TalkTalk chief operations officer (COO) Neil Smith comes from a deep engineering background in telecoms. He has been at the company for seven years, and had leading roles at Openreach and BT Global Services before that. Immediately prior to the COO role, he was operations director at TalkTalk for almost three years.
More recently, Smith has focused on the company’s customer experience capability, leading TalkTalk’s strategy to better customer experience (CX) provision by simplifying a morass of applications to enable contact centre agents to do a better and more fulfilled job.
Smith says: “Our customers want a personalised service. First of all, they don’t want to speak to us. Customers don’t want to speak to a a broadband or a Wi-Fi company, but when they do, they want to make sure that it is a quality conversation – and an honest one. We’ve built a really trustworthy customer service organisation, and whereas our service has got better over the past few years, we’ve been held back by the technology.”
He says the company has seen a need to step up investment in its contact centres. “When I took on this role in 2023, it was clear that we were inhibited by some of our systems,” he says, stating that TalkTalk had 12 applications in its contact centres. “[These were] all separate, not very well integrated and fragmented. And then we had processes working on top of those to make them work, which was really time consuming and error prone. It was a bird’s nest type of mess.”
To solve that problem of tool complexity – a common one, as this research from InformaTechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group confirms – but also to boost the potential of the provider’s contact centre agents, TalkTalk turned to CX software and systems supplier Nice, and its AI-powered CXone Mpower system. It signed the contract with the supplier in July 2024, and had engaged a few months prior to that. Smith says he had been impressed by what he had seen at Nice’s Interactions customer event in 2024.
“We did the usual RFP approach, assessing around six vendors, but I felt that with Nice, the whole solution was exactly what I wanted,” he adds. “It wasn’t just the technology that many others would provide, [it also gave] me that cultural shift to put the agents first.
“For us, it is about delivering not just technology but also a coaching culture in our contact centres. CXone gives us basic contact centre functionality, but with a knowledge based system that is integrated with a Copilot functionality that helps and prompts the agent to offer a suggested course of action for the customer they’re speaking to or chatting with or texting.”
Beyond that, the system can give a team leader a live analysis on how a particular agent is doing, indicating how they might need help with skills such as active listening, empathy or resolution, says Smith.
“For us, it is about delivering not just technology but also a coaching culture in our contact centres”
Neil Smith, TalkTalk
It was not as though team leaders at TalkTalk had not been coaching team members, he adds, but it had been a heavy tariff of labour, “whereas now, with CXone, they’ll get a sentiment analysis for every contact, broken down to 10 or so behaviours”.
TalkTalk has more than 2,000 contact centre workers up and down the UK, including Manchester, as well as in South Africa, India and the Philippines. The implementation partner is Navixus, part of the TechMahindra group.
“They know our business, they already support one of our contact centres, and so they were ideal for helping to quickly solve problems and implement the solution,” says Smith. “Speed was of the essence. I wanted to off-board those 12 applications and have [the system] integrated.”
Smith sees TalkTalk’s customer experience capability as strategic and as one that has board-level visibility, saying: “In the past, TalkTalk was very much focused on giving [price] value to our customers and making sure that we could offer a proposition that was at that value end.
“We’ve shifted as an organisation now for CX to be more of priority than value, and putting them hand in hand. We should be offering value, customer service value, with brilliant customer service. And if we can get that right, then we will nail it.”
