In our opening keynote presentation, we’re going to fortify you with the knowledge of what to do, where to start, and, most importantly, whether you’re ready to begin implementing AI into your contact centre.

After a quick overview of the latest available AI solutions, we will help you to identify the areas that AI can improve such as process optimisation, agent productivity, handling times and customer satisfaction. We’ll talk through how important it is to prepare your organisation and your Contact Centre for this journey and how to plan a tailored Roadmap. We’ll look at the importance of comprehensive data for selecting the customer query types to target at beginning, for training AI models, deploying appropriate AI bots and developing a continuous improvement approach.

In the second half of this presentation we will discuss how AI cannot live in isolation but needs to blend into your contact centre, integrate with your CRM and, above all, be a valuable companion to your Team. We’ll look at the importance of having training and awareness activities for your human agents and Management to familiarise with AI, to clarify roles and responsibilities and to foster a positive attitude to AI adoption across the board.

Every day we are overwhelmed with messages from vendors on how much more efficient we could be if only we adopted their technology. This presents an opportunity; however, we have all become desensitised to these claims as they don’t necessarily follow through to reality. What we do know is that we have jobs to do – we all need to provide outstanding customer service experiences, we know we need to reduce friction in the experiences that we are offering to our customers, and we need to do all that in a more efficient way that is equally engaging for our people.

Advances in technology mean that we can all have technology first contact centres. Low value tasks, scaling and surfacing insights, enhancing quality are all domains that we can transform. Alone these would be magical enhancements for many centres in the country. We can go further as people continue to have a place, but it is how we can support our agents to really focus on the customer, empathise with the customer, and provide a value-added service that will turn the dial in reducing customer effort, increasing satisfaction, reducing attrition, and increasing employee engagement.

For too often, and for too long the Contact Centre has been misunderstood, whether it’s with data, the impacts of projects and activities, ways of working or the important function we play in business. To set ourselves on the right path, we must have business buy-in and how to get that is exactly what this session is going to tackle.

Join us as we explore how to move beyond the fact that Contact Centres often end up owning the consequences of the issues that they face but not the solutions. We need to delve into why this is the case and how to change that mindset if the ambition of Contact Centres as a value generator is going to be achieved. Many projects often claim benefits in the Contact Centre without a clear understanding, to make these benefits grounded and real we’ll take a look at overcoming the operational load of Contact Centres in addressing these challenges.

Through sharing some of the MECCA journey of success: you’ll leave with actionable tools to gain greater buy in from stakeholders and examples of how they can grow awareness of the Contact Centre within their business immediately.

Our latest research showed that Aussies spent a whopping 107 million hours on hold in 2023, up 11% comparing to the year before. 1 in 3 customers have now lost trust that customer service can actually help them. How can this be when organisations have invested millions in improving it?

When we asked Aussies what they want, they said three simple things: Speed – have their issues resolved faster; Accessibility – getting service whenever, wherever they want; and Empathy – to talk to service agents who genuinely care.

What could you do differently to ensure your contact centre is providing customers what they want?

In this session we’ll show you how to get started with GenAI to finally give customers the service they expect, unburden employees, and unlock their potential and connect the organisation to deliver streamlined customer outcomes.

In this panel discussion, by hearing from a showcase of industry leaders with different perspectives and opinions, you’ll walk away knowing whether or not your business is best suited to office, home, hybrid and knowing when to strike the balance. The core problem is how to manage hybrid workforces to perform at an elevated level. Truth be told, we all know that what works for one doesn’t work for another, so this session is designed to help you understand the right path for you to take. To do so, this panel explore the following points:

– How do you instil discipline in yourselves as leaders, so you know precisely what you and your business want?
– What are the KPI differentiators between in-the-office Vs work-from-home?
– How do you manage diverse needs of employees, when some can demonstrably work from home, but others require a lot of support?
– In what ways do office proponents demonstrate the value of coming-in to employees?
– How do you foster a sense of connection and purpose in a virtual environment?
– Do WFH opportunities improve employee engagement and retention rates in a busy call centre working environment?

CPA has been on a journey, and one that has turned their Contact Centre into a Centre of Excellence. By moving away from traditional KPI’s and towards cultivating a culture that prioritises members service from top to bottom.

In this special fireside chat NICE’s Ben Hancock is going explore, along with CPA’s own Avryl Zangalis, how CPA Australia has upgraded its legacy contact centre solution towards a model that empowers its contact centre agents with access to real-time coaching and near-real-time insights that help drive efficiencies across it’s operations.

For the second half of our time we’ll be looking at the role of AI, what does it mean in the contact centre now? What will it mean in the future? And what has it meant for CPA? Navigating, selling, and educating on AI is a genuine challenge and we’ll be looking to how you can balance time investment, resources, and operational efficiencies to get the best out of it.

