Dr Nicola J. Millard

Customer Experience Futurologist
BT Global Services

Dr Nicola Millard is a customer experience futurologist with BT.  Despite working for a technology company, Nicola isn’t actually 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 currently broken).

Nicola has now worked for BT for 23 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 likes nothing better than to challenge conventional business thinking; from how call centres are managed to the ways in which people work. She got her PhD from Lancaster University in 2005, published her first book in 2009 and now spends most of her time doing research, writing blogs, articles and white papers. Last year she was named by ICMI as one of the top 10 most influential customer service Tweeters in the world. Nicola has also appeared on both the BBC (Radio and TV) and Channel 4 in the UK, as well as Sky News in Australia and Radio Dubai. 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 awards.

When she’s not doing all that, Nicola travels around the world presenting at conferences and running workshops with an assortment of organisations including banks, travel companies and retailers, to name but a few.