Mark Carter Head of Customer Retention & Marketing Technology at HAYU, an NBCUniversal subscription video on demand (SVOD) service.

Mark explained how HAYU rely on first party data for understanding the needs of their customers and the challenges of ever-changing privacy requirements from regulators and platforms have made first party data more important than ever. And now HAYU use first party data to enhance the video on demand experience for reality TV fans. Insights are lifted from the data on subscription attribution, viewer segmentation and churn propensity modelling, the science of trying to predict when customers are most likely to leave, and then to take appropriate steps to keep them. Mining this data reveals important CX phenomena, including how people who like watching true crime are the most valuable and loyal and the tendency for people who haven’t watched for 14 days to become increasingly likely to cancel. This trend changes at 6 months, where their likelihood to cancel starts to reduce again. This means that even contacting them might simply prompt them to cancel.

Mark explained how data helps inform the next best actions that can be taken to increase engagement and reduce churn.

We then welcomed Stephanie Waismann of Barclays Ventures to talk about some of the innovative ways Barclays are driving the future of banking by identifying new business models and emerging technologies to better solve customer problems. Her goal is to help create meaningful, long term relationships with Barclay’s customers through new, transformational business lines. Stephanie shared with us some of the way she is exercising an independent mandate to invest, co-develop and build new digital products, in areas such as cyber security and digital identity. You may have heard of the brilliant Barclays Eagle Labs. Well worth a visit if you have one in your area. They are making a real contribution to emerging new businesses in the eco-systems in which they are located

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and the industry vertical each branch specialises in. With Barclay’s Rise, the company has been focusing on supporting under pressure start-ups and scale-ups with vital information such as government funding options and other support though virtual hubs. By listening to customers, Barclay’s have identified new offerings such as Barclay’s Female Founders First, a 6-week virtual programme targeting high growth female entrepreneurs. This group often have less access to funding/capital than others, explained Stephanie.

The company are also investing in New Ways of Working to support the new, digital, agile, and responsive business they are evolving into, such as working in multi-skilled pods that facilitate collaboration. These are small teams that can own a project from beginning to end and include designers, project managers and engineers working together with a user researcher. Design thinking is at the heart of how Barclay’s Ventures is moving forward with meeting the real and perceived needs of customers in this unique climate.

Stephanie spoke about the use of personas to operationalise and shape products, and the steps they take to try to make these as real and as human as possible, rather than simply trying to put people in boxes. People are seeking trust and transparency and this need drives Stephanie and her team at Barclay’s Ventures.

Earning trust and loyalty in a world post-lockdown was the theme for Emilie Mouquot, Customer and Growth Director for ‘notonthehighstreet.com’. Emilie is responsible for delivering the strategy for acquisition channels whilst ensuring improved loyalty and retention of customers. Her focus is very much on delivering a great experience that is relevant to customers, and which drives both sales and long-term loyalty. She explained how a business can emerge

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successful post-lockdown by focusing on emotional connections, digital, and agility, and how the company changed the ‘e’ in ecommerce to emotional – emotional commerce.

Emotional and ethical considerations are influencing buyer behaviour more than ever.

64% of the company’s customers report they would buy or boycott a supplier based in their social values and 77% reporting they buy from brands who they share values with.

Emilie cited Harvard research showing that 95% of buying decisions are emotional rather than rational, and that emotionally engaged/connected customers have on average a 306% higher lifetime value and stay with a brand for over 5 versus 3.4 years, as well being much more likely to recommend a brand (71% vs 45%).

Emilie described how agility has become a vital quality within the business in terms of using data to develop relevant brand messages and content, product offerings, and inform the use of marketing budget and media mix. Delivering a seamless and frictionless omni-channel experience across the entire customer journey – personalised, responsive, and optimised to each device as well as informed by identified customer preferences.

Carina Ahlberg, Head of Customer Experience VOLKSWAGEN GROUP Sverige AB works with all brands within the Volkswagen Group in the Swedish market: Volkswagen PC, Audi, SEAT, SKODA, VW Commercial Vehicles and Porsche. She explained how Sweden lie in second place in Europe in digital maturity. Her theme was moving from flat stars to three dimensional stars, sharing how we need to really understand what customers are telling us, in all the ways they do business with us. She spoke about how as the company moved from a long questionnaire to a shorter one with a 5-star rating, she realized that many stakeholders were frustrated.

