On Thursday 24 September, 240 people from 130 organisations spent the day with us at The Assembly Rooms in Finsbury for the Future of Service Conference 2026. They ran contact centres, claims teams, rail control rooms, university admissions offices and council customer services. Most came with the same question: what should we stop doing?
These are the four things we heard most often.
Demand is changing faster than plans
Several delegates said their workforce plans were built on last year's contact mix and were already out of date by spring. One energy supplier described a week in which calls about bills doubled after a price letter went out with an unclear table. Nobody had asked the contact centre to read the letter first.
The lesson was not new, but it was repeated all day: understand why customers get in touch before deciding how many people you need to answer them.
Automation helps after the call, less during it
One session on artificial intelligence stood out because the speaker, a building society's operations director, was candid about results. Generated call summaries had saved her advisers around 40 seconds a call and were rated accurate by quality reviewers nine times out of ten. A customer-facing chatbot, by contrast, had answered plenty of questions but resolved few: most customers who used it called within two days anyway.
The room agreed that the strongest early gains sit behind the scenes, in notes, routing and searching for answers, where a mistake is caught by a person before it reaches a customer.
“We kept counting how many conversations the bot handled. We should have counted how many customers never needed to call us afterwards.”
Regulation as a design brief
A panel of operations leaders from insurance, water and banking discussed how outcome-based rules have changed their work. Their view was more positive than we expected. Rules that ask firms to show customers are treated fairly gave them a reason to fix journeys they had long known were poor. Anjali Mehta has set out our own view on this in our white paper, How to make regulation work for you.
People still decide the outcome
The afternoon returned to staffing. Frontline turnover above 30% a year was common in the room, and several delegates linked it directly to work that made no sense to the people doing it. The organisations that had cut turnover had done so by removing pointless tasks and giving team leaders time to coach, not by raising pay alone.
Next year
Thank you to everyone who spoke, asked questions and stayed for the evening. The Future of Service Conference 2027 takes place on Wednesday 3 March 2027, again at The Assembly Rooms, Finsbury. Details and tickets are on the conference page.
