United Kingdom - December 28, 2007 - The Professional Planning Forum announced the shortlist of finalists for the 2008 Contact Centre Innovation Awards, to be presented at the Contact Centre Planning conference on April 28-29. With an exceptional number of outstanding entries, shortlisting was even tougher this year with 16 contact centres selected as finalists. "These nominations show that planning analysts can make the difference in helping organisations initiate and implement change in their contact centres", explains Paul Smedley, Executive Director at the Professional Planning Forum. Showing evidence of strong performance improvements, the nominations cover innovative work in the use of management information, target setting, employee engagement, process re-engineering and streamlining the customer experience - as well as the more traditional areas of workforce management and schedule innovation. The full list of finalists is: Alliance and Leicester, BUPA, Canterbury City Council, Carphone Warehouse, Centrica - British Gas Service, Dell, EDF Energy, Firstsource, GEM, Metropolitan Police, North Warwickshire Borough Council, Northern Counties Housing Association, Orange, RBS (IT Services), T-Mobile and Vodafone. "A special feature of these awards is that they are so thoroughly judged, based on talking to front-line staff and managers and spending time looking at the results and how they have been achieved", explains Peter Massey, one of the external judges. The award programme also provides a year-round programme of discovery, with Planning Forum members gaining access to professionally prepared case studies on each finalist, with the chance to talk to them at the April conference and join in on site visits in the summer and autumn. The 2008 judges include managers from four previous award-winning organisations: John Tanner (Salford City Council), Steve Hubbard (Royal Sun Alliance), Paul Burgess-Clements (AXA PPP Healthcare) and Darren Leahy (Abtran). "The number of quality entries was especially impressive and makes me proud to be associated with the contact centre planning profession", concludes Steve Woosey, Membership Director and a member of the judging panel. "Their work takes performance in these centres to new levels and demonstrates that planning plays a key role in successful contact centre management teams". |