Putting the customer at the forefront is an important crux of business strategy in the battle for market share, and this couldn’t be more true for Kmart. In this session, we’ll be joined by Tom Bradley, GM of CX who will share Kmart’s recent CX transformation journey. He’ll share how quantifying the financial impact of CX with senior leadership was an important initial step, along with developing a clear functional vision that helped combine disparate skillsets across research, analytics, service delivery and design.

He’ll then touch on how the team combine these skills to identify, socialise, and align on the priority elements of Kmart’s customer experience to focus on, and share some interesting discoveries from projects along the way. He’ll also touch on how the teams is fostering a customer culture more broadly at Kmart, from weekly reporting of key customer metrics to a rich customer immersion programme that allows head office team members to gain firsthand customer insights to take back to their roles.

We all know being customer-centric is the north star of differentiating ourselves in a competitive market, and lots of businesses SAY that they’re customer first, but what does it take to walk the walk?

In this panel discussion, we’ll hear from some of the region’s very best customer experience leaders as they share the work they’ve done to drive a customer-lens throughout the business, ensuring that customer-centricity is lived and breathed by everyone in the organisation, and used in strategic decision making across every department and function.

But it’s not just down to the leaders to drive this transformation and mindset; everyone in the business has a role to play. So, our panellists will also discuss some of the grassroots efforts in their organisation, and how every single person can make meaningful changes as part of their wider customer-centricity efforts.

It’s important to meet our customers’ needs where and when they want to interact with us, whether that’s live chat, social media, the contact centre or in-store. But with more channels, come more siloes, making it more difficult to get that holistic view of the customer and power a more seamless and proactive customer experience.

In this session, we’ll be joined by a CX leader working to create a more personalised and seamless experience for customers across channels. We’ll hear how they’re leveraging their customer feedback and data across channels to create a much more proactive approach, from identifying and tailoring the experience for high value customers, pre-empting potential customer issues and getting ahead of the resolution, and the downstream impact of eliminating cost by proactively addressing CX issues upfront.

The importance that businesses place on the customer experience has grown enormously over the past few years, but one thing remains a big challenge: Demonstrating ROI from our CX efforts, and linking our CX strategy to tangible improvements in business performance.

We all know that the experience we deliver has an enormous impact, but how do we better prove it, especially as we face greater commercial pressures?

In this Think Tank, we’ll discuss the evolving measures of success in CX, layering those measures into financial metrics, and moving the needle on NPS and beyond.

In our quest to drive greater effectiveness and efficiency internally while also amplifying the experience for our customers, developments in AI will have enormous potential in changing the way we operate as both a CX team and an organisation. But most of us are still in our infancy with trialing the use of AI, and while the potential is enormous, there are a lot of challenges for us overcome on the journey such as cost of entry and protecting our data.

In this Think Tank, we’ll have the opportunity to share and discuss how we’re experimenting with AI in our CX teams, some of the challenges faced and how we’re working to overcome them, and where the real value and opportunities lie for us as CX leaders.

Customers expect a lot more from the brands they interact with, with hyper-personalised experiences being one of those expectations. But with data siloes sat across channels, challenges in shifting away from big personas and toward micro-segments, and with increased restrictions in how we contact our customers and protect their data, it’s not an easy task.

In this Think Tank, join your peers for an in-depth discussion as we navigate some of those barriers to delivering a more personalised experience for our customers, and how we can best align the organisation and employees around the customer to best meet our customers’ needs when and how they need it.

In today’s economic climate, customers and businesses alike are feeling the pinch. With tightening budgets and recruitment freezes, coupled with growing requests to deliver more for our customers, it’s tricky to find the balance between responding to the now, versus planning for the future.

In this Think Tank, you’ll have the opportunity to share and discuss how you’re navigating that balancing act, ensuring we’re set up for success to deal with the now, while also going after research scopes that are more future-facing and innovation focussed.

We’ll discuss how we can better communicate cross-functionally and align our approach to insights with the long-term strategic vision of the organisation, and explore the role of adding value versus cost-cutting in our quest to differentiate against the competition.

As the privacy act continues to evolve, and as consumers become more aware of the communications they receive and how their data is being used and stored by the businesses they interact with, a huge area of focus for many is enhancing data security and privacy, and ensuring that we’re best protecting customers’ personal information. But, is this increased security impeding our ability to do research effectively.

In this session, we’ll hear from a leading privacy expert who can share the latest recommendations and regulations in the privacy act that we need to be aware of. We’ll then open up the discussion to explore the impact of tightening rules and restrictions with regard to data protection, the nuances of what this means for our ability to deliver insights to the business and measure our CX efforts, and what we can do to overcome some of those barriers.

There are lots of big contributors in driving a customer-centric transformation, from processes, data, tech and tools, and getting each of them right come with their own challenges. But many of us are grappling with one of the hardest contributors to get right: our people, culture and capability. It’s easier to empower our front-line teams to be customer-centric in their thinking, but what about finance and operations teams? How can we create a customer-centric culture that truly filters down throughout every department and person in the organisation?

In this session, we’ll hear from a CX leader flying the flag for creating and instilling a CX culture in their organisation. We’ll also explore the importance of building out the right capability to support that transformation, what the skillsets and mindsets we should be cultivating internally to set our CX strategies up for success in the years to come, and ensuring we build out a culture that supports our people adapt to that change.