Nicola Millard heads up Customer Insight & Futures in BT’s Global Services Innovation Team.  Despite working for a technology company, Nicola isn’t a technologist and combines psychology with futurology to try and anticipate what might be lying around the corner for both customers and organisations (sadly, her crystal ball is broken).

Nicola has been at BT for 27 years. She has done a number of jobs around the BT business, including user interface design, customer service and business consulting. She was involved with a number of BT “firsts”, including the first application of intelligent systems into BT’s call centres and BT’s initial experimentation with home working.

Nicola got her PhD from Lancaster University in 2005 on motivational technologies in contact centres, published her first book in 2009 and now spends most of her time doing research, writing blogs, articles and white papers.

Nicola regularly pops up on radio and TV around the world, including appearances on ‘Woman’s Hour’, ‘Tech Tent’, ‘The Genius of Invention’ and ‘Back in Time for the Weekend’ for the BBC. She has done a TED talk about why people accept or reject technologies and is also a judge on a number of award panels, including the Institute of Customer Service, the CCMA and the Association of Business Psychology awards. In 2014, she was the recipient of the ‘Outstanding Industry Contribution’ award from the UK Contact Centre Forum.

When she’s not doing all that, Nicola travels around the world presenting at conferences and running workshops with an assortment of BT’s large multinational corporate clients including banks, government, airlines and retailers, to name but a few.