Rob Ettridge

Rob is a partner at customer communications consultancy Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. The lorries help organisations improve customer experience through better communications. He’s managed customer engagement, cultural change and tone of voice communications projects for leading financial, retail, utilities and manufacturing clients. He has a background in public relations, branding and communications gained in technology companies in the UK and USA.

Michelle Ansell

Michelle Ansell is a Director and Managing Partner of Douglas Jackson, a specialist recruitment consultancy. Douglas Jackson offer Executive Search and Recruitment. We work in partnership with our customers to help solve their resourcing challenges, recruiting executive level, senior/mid management and skilled practitioner appointments for; Operations, Sales, Service, Experience, Strategy, Journey, Loyalty, Acquisition, Customer Contact, CRM, Digital, Planning, Programmes, Insight and Analytics. Michelle has over 20 years’ customer recruitment experience, working with a variety of organisations, offering professional advice and consultancy, whilst partnering with clients to identify, attract and recruit the most appropriate talent and individuals for their business.

Caroline Tan

Caroline’s passion and expertise lies in CX transformation. This was inspired and developed during her career within Nationwide. Following roles in Senior Management with a remit to propel the organisation towards delivering a World Class customer experience, Caroline set up Inspiring People, a consultancy and training company aiming to help people do ordinary things extraordinarily well. Caroline is also a speaker and writer and feels privileged to be a judge, able to watch the very best service professionals in action.

Olga Wormald

Olga has over 15 years experience working with businesses like Asda, Hallmark, EasyJet and Bourne Leisure, leading the delivery of customer focussed change programmes, where customer experience is key. She now has her own consultancy company specialising in guiding businesses through strategic change - interpreting their vision into structured delivery plans that gets results.

Marie Cross

Marie is a customer service extremist, with almost 40 years’ experience - passionate about developing the talent of frontline teams and leaders, in order to enhance the customer experience, build brand loyalty and develop employee engagement. An award-winning customer service trainer and entrepreneur, Marie’s expertise and infectious enthusiasm stimulates and educates everyone she works with. Her overall aim is to add real, measurable value to both the individual and the organisation, recognising people as the vital ingredient in the recipe for success.

Peter Milligan

Peter is a professional speaker and business psychologist with 26 years of international experience in developing business leaders and teams. After moving from Australia to the UK in 2000, Peter became a director of Europe's largest executive coaching firm before establishing his own business in 2005. He has worked with leaders at all levels across a wide range of industries. He brings practical applications of psychology to the workplace so that individuals and teams have less stress, more joy, and greater productivity.

Stewart Pattinson

In his fourth consecutive year judging, Stewart combines a successful career in senior contact centre management with recent service transformation expertise, to offer consulting and interim services to the industry. A seasoned customer experience professional, Stewart has over 20 years diverse experience, across multiple verticals within both public and private sectors. In recent years Stewart has been helping organisations deliver improved customer experience outcomes, through optimising and transforming their delivery of sales and services via digital and traditional voice channels.

Giles Owen

An avid lover of improving customer experience my whole career. With over 20 years experience in the redesign and transformation of group level customer engagement strategies, I have seen a myriad of changes happen in the contact centre industry. The constant change keeps the industry exciting. The constant in this ever changing environment is always the customer. Lose sight of them and you have nothing.

I love to see how different companies from diverse industry sectors tackle their own particular set of challenges to improve their offering to the customer.

Helen Gillett

Helen is an award-winning businesswoman, with wide-ranging experience in operational and strategic leadership, gained over a 25-year career.

Passionate about diversity and inclusion, especially in the realm of mental health. As a leader she believes in role modelling in an open and honest way, not least since her face hasn’t always obviously fitted the environment where she’s worked. Making Affinity for Business the kind of organisation where everyone can do their best, every day, wherever they have come from is extremely rewarding

Caroline King

Caroline is an Operations expert with over 20 years’ experience of leading large scale customer support centres, delivering solutions across the end to end customer journey. Passionate about delivering exceptional service to customers, Caroline has led a transformation programme at Ageas, which has the aim of ‘making insurance easy’ for customers, by helping and empowering people to think differently about how they support customers and as a result, revolutionizing the service they provide. Through this work, the Ageas Sales & Service team have seen significant uplifts in NPS/NES scores, as well as unprecedented improvements in employee engagement.

Chris Chipperfield

Chris is Head of Customer Service Acceleration for HSBC UK, focused on accelerating the delivery of programmes and initiatives which will deliver the best possible experience for customers. He has worked in Financial Services for nearly 20 years, having undertaken a wide range of frontline retail banking roles, as well as leading the delivery of numerous Change programmes across the UK.

Guy Masters

Guy has been recruiting into the Contact Centre industry for over 20 years. Formed in 2003, Cactus Search are a specialist Contact Centre recruitment business who recruit Executive, Management and Leadership roles in addition to running large scale volume resourcing solutions across the UK and abroad. Partnering small and large organisations alike, the team at Cactus Search have a superb record of success.

Louise Newman

I am experienced in managing and implementing change with over 20 years of working in a variety of industries, including Banking, Insurance and Manufacturing. I am responsible for introducing large scale change within the contact centre environment to benefit our internal and external customer’s journey. With a passion for enhancing the customer experience, my focus is to ensure that I understand how our customers feel and more importantly, understand what needs to be done to improve this.

Rachel Adlard

Rachel Adlard leads the Programme Management Office for the Zebra Technologies’ Professional Services Business Unit. Rachel’s team is responsible for launching new service offerings as well as defining the methodologies and tools for delivering successful customer projects across the globe.

Rachel has worked in the Technology and Telecoms Sector for the duration of her career and has held a diverse set of leadership positions including roles in product quality, software development, new product deployment, customer advocacy and programme management.

Stuart Bishop

As Director of Service at leading technology provider CDL, Stuart has extensive experience in the UK insurance and tech spaces. With a passion for developing people and building high performing teams, he believes that a customer-centric culture is central to organisational success. A Companion member of the Institute of Customer Service and former judge of the National Customer Service Awards, Stuart is excited to hear the success stories from this year’s entrants.

Sue Amies-King

Sue Amies-King is a non-executive director for Hastings Insurance Services Ltd and an independent consultant advising on business transformation, operational excellence and customer management. Sue has worked at CEO and Board level across a range of sectors spanning retail, insurance, energy and water. Sue has deep functional expertise in sales, marketing and customer operations, having led large customer facing teams in the retail and service sector for over 25 years.

Yvette Wise

Yvette comes with masses of energy, enthusiasm and over 20 years of sales and service operational experience. She has a strong background in coaching and performance management, has managed multi-functional contact centre and field based sales teams and uses this experience when designing performance improvement strategies. Yvette has delivered profitable and sustained results across industry and organisation, with clients including TSB, IBM, AXA, Marks and Spencer, TUI and Nationwide. Yvette has previously judged at the TJ Awards.