Simon Pollock

Simon now manages the “front door” services at Surrey including the council's acclaimed website and their innovative 120 person strong contact centre, a centre with a customer satisfaction rating of over 98%. Simon has a reputation for innovation and improvising low cost solutions that drive performance. Simon holds a seat on the Contact Council as the local government representative for London & the South East.

Colin Shaw

Colin and the team have many years experience of successfully leading Customer Experience initiatives within organisations – which are proven to increase customer loyalty and reduce costs. He is aware of the pitfalls and the politics and provides real-life case studies to demonstrate his key points.

Company Profile: Beyond Philosophy

Beyond Philosophy are recognised as the worlds thought leaders in Customer Experience. We have written three international best selling books on the subject. Formed in 2002, we work internationally with organisations such as IBM, FedEx and American Express to name a few. We have offices in London, England and Atlanta, USA.

Beyond Philosophy help organisations design deliberate Customer Experience’s that are emotionally engaging. In addition, we guide our clients on the path to becoming more Customer Centric. We have developed unique, tried and tested practical tools to improve an organisations experience. All these activities are designed to improve Customer retention, increase revenues and save costs. We have many case studies that demonstrate how this is achieved.

We provide four services:

Strategic Guidance - We guide organisations to improve their Customer Experience. We help set the strategy and then critically guide them through an implementation using unique tools and techniques. Throughout the process we transfer our knowledge to an organisation so they can build their own expertise.

Training – We have well developed training programmes for all members of the organisation, in our tools and techniques. We also provide general training on how to improve the Customer Experience. We use Experiential training methods to great effect to ensure the subject lives with all delegates.

Customer Research - We conduct research for organisations to enable them to understand what they can do to improve their emotionally engagement with their customer. We discover the root causes of good and bad experiences and provide ongoing emotions measurement and experience tracking.

Conference Speaking: We provide speaking services, Our Founder and author of our books, Colin Shaw, is an internationally recognised public speaker. Qaalfa Dibeehi, VP of Thought Leadership and consulting is also a highly acclaimed speaker.

Darren Cornish

Darren is a dynamic figure often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. He has been known to remodel train stations on his lunch breaks making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. He translates ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, writes award-winning operas and occasionally treads water for three days in a row.

He woo's women with sensuous trombone playing. He can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed. Is an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, Darren once single handedly defended a small village in the Amazon basin from a horde or ferocious army ants. When bored, he builds large suspension bridges in his garden.

He is an abstract artist, a concrete analyst and a ruthless bookie.

Darren once read ‘Paradise lost’, ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘David Copperfield’ in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. He has performed several covert operations for the CIA.

On weekends, to let off steam, Darren participates in full contact origami. Years ago he discovered the meaning of life, but got drunk and forgot to write it down.

He has won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and chess tournaments at the Kremlin. He has played Hamlet, performed open-heart surgery, and spoken with Elvis.

Oh, and to be honest, he works in Insurance for Norwich Union as their 'Director of Customer Experience (Risk)' and tries to help his company stop doing dumb things to it's staff and it's IFA's, partners and customers. He has been with Norwich Union (its legacy companies such as CU and CGU) since he joined on the Graduate Scheme back in 1992. Until last November, Darren was part of the General Insurance part of the business, having managed service, sales and claims operations finally becoming the 'Head of Customer Experience'. In joining NUL Darren has been asked, as part of the overral Customer Experience Leadership team to continue the service improvements of the last few years.

Adam Koffler