Bought a few properties a while back and it’s now making enough to live on, so decided that I’d choose to have the time rather than the extra income a job would offer. Maybe would go back to work if the right opportunity arose, but for now very happy filling my days with dog walks, housework, volunteering and lots of triathlon training.

After over 3 years working with the great team in The Co-op Service Centre, I decided it was time to take a permanent role. Doing more or less what I’d been doing as a consultant, but with a bit more commitment on both sides. Continued the journey of building a best in class, multi award winning contact centre capability including delivery of home working and a new Genesys Cloud contact centre platform integrating into Salesforce CRM. 2022 mainly spent delivering aggressive cost reduction targets which ultimately reduced the scope of the contact centre and made my own role redundant - which was only fair under the circumstances - so now looking for the next thing.

Working with the Membership and Customer Services team to deliver key change projects, build service excellence capability and develop insight and relationship management as a value stream, my deliverables included: - Developing the business improvement strategy (4yr) - Translating the strategy into annual objectives and targets - Developing and implementing a Voice of Customer programmeUnder the leadership of my boss Claire Carroll this became a high performing team that was recognised internally and externally, including several industry awards for Business Improvement Strategy, Complaints Handling. In Nov'17 we won GOLD for Best Insight/Voice of Customer programme at the European Call Centre and Customer Service awards..

When I made the move from permanent employment to consulting/contracting in 2014 I knew I’d need to explain to prospective clients how I could make a difference to them. I needed to be clear what my proposition was. I considered my career to that point, in particular what the most successful moments of it had been and which I’d enjoyed most, and came up with this mission statement, which has stood me in good stead ever since: To profitably orientate business activities around the needs of target customersI believe that in business, understanding the needs of the people you’re most reliant upon to deliver your business goals - your target customers - and then meeting these needs in the most efficient way possible is the path to optimising profitability.As a contractor I can offer a flexible solution for organisations who require expert analysis, planning and delivery resource on an ad-hoc basis, eg - To work on a specific project where Voice of Customer is a key input- To set up a planning framework that orientates around customer needs- To cover peak workloads or absences for Insight and Analysis type roles- To develop and implement a business improvement plan in the field of customer management - contact centres in particularI could also provide a regular service on a day-a-month basis for smaller organisations who could not take on a full time member of staff but want to benefit from my industry knowledge of contact centre best practices, and I would consider collaborating on interesting research projects that further the cause of value realisation from customer contact.To discuss suitable opportunities please get in touch via LinkedIn.

Role extended to cover all channels and products within the Bank and to focus on identification and management of Conduct Risk, in line with the overall Bank strategy. Led a team of analysis to deliver action-orientated customer insights into channels and product heads to orientate their activities towards better customer outcomes• Over 1000 improvement suggestions, with £2.8m benefits, identified in 2013 as part of a strategy to increase the value-add of insight• Ratio of complaints resolved on front line up from 35% in 2012 to 85% in 2014 with an estimated saving of £2m per annum in complaint handling cost• Over 40k email survey responses delivered for telephony, enabling measurement of CSAT and Advocacy to adviser level at a cost of £3 per response• Key analysis pieces delivered including VoC review ahead of Ethical vote• Derived complaints and insight metrics for customer outcome monitoring

My remit remained as before, to add value to the Customer agenda, but with specific objectives around creating commercial opportunities for the Shared Services directorate in CFS.

Building customer service capability and culture within Operations through thought leadership, insight development and a customer centric culture. Managing performance of the Customer scorecard to deliver key strategic outcomes.• Developed and implemented a Customer Centricity programme• Developed customer scorecards with shared serviced departments• Oversight of monthly customer scorecard performance management• Led cross-functional working group to embed new “relationship model”• Implemented adviser-level customer feedback across multiple contact centres• Embedded the “Customer Promise” brand experience model into shared services• Market leading levels of customer satisfaction maintained and improved• Complaints reduced by 11% Q109-Q110 and dissatisfaction down 7% to 5%• First Contact Resolution improved from 81% to 85%, saving £1.3m pa

Defining, monitoring and improving customer experience across Operational touch points, leveraging feedback for value-adding, actionable business improvements.• Developed Customer Experience strategy for UK Sales & Service.• Improved insight capability and introduced value-based analysis.• Led projects which delivered £3m annualised benefits through cost savings and improved customer experience in 2006 and £5m benefits in 2007.• Targeted complaints reduced by 8% in 2006, 7% in 2007 and 12% in 2008.

Deriving and agreeing business objectives and priorities, through to measurement and evaluation of executed marketing strategies against a set of performance indicators.• Led reviews of marketing effectiveness to provide fact base for future planning, leading to marketing budgets of £180m and £225m being secured in ‘04/’05.• Led ‘05 and ‘06 Op Plan cycles employing a new “customer planning” approach which focused channel and product teams on optimising their activities around key segments of customers.• Developed Management Agendas with marketing departments to set out priorities, integrating these with performance management giving a clear line of sight from the agenda down to the personal objectives of all Marketing staff.

Supported the strategic planning process and led several projects to improve the capability of the Marketing function. • Adapted the planning process to incorporate customer targets by segment.• Compiled fact bases on customer segments and regional competitors to support ’02 planning cycle.• Identified potential value creation of £13m from a previously neglected segment.• Worked in a project team to develop a value focused “Test & Learn” capability to underpin a new proposition development process.• Built an intranet based Knowledge Repository for testing activity and results.

Developed marketing strategy and delivered marketing support for B2B segment.• Secured a budget increase to £2m in 2001 from £1m in 2000 which rose again to £3m in 2002, having demonstrated 20% RoI in previous year.• Built the first b2b marketing database to facilitate customer value analysis.• Launched new products to capitalise on wholesale market conditions• 185,000 new electricity customers recruited by Dec 2001 with average net profitability of £120 per customer (£22m).

I joined British Gas in September 1997 as an electricity pricing expert where I benefited from exposure to MD level from the first week. From there, I went on to develop the market entry case for the SME market which was worth £40m net margin by 2005.

I started as a commercial graduate trainee with Northern Electric and went into Pricing and Analysis. I was soon appointed Team Leader with 8 analysts and responsibility for pricing £1.5bn of energy per year. In 1996 I became Business Process Manager on a new contracts system costing £1.5m, and developed a desktop middleware solution to provide management information.