Eptica is a world-leading provider of multi-channel and multi-language customer interaction solutions and is ranked on the 2008 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA. Eptica software increases business efficiency and revenue performance through its unique ability to self-learn from every interaction how best to answer an enquiry. Available on-premise or SaaS, it enables Eptica clients to deliver fast, accurate and consistent responses through all channels including online service, email, phone, fax, letter and SMS. As a result, over 250 companies – including some of the world’s largest – use Eptica to deliver excellent customer service at much lower cost.

Eptica’s clients include Confused.com, Hotels.com, Fortis Insurance, Go Compare, Virgin Holidays, Brent Council, DatingDirect.com, Société Générale, South East Water, ING and Barclays.

Eptica has offices in the UK, France and Spain and operates worldwide through its network of partners. For more information please visit: www.eptica.com

Delivering EMPATHY is about the ability to understand both the emotional and physical drivers behind a customer’s needs and then react appropriately to those needs.

Harding & Yorke’s passion is to enable clients to create organisations focussed on delivering not just great, but truly differentiated customer experiences.

Our underlying philosophy is to inspire and motivate individuals and businesses to achieve excellence in a sustainable and profitable way.

We do this whilst balancing the needs of all our stakeholders, including our families, so that each will instinctively know that we are working in their best interests.

Reasons to work with Harding & Yorke
Since 1994, Harding & Yorke have been world leaders in the design and implementation of measures that capture the essence of Empathy in corporate and public sector environments.
You can be assured that you’re working with Industry Leaders with a wide range of experience of working with some of the world’s most inspiring companies and individuals and methodologies academically proven to be 98.9% reliable.

The Empathy Academy was launched in 2002 to support clients who are truly committed to improving their customers’ experiences.

Led by Nickie Hawton, The Empathy Academy team are quickly able to understand why your customers’ experiences are the way they are and to design engagements and transfer the skills you need in order to make, and sustain, significant improvements.

In 2004, The Empathy Rating Index Company (ERIC) was founded. Benchmarking over 200 companies from 12 different industries, ERIC quickly became the largest and most influential benchmark within the Contact Centre industry in the UK.

After three years, 4.5 million data points and the analysis of over 100,000 interactions, we shared our findings with Dr. Yuksel Ekinci and Professor Merlin Stone.

They were able to confirm that ERIC™ was the world’s first service metric to correlate directly with Profit (as measured by ROCE). Predictive modelling suggests a 16.4% improvement in ROCE for every 1 point increase in Harding & Yorke’s empathy scale.

Each and every initiative you launch should play a role in improving your relationship with your customers and, ideally, improve your profitability. By adopting the ERIC™ methodology you can easily identify the areas which, when addressed, will have the biggest impact on your customers, engage your people and, most importantly, monitor progress, sustainability and profitability.
Key Harding & Yorke Messages

• Direct and proven Correlation with ROCE, OPEX, Brand Equity and future Corporate Value
• Proposition appeals to highest Execs, but is practical and supportable throughout organisations
• Empathy is evidence based measurement for all offline and online channels providing clear recommendations for action
• Supported by full range of synergistic services and technology businesses
• Enables built-in measurement and proof of progress

ResponseTek provides on-demand customer experience management (CEM) software and solutions to help companies continually improve the quality and consistency of the delivered customer experience.

ResponseTek was founded in 1999 to provide companies critical information for running their businesses – the voice of their customers. ResponseTek has subsequently become the leading global provider of Customer Experience Management (CEM) software solutions, working for some of the world’s leading brands, including HSBC, Aon Corporation, Barclays Stockbrokers, and lastminute.com.

ResponseTek:CEM has been designed to measure and report on customer experiences, capturing insights on customer experiences when and where they occur, and delivering them continuously and in real-time. The goal? To improve customer experiences, and improve your business.

Salesforce.com is the Enterprise Cloud Computing company whose portfolio of Salesforce CRM sales, marketing and service applications accessed over the Internet are revolutionising the way companies and their customers communicate.

Satmetrix is the co-developer of Net Promoter which is proven by leading companies to be a key loyalty metric to drive financial growth. Net Promoter has gained rapid adoption among business leaders due to its ease of adoption and transformational benefits. Satmetrix clients include Virgin Media, Aggreko, Orange Business Services, Symantec, Experian, etc.

