Customer 360 Symposium 2025
AGENDA
This carefully crafted program combines inspiring keynotes with informal activities and time to build real relationships.
Wednesday
17:00
Thursday
8:00
Breakfast
8:40
Opening Comments
8:45
International Keynote: What Does it Take to Deliver a World Class Customer Experience to over 40 Million Customers?
Gail Russell, Global Head of Customer Experience and Channels, HSBC (UK)
As a truly global brand with over 40 million customers across more than 40 markets, HSBC have a mammoth task on their hands in delivering a world class customer experience at that scale. But they’re certainly up to the challenge.
In our exclusive international Keynote, we’re joined by Gail Russell, HSBC’s global head of customer experience and channels, to share how they’re energising the whole organisation around their customer experience efforts. She’ll shed some light on their CX model, introduced in 2022, focusing on designing world class digital journeys that are globally scalable, as well as acting as a fundamental roadmap for changing how they interact with their customers by both embedding transformative CX behaviours in all their staff, while also ensuring that they are measuring what customers think each time they interact with us. We’ll hear about how they navigate the nuances that come with operating in that many markets by modernising how they think about customer research, and work tirelessly to ensure a consistent and seamless customer experience across channels.
9:20
Partner Keynote: Journey-Led Transformation: Mapping the Path to Winning Customer Experiences
Jeremy Duffin, Head of Experience Strategy, ASB Bank
Melanie Scott, Manager Voice of Customer, ASB Bank
ASB’s comprehensive NPS-based program measured a wide range of interactions and was embedded into the everyday operations of the frontline. While this approach was working well for solving inner-loop issues, it wasn’t enabling ASB to identify and address larger, strategic problems.
In 2023, ASB implemented a customer journey framework that measures over one hundred journey stages across nineteen products and services to understand key experiences that needed investment and focus. Using these insights and a new design-led framework, ASB can now identify broken journey stages, prioritise strategic investment, and map the path to winning customer experiences.
In this session, we’ll introduce ASB’s two-stage plan to improve NPS and share examples of how ASB is putting the customer at the heart of their decision-making, design, and delivery.
9:50
Coffee Break & Networking
10:20
TRACK 1
What Do Our Customer Insights Programmes Need to Look Like to Better Connect with Customers and Drive Business Performance?
Jeremy Todd, Head of Research and Insight, Air New Zealand
Over the years, customer insights functions have evolved dramatically, and instead of being seen as reactive entities that respond to research requests, they’re now proactive drivers of growth, innovation, customer strategy and business performance. And as we continue to operate in rapidly changing and challenging environments, the role of insights in guiding the business will only become more important. When the market shifts, it’s important that research programmes do as well.
In this session, we’ll hear from Jeremy Todd, the Head of Research and Insights at Air New Zealand about the work they’re doing to evolve their approach to connecting with and understanding their customers, and how we can best work to ensure those insights are driving real action in our CX efforts. We’ll also explore how we can better link those efforts with the overall vision and performance of the business, and drive future growth and innovation.
TRACK 2
How Our ‘CX Fitness’ Can Help Make or Break Our CX Efforts
Samantha Ezra, CX Centre of Excellence Lead Principal, Telstra
With thousands of customer impacting decisions being made every day, the mindset and capability of our people is essential to deliver great customer outcomes. 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 ensure customer centricity truly filters down throughout every department and person in the organisation?
In this session, we’ll hear from Sam Ezra, CX Centre of Excellent Lead Principal at Telstra and a shortlisted nominee for CX Leader of the Year 2025 at The CX Awards, as she shares how she’s taking a holistic approach to building a customer centric culture in their organisation. We’ll explore the importance of building out the right capability to support that transformation, what skillsets and mindsets we should be cultivating internally to set our CX strategies up for success, and how the congruence of our systems and process are integral for our people to adapt to that change. We delve into measurement and correlation, and how we can better link our EX and culture.
10:55
Partner Breakout: Delivering Distinctive and Personalised Experiences Through Design and Technology
Brad Meehan, Managing Director, Strativity APAC
This session will explore the paradigm shift facing organisations due to rapid technological advancement, and how organisations can effectively deliver distinctive value propositions with high degrees of personalisation and automation.
