Get Out of Wrap - Contact Centre Chat

For this episode of Get Out of Wrap I sat down with ex - Premier League Footballer Matt Jarvis.

A career that took in Gillingham, Wolves, West Ham, Norwich and an England cap is amazing and so are the stories and insights Matt shares.

Now Matt is a mentor, pundit, speaker, business partner and through it all, as you will hear, is a lovely human with a passion to help others.

Through working with Betr Outsourcing Matt is seeing our industry from the inside and meeting & working with the teams at Betr has been seeing how much cross-over there is from elite sport and leadership, sales and contact centres.

This is one of those episodes that will stick with me a long time and I hope you enjoy it !

Susan Terry, SVP and Head of Product at Alvaria, joins Get Out of Wrap for a wide-ranging conversation about the death of "outbound" and the rise of proactive customer outreach. 

Drawing on decades spent leading product transformation across the graphic arts, advertising, and contact center industries, Susan explains why she believes the language we use — outbound vs. outreach — reveals a deeper shift in how businesses should think about customer experience.

She unpacks how Alvaria was built from the merger of legacy platforms Noble and Aspect, why enterprise-scale compliance remains its biggest differentiator (the company powers outreach for 50–60% of the world's largest banks), and how its new "infrastructure as a service" model — already live with partners Zoom and Parloa — lets any business plug in compliant, orchestrated outreach without needing a traditional contact center at all.

The conversation also dives into the decentralization of the contact center, why premise-based systems aren't going anywhere despite the cloud narrative, and how agentic AI is reshaping outbound faster than almost any other part of CX — replacing IVRs, learning from human-in-the-loop supervisors, and opening up use cases most companies haven't even considered yet.

If you've ever wondered why your business is still reacting to customers instead of reaching them first, this episode will change how you think about outreach for good.

• 0:00 – Welcome & Introducing Susan Terry
• 1:38 – Susan's Career Journey Across Industries
• 5:49 – Joining Alvaria: Uniting Noble and Aspect
• 8:42 – Who Is Transformation Really For?
• 11:03 – From Outbound to Proactive Outreach
• 13:40 – Outreach as Infrastructure: Partnering with Zoom and Parloa
• 26:42 – Compliance as a Competitive Advantage in Financial Services
• 29:29 – Helping Customers Find Their Proactive Use Cases
• 36:20 – Legacy Tech Stacks, Cloud, and the Case for Premise
• 42:26 – Agentic AI and the Future of Outreach

•44:45 – Closing Thoughts

Here's a Spotify description for this episode:

#268 - What if leadership didn't need a leader? - Danny Wareham

What if the best leaders are the ones who know how to get out of the way? In this episode, Martin sits down with psychologist, coach, and author Danny Wareham to unpack his book Constellation and the radical idea behind it: that culture — not a single person — can carry the weight of leadership.

Danny shares the research behind the book, born out of studying agile project teams and scrum masters, and reveals surprising findings about how trust, experience, and organizational size shape whether a team can truly self-organize. The conversation takes a fascinating detour into the military, exploring why service personnel can trust a total stranger within a single day — and why civilian workplaces take years to build the same thing.

They also dig into why intentional culture matters more than ever, from climate change to the erosion of institutional checks and balances, and why charismatic, single-leader models often struggle to solve modern, cross-border problems.

Plus: the surreal experience of seeing your own book on a shelf next to Simon Sinek, why traditional publishing wasn't the right fit for Danny, and how Constellation has landed him as a finalist for Business Book of the Year.

A must-listen for anyone rethinking what leadership really looks like in 2026 and beyond..

Martin welcomes back "the Bearded Wonder Man" himself, James Revell, for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, team culture, and the future of customer experience. Drawing on years of judging national and European contact centre awards, James shares what separates truly great teams from the merely good — authenticity, storytelling, and leaders who empower rather than dominate.

The conversation turns to the evolving leadership journey: from early missteps navigating strategy and communication, to mastering the "dark arts" of stakeholder politics and budgets across different cultures. James and Martin also dig into one of the industry's biggest questions right now — how AI and automation are reshaping the contact centre, the risk of losing entry-level talent pipelines, and why customer experience must remain the driver behind every technology decision, not cost alone.

Packed with hard-won insight from a leader who's built and led award-winning teams, this episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating team building, leadership, and the future of CX in an AI-driven world.

Martin takes a closer look at the near future of the contact centre — not the vague "AI will replace everyone" headlines, but a practical, role-by-role breakdown of how the industry might really change over the next decade.

After attending the National Contact Centre Awards in London, Martin reflects on how far the industry has come — and where it's heading. He walks through what a future 500-seat operation could look like, and what that means for every team: agents, team leaders, QA, training, WFM, and HR.