Net Promoter is more than a score, it’s an organisational discipline that transforms your business around the customer. Whether you choose to use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) by itself or with other loyalty measures, our operational approach will allow you to evaluate the customer experience at key areas of your organisation; measure the loyalty of your customers, partners and employees; identify performance gaps, and continue to engage with your customers through online communities.

Satmetrix executives Richard Owen and Dr Laura Brooks have recently published Answering the Ultimate Question, a follow-on to Fred Reichheld’s international best-seller. The book builds on the link between Net Promoter Scores and business growth and profitability. Combined with an operational discipline to increase Promoters and reduce Detractors, Net Promoter represents a potential win-win for businesses and their customers. Drawing on illustrative case-study findings from the more than 80 companies, this book is designed to help apply Net Promoter correctly, and foster growth and profitability in any organisation.

Since 2003, supported by the Northwest Regional Development Agency and the University of Central Lancashire, CallNorthWest has been actively working with public and private contact centres to support the critical success factors that drive excellence. Delivering a high class service that is unparalleled in the North West, it has become the North West’s leading support organisation in the field of customer management.

Established in 1994 to promote the profession of call centre management the Call Centre Management Association (UK) is an independent, not for profit organisation for Call Centre Managers, Supervisors and Team Managers funded by membership subscriptions.

The CCMA is run on an unpaid, voluntary basis by an elected Board of call centre professionals who give up their own time to put something back into their industry and help to support others.

There are around 600 CCMA members in the UK and our mission is to contribute to the continuous professional development of call centre managers and supervisors and to assist wherever we can in sourcing high quality training courses. www.ccma.org.uk

CSN is one of the UK’s largest and most successful customer service networking organisations. We support organisations on their journey to service excellence through a range of services including; assessment, benchmarking, training, consultancy and complaints management. Through our multi-channel surveys we measure customer and employee perception, identify key areas of importance, and recommend actions that deliver real improvements by providing user-friendly interactive reports, alerts, presentations and live on-line results. CSN are all about supporting organisations with best practice solutions, advice and helping them deliver the things their customers really want.

Don Hales, Founder and Chairman of Judges for the National Customer Service Awards, formed the Customer Service Training Association in 2007 as a learning and networking forum for those with an interest in customer service training.  This has been extremely well supported and the Association runs five events a year featuring a variety of outstanding presenters with very interactive and wide ranging sessions. 

In addition to running CSTA and his consultancy/speaking business– World of Customer Service, Don is Chairman of Awards International, a company specializing in organising and promoting Award programmes, both in the UK and overseas.  Don originally formed the renowned National Customer Service Awards in 2000 and, although the programme is now owned by United Business Media, he continues to act as a consultant on the programme and chairs the final judging sessions.  The awards cover every aspect of customer service and attract huge entries from organisations, large and small, in every sector.

Customer Magazine is a UK-based, business-to-business journal for senior professionals who are committed to ensuring their businesses are customer-centric. With a circulation in excess of 10,000 key-decision makers keen to implement strategy and change to improve their customers’ experience, Customer Magazine has to stay one step ahead of the market and deliver cutting-edge case studies, influential opinion pieces, thought-leading articles and dynamic news stories to bring clarity and vision to the customer-driven market place. Add to this the consistent theme of best practice and Customer Magazine becomes an essential read for any professional serious about aligning their business to be customer-centric.

SOCAP in Europe and Worldwide:

The place for professionals within the consumer affairs and customer service industry. The service profession now needs and deserves a worldwide member-based organisation. It was originally founded in the United States of America in 1973. SOCAP UK followed in 1986. There are now SOCAP organisations throughout the world including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Canada. World-wide there are over 4,000 members looking to serve their customers and companies to the best of their ability. SOCAP works with other stakeholders – government, regulators, standards bodies and consumer advocacy organisations – to bring together the best of people and the best of practice on behalf of the companies they work for and the people they serve.

SOCAP raises the professional profile of Consumer Affairs and Customer Service as a profession while remaining focused on the individual practitioner looking to exchange ideas, expertise and opinions to ensure the future of the profession.