The role of the ICS president and vice-presidents is to contribute to ICS strategy formulation, engage in research and the development of authoritative knowledge about customer service, and to enhance the profile of the Institute by acting as an ambassador for the customer service profession. People are invited to become vice-presidents by the ICS chairman and chief executive.
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Sir David Henshaw
David has been Chair of NHS North West since May 2006. He was formerly chief executive of Liverpool City Council, chief executive of Liverpool Culture Company and deputy chair of the Mersey Partnership. He has also been a past president of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, an adviser to the prime minister’s Delivery Unit, a non executive director of the home secretary’s National Offender Management Board (Prisons, Probation and Youth Justice in England and Wales), an adviser to the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit and a member of the HM Treasury Public Services Productivity Panel.
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Giles Hawke
Giles has been director of sales & customer services at Carnival UK plc since May 2007. Before that he was head of sales. He’s also been commerical director at Highlife Breaks and sales director at Crystal Holidays.
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Jo Upward
Jo is director of 21C customer experience. She is also responsible for BT Wholesale’s customer satisfaction and business improvement programmes, and for the longer term service strategy for BT Wholesale, focusing on delivering a world class service for all its customers.
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Nigel Purveur
Nigel has worked in a wide range of financial services industry roles, managing user departments and IT projects. He’s also been involved in the establishment of two new organisations, MI Group and NatWest Life.
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Peter Farrer
Peter has worked in the Scottish water industry for 26 years. He’s designed water treatment works and pipelines, becoming a chartered civil engineer in 1990. Since then he’s undertaken various operational general management roles, including four years as general manager of corporate and asset planning, where he was accountable for capital maintenance planning and delivering Scottish Water’s regulatory targets. After that he was appointed to his current role on the board of Scottish Water, where he’s the customer service delivery director, accountable for operational service delivery across Scotland and customer contact and complaint resolution.
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Libby Reed
Libby is director of customer service at Cirencester College, which has approximately 2000 16–19 year old and several thousand adult students. Previously she was a director of studies and a senior lecturer at the College. She is passionate about excellence in service being central to education both in the way all customers are treated and in the skills students gain during their time at the College. She looks after a full range of service departments in College. She also co–ordinates the customer service and customer feedback strategies.
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Bob Johnston
Robert (Bob) Johnston is professor of operations management at Warwick Business School, specialising in the transformation of service organisations through the re-design and innovative delivery of service. Before moving to academia Dr Johnston held several line management and senior management posts in a number of service organisations in both the public and private sectors. He’s also deputy dean (COO) of the Business School responsible for operations and finance, and academic director of the Diploma in Service Leadership run in Singapore. He serves on the editorial boards of ten leading journals and is a member of several international advisory boards. His research interests include service transformation, service excellence, customer experience design, service recovery and complaint management and performance management. He is the co-author or editor of over 30 books and has contributed over 40 chapters to other texts. He has published around 70 articles in refereed journals, written over 100 case studies (paper and video) and three computer based simulations.
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Steve Stewart
Steve joined Swiss Re in June 2008 as an interim customer services director to Admin Re UK. He is responsible for all policy servicing and administration activities across multiple sites and geographies to around five million customers. His remit includes managing the operational business integration during acquisition and changing the company’s operating systems and cultural alignment. Prior to Joining Admin Re UK, he held various executive positions within several large enterprises such as Virgin Media, Thus plc, Next plc and Yorkshire Bank Retail Financial Services. His principal activity in these organisations was to change large scale sales and servicing functions during major business transformations.
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Paul Lewis
Paul is a regional director with the Halifax, part of the Lloyds Banking Group. He is a member of the Halifax Distribution Board and is responsible for the operational performance of the community banks in the south central area of the UK. His accountabilities include the customer experience, colleague (staff) engagement, sales & business growth, risk management and profitability. He’s also been head of customer service at Clerical Medical, operations director for Capita (L&P) and Zurich’s customer service director. Paul is a keynote speaker on behalf of the Institute at many national conferences.
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Cheryl Black
Cheryl is the customer service director at O2 UK, where she’s responsible for the strategic direction for customer contact management and leadership and operational management of 7,500 customer service staff, both in–house and outsourced within the UK and abroad. She’s also been customer service director at NTL and Scottish Water. She holds non–executive directorships at NHS24 and Southern Water Services Ltd.
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Oke Eleazu
Oke is managing director of consulting business think outside in, which helps organisations take a holistic approach to improving their customer service experience. He is an experienced customer service and operations director in the life and pensions and healthcare sectors, and has been responsible for all aspects of customer service delivery, from the formulation of strategy through to multi-site operational management of both call centres and back offices.
Most recently he was customer service and operations director for Bupa, the UK’s largest health insurance company, where he delivered a number of initiatives for people, process and technology to maintain Bupa’s reputation for first class service. Previously, Oke was customer delivery director at Prudential, the UK’s largest Life and Pensions company. In 2005, he led the Prudential to the prestigious Management Today/Unisys Service Excellence Award for Financial Services.