ben palmer

* Led team of Customer Journey Design Analysts whilst also leading several key business projects. * Co-developed the product life-cycle for British Gas' Smart Prepay proposition - enabling market launch. * Led and developed innovative consumer research, analysis and gained wide business agreement to simplify payment plan operations for the biggest customer base within British Gas; * Achieved record level of agent satisfaction scores (+84 NPS) across 4,000 agents for the subsequent business engagement and training programme I also led, winning a business award. * Coordinated journey review, redesign and impact assessment of VAT process changes, enabling a multi-million taxation benefit.

* Managed numerous projects and co-ordinated several continuous improvement programmes to reduce waste/cost drivers and deliver new capabilities. * Implemented compliant sales warm-transfer process within FSA governed operation; won award * Improvements to automated telephone channel following fall-out causal analysis, saving £700k pa * Delivered online process improvements and new employee tools, in-turn growing agent advocacy to promote business’ digital services * Contact Optimisation: contact-reason based ‘failure’ review and fixes, delivering £500k benefit pa * Developed new scorecard to monitor performance and improvements – “the best new report in 2011” (MI Director)

* Responsible for 20 project managers and analysts to prevent, reduce and recover energy debt. * Developed and delivered major transformation of prepay systems, processes and agent tools whilst also using and piloting Agile change methodology – a first for the business (now adopted). * Successfully completed the identification, processing and recovery of £10m of prepayment tariff debt, which was a very complex, sensitive and significant activity, across c.1m customers. * Performance and contract management of two competing third party debt collection partners.

* Monitored and analysed range of customer and operational KPI's to identify, propose and agree tactical and strategic process changes to reduce costs. * Co-ordinated and delivered 'Direct Debit payment plan’ programme achieving significant revenue and retention benefits – and subsequently won MD award. * Improved Meter Read utilisation to 98.9% through targeted fixes, reducing waste and complaints.

* Initially a Customer Service Advisor, before promotions to Supervisor and Team Manager roles. * Providing great customer care, sales, team development and achieving productivity/business targets.

Customer service delivery, sales and stock management

Part-time, Customer Service delivery, sales, stock management

* Responsible for leading team of Customer Journey Senior Managers to deliver best-in-class customer and commercial performance. * Continuously monitor, redesign and improve 7 multi-channel end-to-end journeys; including product/tariff change and smart meter upgrade, involving over 6 million customer transactions pa. * Operating and influencing across a wide matrix organisation to drive and deliver large portfolio and pipeline of initiatives, trials and projects; whilst coaching and building my team’s capabilities. * Able to understand, balance and execute (sometimes competing) customer, business and industry requirements into simple, lean processes and interactions to improve business outcomes. * Achieving in 2016 the highest performing journey customer satisfaction levels in British Gas (+37 Net Promotor Score) and dramatically reducing complaints by 68k (31%), despite growing transactions.