The frustration was related to “What do we need to improve to perform better?”. By finding a better way to analyse and present texts from customers, Carina showed us how valuable a combination of linguistics and high-tech can be applied to enhancing customer engagement.

The great thing for me about Engage, is the rich diversity of case study material we

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have such access to. Our penultimate session for Day Two was a panel debate, with debate topic named 'Start-ups and Disruptors: The new kids on the CX block'. We were joined for this by Emilie Vanpoperinge, Finance & Operations from Oddbox, Isabella West, founder of Hirestreet, Charles Instone, Chief Marketing Officer at The Drug Store and Amit Kumar, Head of Marketing Technology at Photobox.

Each participant spoke about the market they are disrupting and/or inventing.

Emilie shared how Oddbox is helping us all “save the planet from our doorsteps” by doing something about the food waste created by supermarkets who turn away fruit & vegetables that don’t meet strict cosmetic and quantity requirements. Emilie and her team rescue delicious, fresh fruit & veg for being too odd, big, small, having cosmetic defects, or even being too many from the farms and deliver it direct to our doorsteps.

At Hirestreet, founder Isabella West and her team make style and sustainability accessible for all women by offering high quality clothing for 4-16-day rental. With over half a million site users, Hirestreet offers rentals from 50 partner brands.

Hirestreet has a strong strategic focus on inclusivity and community and is on a mission to make sustainable fashion accessible to everyone. In the company’s words “We strive to build a community of empowered individuals, with inclusivity, creativity and care for our planet at the forefront of everything we do.” Hirestreet believes that fashion is for everyone and makes quality more available to everyone. Isabella has achieved a year-on-year growth with this strategy of over 1000%.

Charles Instone and his colleagues at The Drug Store focus on curating the best natural remedies and innovative health products in as they strive to educate about and give access to the best products from around the world, in a helpful and memorable manner - in-store and online. The company has grown over the past two years to be at the forefront of this maturing industry. Charles clearly uses his experience from his time at Amazon and how customer obsession is at the forefront of growth within the inner workings of this retailing giant.

They believe that “Everyone deserves to live life to the fullest and our ambition is to help you overcome just some of the obstacles that hinder you from achieving that.

Health & wellbeing is personal. It cannot be generalised, so we try hard every day to provide the best support possible!”

At Photobox, Amit Kumar and his team offer everything you need to turn your favourite moments into beautiful gifts for family and friends – from photo books to mugs to canvas. They encourage us “to experiment, get creative, and have a lot of fun along the way!”

We concluded a brilliant day with an exclusive interview with Raj Kumar, Group Brand and Reputation Director at Aviva. the interview was aimed at getting an insight into his role, recent projects, and their future plans. Before Aviva, Raj held leadership roles in Europe and Asia with companies like Siemens, Experian, and Nokia. In this interview is became clear how Raj sees that performance that is underpinned by building a positive, honest, and inclusive culture that embraces change.

Raj shared his overarching three-pronged customer experience approach of competency, character, and intent and how clearly, Aviva customers’ priorities and behaviours are changing. Raj and his team are concentrating on making the brand easier to do business with. He shared his view on the strong positive link between customer and employee engagement and how this belief underpins Aviva’s efforts for develop a strong culture and smart strategy. He talked about the view that the financial services sector still has work to do in implementing Artificial Intelligence into its CX – and how Aviva are looking to optimise this technology and how customers are reacting to their efforts.

I’d like to thank everyone for sharing such inspiring, thoughtful, and valuable insights.

