The Customer Experience Conference

Graham is the senior researcher on the Institute for Government Performance Tracker team. Before joining the Institute in November 2016, he worked as a researcher at DragonGate, a public sector consultancy, working on a range of projects related to local government and the broader public sector. 

Dr Ana Paula Nacif is an experienced executive and group coach, consultant, and facilitator, with expertise in wellbeing, women leaders, and career transition and development. She works with individuals, teams, and organisations in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. Ana is also an active researcher in the fields of coaching and wellbeing. 

Dr Jai Shree Adhyaru is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist with around 20 years of experience in working with children, teenagers, and families in a variety of settings. Her specialisms include working with traumatic life events and focusing on self-care and burnout prevention among helping professionals. Jai has a special interest in working with technology that can support mental wellbeing and offers guidance on the use of apps, virtual reality, and augmented reality in clinical work. Jai specialises in service implementation of services targeted at populations that do not access mental health support through traditional means. 

Jai works with a range of presenting difficulties including anxiety, depression, self-harm, anger, and violence, worry about self-image and relationship difficulties. Her approach uses evidenced based therapies – those which we know from research are effective – and applies these systemically, i.e., to consider the influences of our family, friends, workplace, or place of education and other ‘systems’ and how they impact on our wellbeing.  

Jai currently works as the Service Manager for the NHS Grenfell Health & Wellbeing Service for Children and Young People. In addition to her NHS role, Jai also offers consultancy to professionals on a range of topics, offers specialist supervision to support people in managing the emotional impact of working with people in distress and holds several roles with professional regulatory bodies including the Health and Care Professions Council and the British Psychological Society. Jai also guest lectures at the University of East London.  

John is the Director of Customer Services in the University of Oxford’s central IT team. His group comprises the service desk, managed desktops, digital skills development, research & business systems support and educational media. 

His career in Higher Education IT started in a tight-knit college community, and now brings the delight of supporting some 60,000 staff and students in highly diverse academic fields. He has worked in user support and training, software and systems development, service and project management, information security and sponsorship of IT services. 

John is passionate about seeing things from a customer perspective and using the knowledge and skills of our highly professional IT teams to make IT a trusted, valued enabler for individuals and the University of Oxford as a whole. 

Jo joined The Institute as CEO in 2009. Over the last 10 years she has driven membership growth by 150 percent and established the UK Customer Satisfaction Index as the country’s barometer of consumer satisfaction, providing organisations with an indicator of the return on their service strategy investment.

Jo brings a wealth of experience from the commercial sector, enabling her to put customer service at the heart of the Boardroom agenda. She has extensive experience in the financial services sector having served as a non-executive director to Aegon UK’s independent governance committee and having spent more than 11 years with organisations such as Aviva. She has also held director roles in brand and business consulting, policy development and research for the likes of City & Guilds and the Chartered Management Institute.

Jo focuses on demonstrating the clear link between employee engagement, customer service strategies and organisational performance. Working across the public, private and voluntary sectors she provides strategic advice to Boardrooms to raise the standards of service provided by UK organisations, providing evidence of the connection between customer satisfaction and operational efficiency and profitability.

She works with parliamentarians, officials and regulators to help them understand and harness the impact that service has on the UK economy and productivity. She is a regular media commentator and was called to give evidence at the Public Administration Select Committee inquiry into complaints handling.

Away from work Jo is a keen walker and traveller. She has travelled extensively, using her experiences to draw parallels on service strategy which she believes UK organisations should adopt and adapt to enhance customer satisfaction in an increasingly global marketplace.

Jo has been closely involved with the Engage for Success movement as a volunteer since its launch.  She is Partnerships Director as well as co-host of the weekly Engage for Success radio show. The Engage for Success purpose is ‘Inspiring people and workplaces to thrive’ which is absolutely aligned with Jo’s own vision ‘To make workplaces better places to be’.

Jo’s ‘day job’ is MD of Woodreed, a specialist ad agency who use the tools, techniques, creativity and insight of the advertising world to engage employees inside organisations.

Jo is passionate about brands and their power to move people.  She is equally passionate about employee engagement and its vital role in delivering a high performing organisation. Put the two together and she becomes almost evangelical about the power a well-positioned and consistently delivered brand has as a catalyst for employee engagement and organisational success.
 

Twitter handle for Woodreed                     @TunWellsWoodies

Linkedin profile                                                 Jo Moffatt

Twitter handle for Engage For Success    @Engage4Success

David Blackburn is one of the most awarded HR professionals working in the UK today: most recently winning HR Team of the Year in the HR Excellence Awards. In January David was made a Chartered Companion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). This is the highest accolade and level of membership awarded by the CIPD professional body and the selection of individuals to enter this group – currently only twenty-six - is made directly by the CIPD Board.

With over 20 years’ experience in leading all aspects of Human Resources, David is currently the Chief People Officer of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). Prior to his current role he worked across both the private and not-for-profit sectors. David is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen and the London Business School; a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce; the Institute of Leadership and Management and a Member of the Guild of HR Professionals.

David Blackburn is the Investors in People (IiP) Leader of the Year; MEMCOM Excellence Awards HR Leader of the Year and Personnel Today Awards HR Director of the Year 2020 as well as being the inaugural Financial Times FT Adviser Diversity Champion of the Year. David’s work has been recognised in multiple National Awards including: Brilliance in Internal Communication; Business in the Community (BITC) Responsible Business; CIPD People Management; Employee Benefits; Engage Awards; Financial Adviser Diversity in Finance; Financial Innovation; Housing Heroes; HR Distinction; HR Excellence; Investors in People; Personnel Today; and the UK Customer Experience Awards.

Jenny is the Head of Customer Experience and Improvement for Cornwall Council, one of the largest unitary authorities.

Her team look after a number of areas focused on driving customer satisfaction up. These include contact centres, the website and digital platforms, digital inclusion and skills, customer feedback, customer data and the overall customer strategy. In addition to this, her team lead on driving a culture of continually improving efficiency for the Council.

Jenny has worked in a number of industries outside of the public sector including Hospitality, Retail and Transport and in all of these areas her focus and drive has always been to ensure the customer is at the heart of service design.

Jenny describes her passion around customer as ‘an infectious energy’ that she actively encourages colleagues to share.

Kevin is an experienced Customer Service Director. In the last few years he has led his service to an increase in NPS from -42 to +58. During that period the service has changed significantly, expanding its offer and the range of products supported while also achieving a staff engagement score of 73% during this time of change. Kevin has delivered a wide range of transformational change programmes that are focussed on the customer as the output. Kevin has worked in both the public and private sectors and for local, regional and national organisations. He has a real passion for delivering customer centric services that are driven and owned by your people.