In this episode:

• Why transactional contacts will largely disappear — and what that leaves for human agents
• How the team leader role becomes more important, not less
• The evolution of QA from auditors to insight specialists
• Why training will shift towards emotional intelligence, resilience, and critical thinking
• The real risk of removing humans too aggressively — and why customers will punish it
• Why demand for exceptional team leaders will be higher than ever by 2035

Whether you're deep into AI adoption or still running on an Excel Frankenstack, this one's for you.

Share your thoughts — how do you see the contact centre changing?

Martin Teasdale is joined again by Danny Wardell of Alvaria for Part 2 of their conversation. 

Fresh from a great response to Episode 1, they dive deeper into the realities of contact centre life, from the agent experience to the evolution (or lack of it) of customer experience over the last 20 years. 

Danny shares candid takes on CCaaS, proactive outbound, AI, and why buying brand over capability has held the industry back.

A genuinely honest conversation from two people who've lived it from the agent's seat upwards.

Chapters:

0:20 – Being an Agent

3:59 – Has the Job Got Harder?

8:22 – Has Customer Experience Improved?

16:32 – Proactive Outbound

19:22 – The BA Story

28:20 – Service vs. Cost

29:43 – AI & The Future of Contact Centers

41:23 – Wrapping Up

ContactCentre #CustomerExperience #CX #Podcast #Outbound #AI #CCaaS #Alvaria #GetOutOfWrap

Feeling stuck in a cycle of firefighting, endless meetings, and inbox management — and wondering why nothing ever seems to truly improve? This episode might be exactly what you need.

Martin is joined by Phil Anderson and Chris Rainsforth from The Forum — an organisation dedicated to raising standards in customer operations — for a practical and thought-provoking session on how to break free from reactive working and build smarter decision systems.

Together they explore:

• The Failure Loop — why great intentions so often lead to the same problems repeating
• Resetting before redefining — why you need to stop old habits before you can build new ones
• The Eisenhower Matrix — a simple but powerful tool for sorting urgent from important
• The 1-3-5 Rule — how to structure your day around what actually matters
• Decision architecture — moving from reacting to orchestrating
• The Strategy Pyramid — aligning daily priorities to organisational objectives

Whether you're a team leader, analyst, or operations professional, this session is packed with practical frameworks you can start using immediately — no matter what's going on around you.

Plus, stick around to the end to hear about The Forum's Virtual Learning Academy, now available exclusively to the Team Leader community.

Get Out of Wrap | Episode #263 – Danny Wardell, VP EMEA GTM at Alvaria CX

From filing in a damp cellar at a solicitor's office to VP at one of the contact center industry's most recognised brands, Danny Wardell's journey is anything but ordinary.

In this episode, Martin sits down with Danny to explore the grit, setbacks, and hard-won lessons behind a career built from a working-class background in West Yorkshire. They cover early jobs that shaped his relentless work ethic, the rejection that lit a fire under him, what it really costs to succeed in sales, and why returning to carry a bag after a decade of leadership was the best move he ever made.

They also get into the AI hype problem facing the contact center industry, why proactive outbound is the most underused superpower in CX, and the human moments where no technology should ever replace a person.

Honest, grounded, and genuinely entertaining and this is part one of two.

In this episode I am joined once again by the brilliant Lee Houghton for a conversation that gets to the heart of what makes a team a real team, and what gets in the way.

They explore why "team" is consistently the number one thing people say brings them happiness at work, the difference between a group that works and one that truly performs, and why artificial harmony might be the biggest silent killer of team culture.

From belonging and connection to healthy conflict, watermelon reporting, and the danger of mistaking agreement for high performance, this episode is packed with honest reflections, practical insights, and more than a few great stories.

Lee also introduces his BOSS framework — Behaviours Observed Set Standards — and why, as leaders, everything we do (and don't do) is setting the standard for those around us.

If you lead a team, are part of one, or simply care about creating environments where people can do their best work, this one's for you.

In this episode I sat down with Jamie Corbett, Head of Operations at Advantis Credit, for a conversation that's as honest as it is inspiring. 

Jamie's story starts on the building sites, a plumber by trade who accidentally stumbled into a contact centre when he needed holiday money and ends (for now) at the top of operations. 

But it's the messy, human middle that makes this episode unmissable.

Jamie opens up about bombing on the phones, the hippie colleague who changed his entire outlook with a Dale Carnegie quote, and the Excel V-lookup that quietly launched his career. 

He talks about what it really means to build psychological safety for a team, why he created a secret project called "Project Artemis” to solve a wrap time problem, and the brutal setback that turned out to be the making of him.

If you've ever questioned whether you're ready for the next step, taken a leap that didn't land, or wondered what separates good leaders from great ones, this one's for you.

Topics covered: contact centre culture, emotional intelligence, early leadership lessons, dealing with failure, self-development, and why the best leadership lesson is learning it's never about you.

• From Plumber to Contact Centre
• Learning the Hard Way on the Phones
• The Vinny Effect: Lessons That Last
• Stepping Into Leadership
• Building the Bad Apple Team
• Creating Psychological Safety
• The Setback That Changed Everything

• Jamie 2.0: From Me to We