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Day Three: Thursday 3 December Gerry Brown, The Customer Lifeguard

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ay three of the Customer Engagement Summit also happened to be the last conference day in the EBM calendar and while not wanting to diminish any of the other days in a challenging year, this did feel as if we had scaled new heights. In particular, it coincided with the news from the previous day that UK approval had been granted for the Pfizer vaccine and as a result all of the presenters stood a little taller, and had a virtual spring in their step David Dagger from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) shared some recent positive feedback about the links between a great CX/ EX and loyalty, trust, productivity, and profitability from their recent surveys where Covid-19 unsurprisingly was prominently featured. It once again demonstrated why customer experience (CX) really matters and that business performance improved measurably and significantly for those companies that really did put at the top of the agenda. David highlighted the customer service dividends that were really compelling; increases in ebitda, average profit margin and average revenue per employee. But he didn’t stop there and went on to show the huge financial costs in productivity from not delivering great CX and topped it off by showing what mattered most to customers, and the impact on customer satisfaction. For any for those attendees that questioning the ROI of CX, this presentation clearly washed away any lingering doubts.

Adam Firbank, British Gas (BG) & Darren Collins from Quadient teamed up to introduce us to Customer Communications Management (CCM) and how using CCM & journey mapping can improve customer engagement, right across their customer base. Adam shared how they had realised that many parts of the customer journey were created for the benefit of BG and didn’t accurately reflect the needs of their customers. This led them to taking a really deep dive, using CCM techniques to understand what a customer goes through at each step of the journey. This resulted in uncovering many customer pain points, and a complete restructure of the approach to customers, the communications they preferred and how to reduce contact inefficiencies and costs. While it still early days in the project, it’s clear that this journey has British Gas on the road to customer success.

Coming back for return match were Matt Leenhouts from Tottenham Hotspur FC & Nicholas Brice from Soul Corporation, who took us on a tour of the new Spurs stadium and the culture they have helped create that they call the Spurs Way. They shared the importance of making every fan being made to feel welcome, whether home or away, and the importance of a great off-field performance as well. But as Nicholas pointed out, the stadium is not just for football matches and other vibrant businesses such as catering, hospitality, conferences, and other attractions also bring the fans in. The One team, One vision approach that all colleagues live every day, and helps them manage all these different journeys, is clearly working. It’s obvious that Spurs are league leaders in employee engagement and all the key metrics such as awards, retention, engagement, and overall fan satisfaction that are the true measures of success.

We were then joined by Seb Reeve from Nuance who majored on the theme of how many CX leaders across all industries are achieving things they would never have thought possible – including meeting sudden, unprecedented customer demand for digital engagement. And this wasn’t just “digital natives” and other younger demographics, but, as Seb pointed out even our grandmas are ditching the visit to the branch bank for a session with their table. Seb continued to show us that this was due to more simplified digital journeys, AI empowering agents, and increasing trust in the brand. The net result, a huge increase in customer interactions to 31M, of which more than half were digital and in particular the use of AI to help all demographics have a great experience. Seb’s very well-made key point in all of this was that those organisations that recognised this trend early and adapted their digital journeys accordingly, have set themselves apart from the competition, thus showing very comprehensively, that only the agile survive.

Following a welcome cup of coffee, we were treated to an interview with Anand Roy from Disney, who in his role as Regional Director of Music & Live Entertainment, gave us a great tour of the Magic Kingdom and some of the challenges that even Disney faced as the Pandemic took hold, especially when it came to their light entertainment shows which were shut down globally. But with the innovation and inspiration that Disney is known for he related how they had found a silver lining, especially in south east Asia, where with a “digital first” population, music consumption of streaming platforms reached new heights. In addition, the global launch of Disney+ has had a tremendous impact on connecting in ways that they never had before. The range of stories and universes that these channels addressed now appealed to all demographics and because of a 90-year history of trust is the bedrock on which the company is built and means that Disney, through hope, optimism, and the best of the human experience, continues to find their way into the hearts and minds of all children, regardless of their age!

Staying with an entertainment theme, we welcomed Jorma Kremser from BOSE, who amplified the message that their Customer centricity is not just a buzzword, but the leading principle of all their product innovations and communications. But, with COVID-19, being able to create the same level engagement in an online world would be a real challenge. This meant establishing a virtual sound testing environment, which clearly is not quite the same, but with the innovation that Bose is renowned for, they were able to closely mirror the experience a customer has instore and maintain that close bond that they have forged over the years. They added the ability to extend the trial period, made the returns policy more generous and inclusive, with the bottom line being that the insight they have gained from the virtual experience will really benefit them when the sound of customers

WINTER 2020

Gerry Brown Chief Customer Rescue Officer The Customer Lifeguard

in stores becomes the normal once again.