Navigating through myriad challenges, this session will address the significant increase in call and online channels alongside growing latency in physical branch transactions. Upholding world-class service levels, Newcastle Permanent have digitised processes to handle complex inquiries and rising call volumes. We’ll also look at managing risks in a fraud and scam environment, we also address scrutiny on FTE resource availability amidst increased attrition, introducing hybrid working approaches.

In technology, our focus will be showing how to deliver new enhancements like cloud migration while minimising disruptions to the agent and customer experience. We leverage technology to address latency in regional areas while maintaining world-class customer service. By funnelling all channels through our technology platform, we ensure consistent delivery to staff, irrespective of team or location. Moreover, we’re utilising technology to shift responsibilities traditionally handled in face-to-face interactions.

After touching on the methodology component of making this happen, such as building a capability uplift programme for staff to interact with customers with on their channel of choice, we’ll finish up by looking at the psychological component of transformation and how to ensure visibility, empathy and consistent leadership.

AI is already starting to shape the customer experience and the ways in which contact centres operate, but just how ready are Australian organisations to embrace the change and take full advantage of the opportunities of this emerging technology? RingCentral’s Steve Jurisic examines the impact of AI on people and process in-depth, drawing on his organisation’s experience in delivering AI-driven solutions at all stages of the customer journey.

In this presentation, you’ll be walking away having heard an in-depth case study on how to successfully upskill your work force to deal with complex and sophisticated scenarios, fortifying you for a world where much of the simple stuff will be taken up by automation. We’ll begin by outlining the technical skills that are going to be required for contact centre agents to understand and troubleshoot problems that may arise from intricate product features and the ability to troubleshoot and find solutions beyond basic customer needs. We’ll also handle how to develop the soft-skills, and what the requirements will be if outsourcing, to maintain effective communication and active listening. The need to build rapport will be especially key.

Then we’ll move on to enhancing critical thinking, what are the most utilitarian scenario-based training exercises that’ll help develop skills the quickest and find the areas that are the most likely to be unsolvable through automation. Finally, this session will touch on how to embed a culture of continuous learning and adaptability, staying up to date on product developments, access to online resources and giving autonomy in areas of each employee would like to be sophisticated in.

In this keynote, we’ll discuss company aspirations of delivering exceptional customer experiences in the context of organizational factors necessary to achieve this objective and how contact centre teams can support alignment and accomplishment by utilising information and implementing practices to surpass customer expectations successfully and consistently.

Area’s we’ll touch on are developing the right mindset within your time by understanding, through recognition and flexibility what motivates your team. How to make a difference and make it last through highlighting practices that show your contact centre teams that their inputs are valued, acted upon, and used to drive customer-focused change. Finally we’ll look at futureproofing exceptional service by showing how to create a virtuous cycle of interactions between customers, contact centres and leadership that remains highly aware, nimble, and responsive to what your customers really want.

Let’s get real about hybrid work in contact centres! Join to dive into what’s worked, what hasn’t, and where we’re headed with hybrid work.

– What did we think hybrid work would be like and how is it really going?
– How has the adaptation not necessarily worked out?
– If it has, how have you made it work?
– Are people more or less engaged and how do we keep teams motivated?
– What are the tools available to make it work if you need to, and what still needs fixing?
– Where do you see the future of hybrid going?

Customers want instant gratification. The demand to meet the rising expectations of customers within contact centres is only increasing as we make our way through this cost-of-living crisis. You always need to be a step ahead. What is amazing today, becomes standard next year and that includes the channels that I can engage on. The list of options goes well beyond calling and many young people expect to connect digitally. In this session, we’ll be delving into the questions and providing the answers on how to anticipate what the developing trends are in customer expectations and the strategies for adaptation around them.


Shaping the session will be: How do you select the channels that are most effective? How do you make these stand up in a cost efficient and effective way? How do you balance data security with the need to provide a personalised digital customer experience tailored to their own journey? What are the skills needed to ensure consistency across channels, particularly transitioning from bot to agent? Finally, we’ll explore the paradox of increased demand for self-service whilst also making sure that you’ve got the human touch covered – it’s this that’s going to set you apart from the rest!

In this presentation, you’ll be hearing from Tim Johnson from Suncorp who will be taking us for an in-depth look at how Suncorp have accelerated the application of AI in their organisation. The whole premise of AI in contact centres is to take away the inability to solve complex problems for clients and customers. You’ll hear how Suncorp have given their contact centres the ability to observe, orientate and act when dealing with issues by putting GenAI at the heart of what they do.

This session will also focus on how you can train your teams to utilise GenAI and how, through the use of an AI-driven Q&A platform, the ability to for agents to ask sophisticated questions will lead to a huge uplift in speed to competence for the team and the CX experience for the customer.