Key topic areas include:
• CVP design and testing
• e2e target experience design, delivery and measurement
• organisational capability assessment and enhancement
• identifying the most value accretive use cases for generative and agentic AI
• engaging the business for execution through a clear and compelling narrative
• building the case for investment and demonstrating tangible value capture
Brad will share thought provoking content, proprietary frameworks, and a set of global examples, to bring this content to life in a compelling and engaging way.
Partner Breakout: Align or Decline: Solving the Employee-Customer Gap with Next-Gen AI-Powered Insights
Matt Morgan, Managing Director, Lowercase
What if your biggest growth barrier isn’t your competition—but yourself?
In a world where customers demand seamless experiences, the greatest threat to organisations isn’t external competition—it’s internal misalignment. Siloed teams. Scattered data. Inconsistent decisions creating fragmented customer experiences.
Step into the future with lowercase as we unveil the AI revolution in business & customer intelligence. Experience TBX, our ground-breaking platform that exposes the critical gap between employee assumptions and customer realities.
Join lowercase, part of Innocean group, to discover how you can talk to 1,000 real customers in under a week, for the cost of 10 traditional interviews—enabling your entire business to align under real customer insights, from comms to call-centre.
Partner Breakout: Humanising Hardware – Unleashing the True Voice of Customer at Mitre 10 (NZ)
Mark Vaughan, Head of Customer Insights, Mitre10
When Mitre 10’s CMO candidly admitted “I still don’t know what our customers are telling us” despite having more customer data than ever before, it sparked a fundamental shift in how they approached the Voice of Customer (VoC) program. Mark Vaughan reveals how the leading hardware retailer evolved from drowning in metrics to delivering compelling customer narratives that drive real business change.
Mark will share Mitre 10’s journey of transforming two parallel VoC programs into a strategic asset that resonates with executives and store teams alike. Learn how they moved beyond the simplicity of NPS to develop a rich, nuanced understanding of customer experiences while maintaining the metric focus needed in a sales-driven organisation.
The presentation will demonstrate:
• Converting raw feedback into KPIs and engaging narratives that inspire action
• Building capability in sentiment and theme analysis
• Creating a culture where strategic initiatives actively demonstrate how they resolve customer pain
Discover though practical examples of how a narrative-driven approach has sped up decision-making and strengthened customer-centricity across the co-operative.
Partner Breakout: From Insights to Impact: Understanding “CX Elasticity” to Guide The Executive Agenda
Stephen McNabb, Former Head of Customer Insights, Suncorp
Organisations with a purpose of helping customers, people, shareholders, and communities will prosper if CX takes centre stage to drive company-wide initiatives and influence the executive agenda. That’s about ensuring feedback platforms are embedded, actioned and that feedback is used to inform decision making.
Suncorp’s Former Head of Customer Insights and client of InMoment, Stephen McNabb, will talk us through how customer insights can make CX a pivotal business function by building an understanding of “CX elasticity”.
Through exploring the economics of CX and the role of CX initiatives in driving positive outcomes for all stakeholders, Stephen will illuminate the critical junctures where experience improvement begins to really matter and the impact CX can have on the organisation. Join us as we discuss strategies to elevate the CX function to the CFO level, unlock additional budget, and drive smarter, more informed actions based on evolving CX metrics. Discover how reshaping CX conversations can fundamentally transform business dynamics and pave the way for sustained success.
11:25
TRACK 1
A Digitally-Enabled CX Transformation to Drive Improved Business Outcomes and Create a Deeper Connections with Customers
Kasey Gaffney, Executive Manager Digital Experience, Suncorp
The digital component of a customer’s experience is an important one, but what does digital best practice look like, and when should be leaning into digital versus non-digital to solve a problem for the customer? How do we uncover the art of what’s possible and use that to drive both greater engagement with our customers and improved business performance? And how do you successfully bring those digital elements into a more traditional legacy business?
In this session, we’ll be joined by Kasey Gaffney, Executive Manager Digital Experience at Suncorp Insurance, whose team has been shortlisted for the Best CX Transformation category at the CX Awards, as he shares how they have reinvented the full pallet of digital opportunities and solutions to drive transformational shifts in CX performance. He’ll touch on some of the key drivers of successful transformation, including a tight tracking of customer experience and digital conversion across all channels, whilst paying great attention to the digital adoption rate, emerging opportunities for digital uptake and continuous assisted channel operational optimisation.
