Ashton Media
Marketing & Customer Experience Hub

What can I look forward to at the Customer 360 Symposium 2015 #CS360?

Customer experience and engagement is the new battleground as brands strive to differentiate themselves from their competitors, create loyalty and ultimately increase profits.

Whether they like it or not, businesses understand that the power has firmly shifted to the customer. The customer now decides how, when and where they engage with their chosen brands and their tolerance for poor customer experience is minimal.

This is what the Customer 360 symposium is all about – coming together with the sharpest minds in the industry to learn how to Reach, Engage and Delight your most profitable customers.

Exchange of ideas

What to look forward to …

There are many things I am looking forward to at the Customer 360 Symposium 2015 #CS360. Professionally I am eager to hear from Tom McCann for his take on CX maturity. As a shopper of both Net a Porter and the Outnet, I’m interested to hear from the horses mouth how the experience I relish comes to being.

As Head of CX at Medibank, I’m of course interested in hearing from Rhod at NIB. While technically we are competitors we are also engaged in a journey that will bring a more transparent customer experience to Health Insurance.

The battle for customer ownership is over

This brings me to the thing that more than anything I look forward to at the Symposium – collaboration. The CX profession is at a crossroads. For the past few years there has been a silent but good-natured ‘battle’ going on for ownership of the customer between marketing, design, strategy and data. We have spent far too long building beautiful artefacts and strategies.

We are now at a point where everybody owns the customer and the breakthroughs are coming from organisations like 02 in the UK, Virgin, even our own Qantas. This is shaping horizontal approaches to CX where the blend of expertise across the country makes it possible to analyse not just transactions but root causes. Where NPS is a leading and lagging lens as well as a sales tool.

We have stopped competing and started complementing

We’re seeing a rapid maturing of the industry as we build cross-functional processes, redesign product and service functions. We have stopped competing and started complementing. As a result we are becoming less consistently inconsistent. One of the best ways to better the horizontal working practice is to get better at doing it ourselves.

At the Symposium we will spend 2-3 days with leading thinkers across the CX industry. Not only will be sharing stories of success, but stories of failure and challenge. We will be practising the very skills we need to bring back to our organisations if we are to put Australia firmly on the CX innovation map. I personally want to go away with a sense of clarity, a renewed drive for change and more than a small pinch of inspiration.

The agenda

For session times refer to the agenda page.

Make sure you follow @AshtonMediaOZ on Twitter and join the other 3,000 Ashton Media fans to follow the event. The hashtag on the day is #CS360 so you can use this for tweeting at the event or you can follow what is happening if you can’t be there.

About Harriet Wakelam - Head of Customer Experience, Medibank
Harriet is currently Head of CX at Medibank. She has just returned from a year in London setting up a CX design practice for a large consultancy. She is driven by a vision of a fairer world that sustains people and business. She has worked as an experience designer with NAB, Australia Post, European and UK banks, and supports a range of innovative start-ups from Singapore to Russia.