Kevin Young from The Economist brought us pages of good news and his interview was one of the highlights of the day.

Reaching different demographics with the best content and being one of the first publications to provide in-depth coverage of Covid19, demonstrated their strong reputation for rigour, accurate reporting and inclusiveness that has led to them now having 50 million social media followers. Kevin went on to tell us that while increasing followers was important, building long-term relationships with each demographic was even more critical to their long-term growth. And while digital was growing they weren’t forgetting their print version and the large numbers of subscribers that counted on seeing their distinctive cover every week. Kevin finished by sharing their goal of being able to reach new people, regardless of the medium, to be trusted and continue to innovate and shape their thoughts, provide an idea of what’s coming next, new ideas that reflect what’s going on both globally and locally and continue to be the voice of reason and hope.

Continuing with a communication theme we had another engrossing interview with Marcus Arthur from UKTV. Marcus started off by explaining the UKTV proposition and how it targeted two market segments. The paid market and the terrestrial market and the importance of the former when with Covid-19 advertising revenues “went off a cliff”. He went on to discuss their competition, Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and BritBox, which clearly impacted viewership. But recognised that it was important to ensure that they still had a strong brand and that each brand promise has to reflect people’s emotional choices and that they weren’t trying to be all things to all people. Marcus also

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focused on their internal view of the world and that the underlying theme was putting people first.

How they interacted with their own colleagues, recognising that work life balance was changing dramatically, and they needed to offer employees choice as well as viewer. Marcus clearly showed that he had a clear vision for the future and having a workforce that is fit for the next 10 years and beyond. Being able to work flexibly was key to their long-term success and their ability to compete in all areas of their respective markets and do their best work irrespective of location, will be their defining mantra.

Andrew Archibald from Co-Op Health gave us a compelling and empathetic presentation about how winning trust is the secret to rapid growth in a direct to customer business and shared how even more vital that is in the healthcare segment. He introduced Coop’s newest business an online UK based, digital pharmacy are the UK’s 7th biggest pharmacy with Trust Pilot ratings of 4.5. He shared that the online market was still exceedingly small but had doubled in the last 12 months.

Co-Op Health uses a secure link to the NHS digital system which mean they can act more quickly and accurately than traditional pharmacies. Deliver anxiety absolute transparency and honesty. Their marketing has all been focused on showing people this really works and the importance of delivery partners such as Royal Mail and their strong relationship with the NHS. In the end their promise is encapsulated in their mantra of “Nothing should be too much trouble” and there’s no question they’ll be delivering on their promise for many years to come.

Sean Whitley, from A2P Messaging, bravely rose incredibly early from his California home to share an especially important message about, well, messaging, and how it has become a vital ingredient in helping organizations engage decision makers into meaningful sales conversations.

This is particularly vital due to the evolving brand-consumer relationship and the changing expectations of consumers. He described how A2P messaging can improve engagement, enhance the sales process, and meet consumers where they are and how connecting with customers via their mobile devices is the way to stay ahead and top of mind. The bottom line, fast reliable and secure, allowing you meet consumers on their terms, supports dynamic engaging content and is highly scalable for any size of business. Now that was a message worth getting!

Madeleine Linden from Virgin Money touched all of us with her highly charged presentation about the Power of Emotion, and in particular how their “Smile Score” helps them really understand how they are making an emotional connection and are empathetic on every interaction. They do this by measuring ease, effectiveness, and positive feelings to understand emotions as a way to know how well they deliver on their purpose. The key to this is understanding specific emotions and regular, relevant engaging communications and impact and this translates into their conversations becoming less transactional and more emotional. Madeline left us all with a smile on our faces and showed that she truly was “hooked on a feeling.”

Justin Sears definitely joined the bots and showed us how building connected experiences with AI and understanding customer intent forms the bedrock of engagement. With the huge increases in online shopping and the lack of face-to-face interactions, empowering everyone individually via the connected experience cloud meant that it was far easier to understand the customer intent, despite a lack of auditory information. He shared some great customer stories and showed how digital interactions can be just as fulfilling, emotionally and financially and provides dividends for customers and employees alike.