Vlad will also share how this transformation has worked to put them in good stead as they experiment with applications of AI now and into the future, to further transform their approach to the customer experience.
TRACK 2
Insights Team or Newsroom? – A New Take on the Democratisation of Information
Alyssa Milton, Head of Insights, Data and Analytics, Officeworks
We all know that having data and insights is one thing, but the real power lies in being able to share that information with the rest of the organisation in order to drive real, customer-centric change. But how do we best do that in a way that’s engaging and will capture the essence of what we’re trying to distil? What if we rethink our roles as insights leaders, and instead think of ourselves as newsroom that creates and publishes content?
In this session, we’ll hear from one company that is doing exactly that in their mission to transform how they’re democratising insights and information across the organisation. We’ll hear how they’ve reinvented their processes as a team to focus on creating sharable content, the skills they’ve needed to hone as a department to allow them to do that, and how this approach is helping to improve customer-understanding across the business.
12:00
Partner Breakout: Navigating the Future: Harnessing the Power of The Latest Innovations to Drive Exceptional Customer Experiences
Lisa Khatri, XM Strategy and Solutions, APJ, Qualtrics
In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, organisations stand at a critical crossroad, balancing the pressures of economic uncertainty with the transformative potential of innovations like agentic AI. This breakout session invites you to explore how some of the world’s most influential icons and beloved brands who are not just adapting, but thriving by leveraging leading edge technology into their customer interactions.
Join us as we delve into innovative strategies designed to foster deeper connections with consumers, unlock new opportunities, and ultimately redefine the potential of customer relationships. Discover creative approaches that are reshaping the expectations of customer experience and learn how to position your organisation to navigate the next stage of this exciting journey. Don’t miss this opportunity to empower yourself with the strategies needed to lead in the era of intelligent, personalised engagement!
Partner Breakout: Data in Motion: A Live Journey of Personalised Digital Experiences and Revenue Growth
Greg Baxter, Global Digital Experience & Personalisation Leader, Codehouse
We talk a lot about the power of data, but how do you actually put it to work to create seamless, personalised customer journeys and drive business growth?
This interactive session takes you beyond the theory—no slides, just a live exploration of how a business can capture and leverage customer insights in real time to create seamless, frictionless experiences that increase engagement, drive up and cross-sell, and deliver measurable business impact.
See firsthand how an “experience-ecosystem” can remove friction, enhance engagement, and drive meaningful business impact. Using composable Martech, we’ll walk through a live digital journey that adapts in the moment—improving customer experiences while unlocking new revenue opportunities.
No PowerPoint, no hypotheticals—just a real-time look at data in action.
Partner Breakout: The $307,000 NPS Point, A Case Study: Converting NPS to the Bottom Line
Matthew Hann, Senior Marketing Manager, Reflections Holidays
Part of the challenge in getting a whole organisation to think customer-first is having a unified way to talk about and measure our CX efforts. Metrics such as NPS often being confusing or arbitrary to departments and functions outside of marketing and customer. But, by creating mutual meaning and significance across the organisation, we better leverage our CX efforts to drive real action and make meaningful changes that move key business metrics.
In this session, we’ll hear from Matthew Hann, Senior Marketing Manager at Reflections Holidays about the work he and his team have done to create business-wide understanding of the value of NPS in their organisation. He’ll share how he and his team have gone from having poor visibility of their customer data, to utilising their data metrics to identify and prove that an increase of one NPS point contributes an additional $307,000 to the bottom line.
Join this session as we explore the value of NPS when tied to quantifiable metrics, and how you can figure out what NPS point means for your bottom line.
12:35
Networking Lunch
13:30
Panel discussion: Navigating the Measurement Ecosystem – What Does it Take to Bridge the Gap Between Customer Experience and Business Performance?
Moderated by: Michael Dominish, Head of Customer Experience, McDonald’s
Natalie Sargeant, Head of CX Design and Capability, icare NSW
Vida Asrina Dhulst, Head of Digital Experience Design, Medibank
Matt Prowse, Customer Director, Bupa
Tom Lobban, Head of Voice of Customer & Business Analytics, Tabcorp
In the macro context of today, we’re all looking for greater efficiency and effectiveness. We need clarity around what drives customer value, and we need to be able to link our customer strategy to financial performance. But in order to do that, and to get a better understand of how we can amplify the parts that are working and the manage the parts that aren’t, we need a performance management framework that enables the business to operate in sync and to power that customer-driven growth. But one thing we’re still struggling with on that journey is measurement. And in an era of survey fatigue, measuring self-reported customer sentiment or feedback is challenging.
