Doug Casterton

Overseeing a 25 strong department to deliver Outsourcing Vendor Management, Customer Care Technology, Workforce Management, Operational Analysis, and Learning Experience solutions for 850 FTE (95% BPO) across both B2C and B2B customers and suppliers with the following key results:

• Service Level targets and 88% Customer Satisfaction (CSat) achieved consistently across 3.5 years.
• OPEX Financial planning and Budgeting accountability. '21 to 23 reduced OPEX from 15.8m to 14m whilst customer bookings grew by 30% year on year.

Key Achievements:

• Human Contact Rate reduced from 25% to 6% through the implementation of conversational ChatBot and Help-Center Self-Service automations.
• Led a Customer Care technology transformational review, including Implementation of Zendesk omni-channel to replace legacy Freshwork/Talkdesk combination as well as multiple legacy replacements for Quality Assurance (QA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), & Learning Management System (LMS).
• Overhaul of Outsourcing Network aimed to deliver better customer experience (CX) and cost efficiency, including opening 3 new sites (Serbia, Peru, Philippines) and offboarding one BPO partner.
• Overhaul of WFM Capacity Planning & Forecasting and implementation of CCmath WFM system.
• Led a Inhouse Build and Implementation of a GenAI Agent Assist Co-Pilot solution.
• Scaled the Operational Excellence department from 6 to 25 heads.

• N26 is Europe’s first Digital Bank with over 7.5 million customers across 24 markets.
• Leading Workforce Management and Business Intelligence departments to support over 2000 employees in 6 office locations.
• Establishing operational workforce scaling budget model and process.
• Against a total scaling cost of 25 million (EUR), over 2 million (EUR) annual cost savings in workforce costs delivered in year 1, whilst also delivering consistent Service Levels in 2020.

• Network level capacity planning and scheduling for 3000 FTE, to support multi-lingual (10 languages) multi-channel customer engagement (Telephony, Email, Social Media, & Chat) for four TripAdvisor brands (TripAdvisor Core, Viator Experiences, Vacation Rentals and Bokun Booking) and eight (Boston, Vegas, London, Oxford, Manila, Pune, Porto, Sofia) worldwide sites both in-house and outsource.
• Complete rebuild of planning team and global implementation of Verint i360 WFM.
• Key non-WFM technologies used include: Cisco, Five9, InContact, Salesforce, Tableau, JIRA, Slack.

• Delivery of strategic workforce change projects to create from scratch a tactical planning and real-time department for a c2000fte contact centre workforce, spread across two internal sites and four outsource centres in both the UK and South Africa.
• Lead for an early adopter partnership with Qstory to develop and implement a technology solution that eliminates ‘”ridged” planning assumptions, and instead maximises options for productive changes by using AI and automated processes. This cutting edge implementation was the first of its kind in the UK.
• Carried out a major workforce scheduling and site strategy review, resulting in a site closure in Newmarket, a new site in South Africa and refreshed part time recruitment strategy. Resulting in the internal UK full-time workforce never needing to work evening/weekend hours, and a c.20% drop in attrition.
• Development and implementation of an employee online & smartphone application allowing contact centre colleagues to book holiday, notify absence and view their shifts whilst away from the office.

• Delivery of long range to real-time resource management for two contact centres and 1,300fte workforce
• Full overhaul of Resource Management Structure and Methodology, including a review of SLAs to better match current BGL strategy.
• Re-build of the front-office capacity planning model (excel) from ground up, to increase ease of use and accuracy.
• Introduced back-office capacity planning to harness EG workflow capture, including being part of the EG Early Adopter Scheme to bring Real-Time Capacity Planning to the back office.
• Major shift review to replace workforce shift patterns untouched for 5 years
• Implementation of Verint WFM technology to replace a legacy 10 year old WFM system.
• Implementation of Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager technology, to create innovative trigger based outbound campaigns that combine two way SMS, email, and phone-based channels to reduce inbound propensity to contact.
• Full review and management of the Business Continuity Plan for the two contact centres.

• Management of a team to deliver workforce planning services for four contact centre and c.1000 agents.
• Significant forecasting accuracy improvements and implementation of an enhanced planning governance/operational stakeholder model.
• Developed successful planning protocols to meet seasonal volume peaks and weather related surges.
• Implementation of an enhanced planning governance/operational stakeholder model to improve planning engagement.
• Upgrade of the Verint WFM system, leveraging new functionality to make planning process improvements.
• 2015 Forum Innovation award winner for Customer Outcomes and an Award Finalist for Homeworking
• 2014 Winner of a PPF Innovation award for Strategic Collaboration. Using transformational planning to remove workplace siloes, LifeStyle scheduling, Homeworking, flexible skilling and cost avoidance of £1.1 million per annum via planning process.
• 2014 Winner of Support Team of the Year at the South West Contact Centre Awards.
• Contributing to LV=’s top industry sector scores in both the 2014 & 2015 UKCSI reports, for ease of getting through over the phone.
• Britannia Rescue reported as having the Shortest waiting times in which.co.uk 2015 Best & Worst Call Centres report

• New Client acquisition and events host for Sikuli
• New Business Development for contact centre workforce planning services.

• Creation and development of a workforce planning consultancy business model
• Marketing material creation for contact centre consultancy services.

• Key member of the programme team that delivered cost savings and resource optimization strategy
• Designed and delivered work-life balanced staff schedules and set-up key workforce planning steering groups.

• Key member of the programme team that delivered over £2 million annual cost saving’s through an uplift in staff utilisation/ productivity and Resource Optimisation strategy for c9000 front-line and back-office staff across 14 sites.
• Designed and delivered work-life balanced staff schedules, principles and techniques across two locations for more than 500 staff.
• Set-up and chaired two key workforce planning steering groups with key senior stakeholders from marketing and operations to deliver high quality demand forecasting driven by projected marketing activity.
• 2010 PPF Award Finalist Winner for the work completed and delivered during the programmes commercial motor claims pilot.

• Workforce planning team management providing optimum service standards
• Managed the roll-out of schedules incorporating annualised hours and member of Aviva's strategic resource steering group.

• Workforce planning team management providing optimum service standards for c2500 Agents, across 7 UK & India sites. Managed the roll-out of schedules incorporating annualised hours to improve flexibility within the operations.
• Member of Aviva’s strategic resource steering group responsible for making staffing decisions across all 7 sites.
• Three month assignment in India to design, develop and implement an offshore workforce planning governance process.
• Member of the project team to roll-out work-force management software Verint i360.

• Workforce capacity requirement forecasting, workload forecasting, and scheduling
• Deployment to India to roll-out planning process and governance.

• Start-up recruitment agency providing customer focused resourcing for the IT and Telecom industry.

• Management of a team of consultants and personal management of high net-worth accounts.