Impact case study database

Building on research findings about effective communication practice, Stokoe and colleagues developed three impact pathways:

• The first pathway was the ‘Conversation Analytic Role-play Method’ ( CARM), a communication training method developed at Loughborough University with ESRC funding. CARM takes research findings about effective communication practice and presents anonymized audio extracts in real time to training participants. CARM guides people through actual instances of professional practice to see what works. CARM won a prestigious Wired Innovation Fellowship in 2015, enabling international visibility [S1].

• The second pathway, which enhanced the international visibility of CARM, comprised numerous prestigious invitations to science communication events, starting with an episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific dedicated to Prof Stokoe’s research and biography (2013) which led, in turn, to an invited TED talk in 2014 (currently 870K views), three lectures at The Royal Institution between 2015-16 (currently 50K views) and other public science events around the world (e.g., at Google, Microsoft, New Scientist) .

• The third pathway was direct integration of research insights into organizations’ written communications via CARM consultancy work.

The international visibility of Loughborough’s conversation analytic research changed public understanding of communication sufficiently to create demand for CARM’s evidence-based training. As a result, CARM generated enough income between 2014-2020 to employ four PDRAs for between three months to five years each, and Prof Stokoe was invited to join the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) behavioural science sub-group, as well as Independent SAGE’s behaviour group . Taken together, the three pathways led to the following impacts.

1. Improved communication outcomes in suicide crisis negotiation

Research findings [R3, R4] led to changes to the language used by crisis negotiators, “challenging the training status quo” and improving communication with people in suicidal crisis [S2]. In 2015, Commander Duncan Jarrett OBE and Superintendent Chula Rupasinha from the Hostage and Crisis Negotiation Unit of the Metropolitan Police invited Stokoe and colleagues to work with them. The Head of UK National Training “took the rare step of releasing negotiation tapes” [S5] and we worked with their training lead to co-produce the training. In March 2017, we trained every single Metropolitan Police negotiator at their UK National Hostage course, as well as visiting attendees from regional police forces, international guests from the FBI, and from other areas of policing (e.g., Operational Communications in Policing). Following the training, negotiators reported better outcomes “as a direct result of the language used”, and noted that the training

“has had a specific impact on our negotiations from the opening gambit and throughout the dialogue … and help[ed] bring incidents to a swift conclusion” [S2].

On hearing about the work with the Metropolitan Police, in 2018 the Head of Border Policing Command at the Organised Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit invited Stokoe and colleagues to roll-out the training to every Police Scotland negotiator. Following the training in 2019, the heads of training and operations reported that “the research is fully embedded within negotiator training courses and materials.” [S2]. The reach of the training has since extended beyond negotiators to every new officer in Police Scotland via the hostage and crisis unit’s input into tactical communication [S2].

2. Improved engagement of potential clients of dispute resolution services

Our research enabled dispute resolution services – that provide alternatives to expensive court-based interventions – to better engage potential clients to participate in them. People in disputes often resist alternative dispute resolution services and overcoming this resistance is thus crucial to the success of dispute resolution [R1, R3]. Starting with mediation services, Stokoe and colleagues changed the way practitioners in mediation services dealt with initial telephone inquiries from callers to convert them into clients. By training over 4000 mediators (2014-2018) from community, family and other types of mediation , across 200 services in UK, USA and Australia, mediators adopted practices that were more likely to get clients to agree to become clients [S3]. For example, from the Board of the UK College of Mediators, Laura Kirkpatrick and Julie Farrell (who also founded in 2016 their own mediation service, Solution Talk) reported that CARM training enabled them to

“make changes when we pick up the phone [and] get people in conflict and stress to the table to negotiate or mediate” [S3].

The Chair of the UK College of Mediators and a CEO of Relate, the national marriage guidance organization (which also provides mediation), said that CARM is “acknowledged widely in the mediation world as ground-breaking” [S3] and, because many mediators work across numerous organizations, including government task forces, the reach of this impact was extended via a UK Government campaign in 2014 to engage people in family mediation. The then Minister of Justice, Simon Hughes MP, invited Stokoe to join the Family Mediation Task Force to change how mediation is promoted and write the text for a national video, poster, and leaflet campaign [S4]. Deputy Director of Family Justice, John Hall, reported that as a “direct consequence” of Stokoe’s input” [R1, R3], the Ministry of Justice redesigned their “promotional video and related leaflets/posters” [S4]. The Ministry of Justice described this campaign as having “the best return on investment, reaching large volumes of people over the duration of the campaign.” The reach of the work was also extended internationally, as the Superior Court for Washington DC, USA (which serves 5.3M citizens), who had previously invited Stokoe to deliver CARM training, adopted the campaign using Stokoe’s text, creating versions for community and family mediation in English and Spanish [S4].