Lord Karan Bilimoria gave us all a lift with his inspiring and compelling story about how he built the Cobra Beer brand from scratch which was a master class in following your dream and creating better beer that brought the best out of any food. He shared how he and his business partner began with no brewing experience, no identifiable track record but were able to bridge the capability gap by having faith, passion, and confidence in their products, in their ideas, and in their brand. He amplified the theme of the conference by talking about the importance of trust and how authenticity, logic, and empathy formed the perfect triangle to build that success. integrity as he said it’s better

to fail doing the right thing then to succeed doing the wrong thing. His final and most memorable message was that you must have an extraordinary brand, based on an undeniable brand truth, that doesn’t compromise on their principles, will have an instantly recognisable product and finally it delivers a relevant and consistent experience. With that I’m sure I heard a collective “Cheers” from the audience.

Our day and the conference year were brought to a fitting end by a stimulating and compelling panel discussion reflecting on how vital it is is to manage the Customer experience, when customer priorities and behaviours are changing fast Vic Silverman from Refinitiv, Deborah Prince from NHS Property Services, Raghav Gupta from Expedia Group, and Matthew Harwood from NatWest all brought their individual and unique perspective to the discussion. All the panellist provided some great examples of how Covid-19 has made us all rethink customer and employee engagement. Our panellist identified some major and lasting changes in how we interact with customers and colleagues. They felt that internal growth opportunities had increased, and companies had discovered better ways of working that provided more free time & less travel. Digital transformation & self-service evolving more quickly and better than ever before and companies finding out what they do really well and focusing efforts on that, but also ramping up their people to see where and how they need to improve. All agreed that despite the challenges of 2020, we had learnt more, adapted better and have the potential to create a better world for all in 2021 That brough the conference to a fitting end and in a week where hope in a brighter future has once again been rekindled, I truly believe that this extends to hope and trust in our ability to deliver really great customer experiences. While we all missed the personal contact that live events bring, there was no doubt that the energy, enthusiasm, and willingness to share experiences surged through the airwaves just as positively and impactfully as if delivered from the stage. It’s a virtual certainty that these types of events are here to stay, especially with such a passionate and willing group of presenters and the behind-the-scenes team from Engage who all made the day so memorable.

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10-11 February 2021 Despite the physical location of agents, contact centres remain the beating heart of an organisation’s customer engagement strategy. To help you on your quest for excellence, there is no time like the present to learn from those who have been at the forefront of change in order to allow their contact centres to deliver the customer experience.

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Overall how would you rate the delivery of the virtual event?

93% excellent/good What our delegates think

Friendly organisers, excellent agenda and respectful treatment of guests.

Amazing use of my time I found the ability to pop in and out of the conference to attend the presentations I wanted to hear was extremely useful. Also being able to catch up on those I missed was valuable.

I found the topic very useful and interesting I think the content and they way the conference was executed was excellent. I am also a big fan of Engage...

I thought the event was really well organised and the length of each event was good (20 min). Some talks were more interesting than others but I think it was a great event overall.

Organised superbly with great use of tech to overcome the usual virtual challenges Some useful content but quite a few poor presentations.

Considering the total investment of your time spent how would you rate the value you received?

The content was great and the speakers were terrific just like the info they shared.

The hosts were great, and the sessions/talks well-structured and comprehensive.

Thought the set up was professional. I like the moderator in the studio approach.

Very slick, good speakers, easy to access, well presented

42% Excellent Value

Overall how satisfied were you with 2020 Customer Engagement Summit?

63%

29% 38% Good Value

4% Fairly satisfied

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Which speakers were your favourite?

Stanford Swinton

Natalie McLeod

Thomas Reby

Emilie Mouquot

Deliveroo

15below

Google

Notonthehighstreet

Jorma Kremser

Colin Shaw

Adam Firbank

Mark de Bruijn

Bose

Beyond Philosophy

British Gas

Smartly.io

The Conference was rated EXCELLENT in the following aspects:

Registration Ease of use of the online platform Sound quality Quality of images / video Quality of the speakers Ability to participate in sessions Ability to connect with new people Ability to interact with other attendees Ability to interact with sponsors Availability of assistance / support Speakers at the event Quality of the event studio

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EBM Live Events VIRTUAL FUTURE OF THE CONTACT CENTRE CONFERENCE

VIRTUAL DIGITAL WORKPLACE CONFERENCE

10-11 FEBRUARY 2021 I VIRTUAL

10-11 MARCH 2021 I VIRTUAL

Despite the physical location of agents, contact centres remain the beating heart of an organisation’s customer engagement strategy. To help you on your quest for excellence, there is no time like the present to learn from those who have been at the forefront of change in order to allow their contact centres to deliver the customer experience.

