Dr. Nicola J. Millard

Head of Customer Insight and Futures BT Global Services Innovation Team

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

Nicola has been with BT for over 25 years. She has done a number of jobs around the BT business, including research, user interface design, customer service & business consulting. She was involved with a number of BT "firsts", including the first application of AI into BT's call centres, BT's initial experiments with home working and developing new ways to measure customer experience.

Nicola got her PhD from Lancaster University in the UK in 2005 on motivational technologies in contact centres, & published her first book in 2009.

Nicola is an award-winning presenter, with 2 TED talks & hundreds of conference panel, chair & keynote sessions under her belt. She regularly pops up on radio and TV around the world, including appearances on 'Woman's Hour', 'Tech Tent', 'The Genius of Invention' & 'Back in Time for the Weekend' for the BBC.

She is also a judge on a number of award panels, including the Institute of Customer Service, the CCMA & 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 does research, writes blogs & white papers, as well as facilitating innovation workshops with an assortment of BT's large multinational corporate clients, including banks, travel companies & retailers, to name but a few.