As the UK water market opens to retail competition, I was solely responsible for designing and architecting a contact centre strategy to enable this large UK water utility to deliver a first class customer experience that encompasses technology areas such as inbound ACD routing, IVR, outbound dialling, PCI-DSS compliant payment solutions and speech analytics.I'm proud to say that now, every time you call Severn Trent Water and interact with the IVR, that's my project that is delivering a great customer experience and saving agents 30-60 seconds per call.As well the inbound and outbound customer contact platform, I helped defined and built a roadmap to a digital and omni-channel world. Working with the business to balance the needs of the customer, the business and the regular and ensure the proposed solution is the best fit for all.Within the £1.6M project I was accountable for:- Providing customer contact and telephony subject mater expertise to the overall customer contact improvement project- Maximising efficiency and ROI by delivering a brand new self-serve capability that includes ID&V, a PCI DSS compliant payment solution and direct debit management- Working with third parties and internal teams to ensure alignment with strategic architectural direction- Supporting the creation and evaluation of PQQs, RFIs and RFPs through to vendor selection and contract award- To own the progression of detailed designs through a detailed design process ensuring downstream design teams remain true to the business vision and technology strategy.- To identify and improve the linkage between business processes, application and data architectures- To advise on the definition and selection of applications and technical/infrastructure and ultimate technology solutions- To deliver cost savings and business efficiency to Severn Trent Water enabling them to win in a newly competitive market

As a lead solutions architect for Barclays Bank (a freelance, contract position) I am responsible for ensuring the demanding needs of the Bank and its customers are met by the best communication solutions available. I act as the interface between the lines of business (for example retail bank, credit card and internal user communities) and the complex telephony solutions that we can bring to bear. At a high level, this involves gathering requirements and turning them into a costed proposal back to the business that not only delivers on the business need but also offers different ways of working, new and innovative capabilities, cost savings and enhanced customer and bank security. After solution sign off the process of component design begins with the lead architect taking centre stage, directing the component teams to ensure they deliver on the original solution promise. It’s a role that sees me communicating with senior stakeholders one minute, discussing cost, ROI and business benefits and designers the next, discussing protocols, applications and integration methods. Much of my recent work has been in the area of IVR and application design and how customers can self-serve in a way that doesn’t make them feel disadvantaged and in fact offers benefits over agent based interactions thus freeing agents for more complex, high value and rewarding transactions.

As a Managing Architect within the Solution Architecture community at Dimension Data, my prime focus is within the Financial Services industry to provide architectural advice and pre-sales support across the end-to-end Dimenson Data solutions portfolio.I work strategically with my clients to understand and steer their technology direction and my background from both the vendor and customer communities allows me to help them address the needs of their end customers whilst balancing the imperatives and strict governance that the FSI industry demands.

I am contracting as a lead telecommunications solutions architect and part of a team of highly qualified communication professionals and strategists currently working with this household name to define, develop, build and deliver a next generation communication and customer contact strategy.On a day to day basis, my role is to provide architectural governance and design for one of the largest telecoms transformation projects the bank has undertaken. This involves all aspects of UK wide contact centre solution that serves all of Barclays retail customers. Including technologies such as ACD, IVR, MI, call recording and associated components.I provide high level architectural governance right through to technology decisions at a component level that ensures the needs of the business and customers are met by a solution that delivers a multimedia customer contact platform for the 21st century.

My particular skill is in translating technology in to everyday language that can be used by everyone from the IT professional to the CEO. This skill is put to good use at Avaya where I am responsible for creating business level and ultimately CxO level messaging for Avaya's Unified Communication and Contact Centre. I’m regularly in contact with our customers and potential new customers to help them with their business communications and collaboration challenges and am a regular speaker at customer and industry events. I am also a key press and analyst spokesperson with many published articles on subjects such as cloud and Unified Communications.

In this role I educated and influenced will known industry analysts on Avaya’s products, solutions and strategy to develop a real “trust relationship” where Avaya and analysts work together to support a common goal. I worked within the global Corporate Communications team to develop and maintain and “front of mind” position for Avaya in industry analyst firms and ensured communication with analysts is a real two way process, so that analysts are always up to date with the latest Avaya news, but also so that Avaya can learn from analysts and develop its strategy accordingly.

In this role I provided a high value and respected sales resource to the Avaya sales organisation, reducing the sales cycle time and increasing average deal value and a proven to impact in-country revenues. I worked with the EMEA sales team to deliver bespoke customer briefings to existing and prospective Avaya customers to present and physically demonstrate Avaya solutions to customers at all levels from CxO and IT manager to end user. I operated a product demonstration area that can really show the power of an Avaya solution that included a full converged IP telephony network, including 15 MS Windows servers, 8 Linux servers, 3 IP telephony servers and 20 MS Windows desktop machines, with a budget of $¾Million PA. I lead a team of 3 direct reports (duties include personnel issues, development, expense management, recruitment etc.) The centre I ran soon became the busiest (measured by number of customer briefings conducted) supporting up to 500 customer briefings a year with a potential revenue run rate of $165M/year and an 85% conversion rate.