Furthermore, because some mediators also work with or for Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS),** Stokoe was invited to run eight regional CARM training events between 2014-2018 and was then contracted to train every senior advisor and all internal trainers across the organization (2019-2020) – 250 conciliators across England, Wales, and Scotland [S5]. The aim was to support conciliators who “have a tough time trying to persuade people that conciliation is a worthwhile process … we tend to find that conciliators have to repeat conversations which adds to time on the phone. And because government funding is becoming more limited over time, we must work as efficiently as possible” [S5]. ACAS’s Chief Operations Officer, working with a conciliation manager who organized all the training sessions, reported that, following the training, conciliators changed the language they used to describe services, and changed the timing of their explanations of services in initial conversations with clients, producing more “efficient and seamless” calls [S5].

3. Improved patient satisfaction with telephone inquiries to UK GP receptions

Even though all UK GP surgeries experience similar resourcing challenges, they vary greatly with regards to reported patient satisfaction. In 2015, Dr Graham Todd, responsible for Quality Improvement Science at Health Education England, commissioned Stokoe and colleagues to conduct research to identify best practice in patient calls to GP practices. Dr Todd supplied recordings of patient calls to four surgeries. Dr Todd reported that

“findings showed that very simple phrases and words are associated with increased patient satisfaction on the GP Patient Survey. As a practice, how our receptionists speak to patients has changed significantly.” [S6].

Based on research findings [R6] about how to meet the requests made in incoming calls to surgeries, eight CARM events took place across England, training ~80 receptionists from ~20 practices and therefore reaching ~200,000 patients. Following the training in 2017, indicators from the quarterly GP National Survey on key aspects of GP receptionist provision improved. The proportion of patients describing the “experience of booking an appointment” as ‘good’ increased from 76% to 95%, compared to no change across the UK during the same period. And the proportion of patients reporting that the “GP receptionist was helpful” increased from 66% to 77% in those surgeries trained, while the national picture remained constant [S6].

4. Improved client experience and economic success of digital technology products and services in global organizations

Our research on client engagement [R1, R5] was sought in 2018-19 by Typeform, a global ‘software as a service’ company (and iconic Silicon Valley start-up) with three million subscribers who use Typeform’s templates to create online surveys. Typeform wanted to increase the ‘conversationality’ of their product because “conversational forms are better than regular forms” and “because conversation creates a better user experience and thereby more results” [S8]. Typeform funded Stokoe to work with them for four months to integrate research findings about effective question design [R1-R6] into the product to “address business metrics such as completion rates and new customer registrations” [S7]. As a result of redesigning the questions in Typeform’s survey templates, and creating assets for marketing, design, machine learning, and customer experience teams [S7] their CEO reported in 2019 that “customers are now enabled to increase the effectiveness of the forms in terms of completion rate” [S7]. The CEO further reported that

“the immediate beneficiary is Typeform itself, but the end user is the real beneficiary – our customers who are actually now creating typeforms with different templates and different guidance. Their forms are a critical part of their business process, we want to maximize their changes for as good a completion rate as possible, so that they can convert a potential new lead into a customer and then into revenue” [S7].

The same underpinning research was sought by *Toshiba Tec Imaging Systems who identified the need for research-based rather than anecdotally driven communication training [S8]. Many businesses ‘cold call’ other businesses “as a large part of the way the technology industry generates sales” but these achieve “low percentage appointment rates” (National Sales Director, Toshiba Tec) [S8]. Toshiba commissioned us to identify the communication practices that led to more sales appointments [R3, R5]. Research findings underpinned subsequent CARM training for its authorised Business Partners across the UK and Ireland in 2016-17. Toshiba’s National Sales Director reported that, because of the training, salespersons were enabled to

“reduce call time, making calls more successful, but also enabled businesses to make more calls [and] our dealers report up to a 30% increase in appointment-making” [S8].

One of Toshiba’s sales franchises who attended the training, Print Copy Scan, reported that appointments “we have made over the phone have doubled, and as a result, sales have increased” [S8]. Toshiba reported economic benefit having “seen a 100% increase in unit sales over the last five years and Liz and her team have been a major contributor to that success” [S8].