In this panel, we’ll explore some crucial themes around how we can bridge that gap between customer experience and business performance, and create a measurement and reporting ecosystem that spans all segments of the organisation. Is NPS fit for purpose or does it have a question mark over its head? How do we decide what to measure and how to measure it? How clear are the objectives that we’re asked to measure against? How can we better connect a suite of metrics to tell us the whole story and prove the value that CX is creating for the organisation? How do we measure, report and drive actions with our ability to use data in a smart way? How does a measure find its way onto a balance scorecard and incentivised KPIs? How do arm our teams with the commercial acumen to analyse whether a CX initiative will stack up financially?
14:00
Partner Keynote: From Hype to High-Impact: How Leading Brands Are Using GenAI to Transform CX
Alexander Mahr, Director ANZ, Coveo
This session is about what’s actually working. Join us to explore how leading companies like Dell, SAP, and Xero are harnessing the power of Generative AI to deliver hyper-personalised, intelligent experiences that drive real results. From cutting case volumes by 20% to improving search precision and accelerating self-service, you’ll see how these innovators are using relevance-augmented GenAI to meet people in the moment—with the right answer.
14:40
Wine Tasting
Golf
Workshop: Staying Energised as a High Performer
Melo Calarco, High Performance Coach
Sustaining your energy and vitality as a high performer requires some diligent routines and habits which we will explore in this workshop.
In this highly interactive workshop we will learn various tools and techniques to help you stay energised and consistently perform at your best, without compromising your wellbeing!
You will also learn ways to stay calm and focused in high-pressure environments and how to optimise your productivity and performance everyday.
Come along, have some fun and learn some valuable
tips to stay energised!
Paint & Sip
Sit back and have fun while our talented artists guide you step-by-step to create your very own masterpiece.
Session details TBC
17:00
Relax + Recharge
19:00
Pre-Dinner Drinks Reception
19:45
Gala Dinner
21:45
Close
Friday
8:00
Villa Checkout
Breakfast & Opening Comments
8:40
Partner Keynote: Insights from Global CX Research: The Data that Drives Loyalty and Shapes CX Excellence
Maurice Zicman, Vice President, Teleperformance
In today’s rapidly evolving and technology-enabled customer experience (CX) landscape, being able to understand and anticipate customer needs is crucial. By building better connections and understanding how customers engage and experience brands in a digitally evolving world, we help drive more informed, strategic decisions for our own CX efforts.
As one of the world’s largest digital business services company, operating in almost 100 countries, employing over 500,000 people, and interacting with more than 50% consumers each year, Teleperformance established the TP Business Insights Lab to formalise its global insights, analysing and converting customer data into actionable business insights that help us understand and anticipate those customer needs.
In this Keynote, Maurice Zicman, Vice President of Teleperformance, will draw on their 2024 annual TP Business Insights Data from 19 sectors and dissected by give generations of consumers, to provide powerful insights into the drivers of increasing customer engagement, reducing friction points, and identifying which channels, tools, and technologies have the highest impact on loyalty and satisfaction. He will offer data-driven perspectives to help you make informed decisions on where best to invest your CX resources, ultimately driving the highest impact for your customers.
9:15
International Keynote: Why We Should Kill NPS
Nyssa Packard, Senior Director CX, Skyscanner (UK)
Since its inception in 2003, Net Promoter Score has increasingly been showing up in earnings calls (and our inboxes!) and is now used by 2/3 of the Fortune 1000. But despite its popularity, NPS has some serious downsides that can result in misleading data, wrong decisions, and disgruntled CX teams.
In this session, we’re joined by 2024 CX Leader of the Year in the UK, Nyssa Packard, Senior Director of CX at Skyscanner, who will call out the pitfalls of NPS, how they are impacting your CX program and, more importantly, what should you use instead.
Ready to take your CX metrics to new heights? Don’t miss this session!