Engaged employees are more important to organisations than ever before.

Providing our people with a truly digital workplace environment enables new and more effective and efficient ways of working while improving engagement levels and at the same time relationships with our customers.

VIRTUAL AUTOMATION, AI AND RPA CONFERENCE

VIRTUAL FUTURE OF MARTECH CONFERENCE

22 APRIL 2021 I VIRTUAL

29 APRIL 2021 I VIRTUAL

Automation, Artificial intelligence and Robotic Process Automation are arguably some of the most talked about terms at the moment, exciting new areas within the transformation of customer engagement.

Martech originally comprised of marketing software such as marketing automation platforms, social media management and monitoring tools, website, and SEO analytics.

VIRTUAL EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SUMMIT 2021

VIRTUAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT TRANSFORMATION CONFERENCE

11-13 MAY 2021 I VIRTUAL

9-10 JUNE 2021 I VIRTUAL

Now in its eighth year, the Summit has grown exponentially and has moved to an interactive virtual conference boasting three days of case study presentations, firmly established as Europe’s premier event, examining all aspects of work under the overarching theme of how technology is changing the face of employee engagement.

The Virtual Customer Engagement Transformation Conference comes as a growing number of organisations are realising the business benefits that accrue when they work to transform and evolve their customer engagement strategies to keep pace and engage more closely with their customers.

VIRTUAL EMPLOYEE WELLBEING CONFERENCE

VIRTUAL INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE

8 JULY 2021 I VIRTUAL

15-16 SEPTEMBER 2021 I VIRTUAL

The challenges and opportunities relating to the mental, financial and physical health related wellbeing of our people are now firmly at the top of the business agenda, alongside increasing awareness and understanding of the myriad of issues involved.

The fast-changing world of internal communications and how it is increasingly taking on the critical employee engagement role that has too often been neglected by those in HR. The way we communicate with our people must also change and we will look at how organisations are grappling with the challenges thrown up by the seismic changes in the way we work.

VIRTUAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE 23 SEPTEMBER 2021 I VIRTUAL We take a deep dive into looking at how organisations are having to handle more data every day than ever before, nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated daily. This can quickly become unwieldy on both a company and employee level.

VIRTUAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT SUMMIT 2021 9-11 NOVEMBER 2021 I VIRTUAL Our flagship Customer Engagement Summit is back. Delegates will hear from 45+ speakers, and we’ll be covering the latest, hottest topics in the industry.

VIRTUAL DIVERSITY & INCLUSION CONFERENCE 23 NOVEMBER 2021 I VIRTUAL An effective diversity and inclusion strategy goes far beyond just legal compliance. Increasingly, employers recognise the importance of diversity and inclusion in recruiting and retaining the skills and talent they need, this adds substantial value to an organisation and contributes to employee well-being and employee engagement.

VIRTUAL CX MARKETING SUMMIT 2021 13-14 OCTOBER 2021 I VIRTUAL Every interaction that a customer has with a company, be it online or offline, changes their impression of the brand. For this reason, there has never been a more important time for the marketing function to ensure a great CX through each touchpoint of creating awareness, driving conversions, and keeping existing customers happy.

ENGAGE AWARDS 2021 10 NOVEMBER 2021 I VIRTUAL Following on from the success of the 2020 International Engage Awards programme, which broke records across the board, we are delighted to reveal the winners of our 2021 programme.

LIVE UPDATE: All of our 2021 events are currently planned as virtual, although we have placeholder dates with a number of our venue providers ready and waiting to welcome us back. When possible we are excited to be able to provide our ‘turnkey’ fully managed exhibition solution once again providing the physical presence at the venue and in person networking opportunities.

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