9:50
Partner Keynote: Revolutionising CX: Digital Transformation in Real Life
Jonas Katzellenbourg, Managing Director, Concentrix Catalyst
Brendan Daly, Chief Service Officer, Rest Superannuation
Join us for real-world case studies from leading organisations that have successfully navigated the challenges of digital transformation. Drawing from tangible examples, we will explore how businesses are transforming their customer and employee experiences by overcoming legacy systems and integrating cutting-edge digital solutions.
With a focus on actionable insights, we will demonstrate how digital transformation goes beyond technology – it’s about reshaping the way organisations engage with customers, enhance satisfaction, and foster long-term loyalty. Through these real life examples, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how forward-thinking companies are using data-driven strategies, digital channels, and human-centred design to drive innovation and deliver measurable impact.
Whether you’re just beginning your transformation journey or looking to optimise ongoing efforts, this session will provide you with practical takeaways to help you navigate your own CX challenges and drive meaningful change in your organisation.
10:20
Coffee Break & Networking
10:50
Think Tank 1: Communicating for Influence: How Do we Position CX as a Profit Centre?
Adam Novak, Head of Experience and Transformation, CBHS
We’re operating in a challenging commercial environment, so it’s more important than ever that we effectively demonstrate the impact that are our CX efforts have on the business and think creatively about how we use the resources that we have.
In this Think Tank, we’ll navigate how we, as CX leaders, can harness the commercial acumen in our teams to position CX as a profit centre rather than a cost centre in the organisation. How can we better cultivate a strong relationship with our CFO? How can finesse our presentations skills and communicate for influence? What are the right metrics to be talking about? How can we think creatively about how we use our budgets to make an even bigger impact?
Think Tank 2: What Does it Take to Orchestrate a CX Transformation, and How Do We Overcome Some of the Barriers Along the Way?
Sophie Imbert, Head of Customer Experience and Transformation, Russell Investments
We’re all on the journey of transforming our organisations to be more customer-centric, operating with customers at the heart of what we do. In fact, as customer expectations continue to evolve, that journey is never-ending.
But executing large-scale and meaningful change across an organisation can be challenging. In this Think Tank, we’ll share and discuss some of the barriers we might face along the way, and how we can work to overcome them. How should be structuring our organisation around the customer to support this vision? Who should own that CX strategy?
Think Tank 3: Enabling the Workforce of the Future
Virginia Meikle, Senior Manager Consumer Insights and Segmentation, The NRMA
Customer expectations and the technologies available to help us meet and exceed those expectations are all evolving at a rapid pace. Our journey to exceptional CX is never-ending, but enabling and empowering our teams and our workforce will help set up for success to thrive in the future.
In this Think Tank, we’ll discuss what we need to be thinking about to ensure our workforce is set up for success. How can better empower our teams with AI and digital tools to drive greater effectiveness and efficiency? How can we energise the organisation around our CX efforts and make CX real to the front line? How can we upskill our teams’ commercial acumen to drive greater awareness of business impact?
Think Tank 4: How Do We Get the Balance Right Between Short Term Performance Versus Long Term Brand Building?
Vida Asrina Dhulst, Head of Digital Experience Design, Medibank
As CX and insights leaders, it’s our role to create an experience for our customer that differentiates us from the competition. And as the economic environments in which we’re operating in continue to be a challenge, it’s important for us to focus on creating and demonstrating impact now, while also filling the top of the funnel and investing in longer term CX innovation and brand to set ourselves up for success in the future. It’s a very real challenge, so how do we go about getting that balance right? What do we need to be thinking about? How can we ensure we’re bookmarking resources and invest to support that longer term vision?
Think Tank 5: How Are You Keeping Up with the Opportunities That AI Presents?
Claire Macleod, Head of Customer Insights, Woolworths
The applications of AI and our use of it both in our day-to-day roles and from a wider organisational perspective has increased significantly in the last year. It’s evolving at an unprecedented speed, but for those of us starting our journey with how we can be utilising AI as CX leaders, keeping up with that pace of change can be overwhelming. Where do we start? What do we need to be thinking about?
In this Think Tank, we’ll come together to share and discuss the opportunities that AI presents us, how we can start to take advantage of those opportunities, and some of the compliance, legal and ethical considerations to be aware of as we experiment.
Think Tank 6: How is Customer Research Evolving?
Rebecca Alexander-Head, GM Customer Insights, Super Retail Group
It’s an interesting time for the world of insights and research. We’re in an era of survey fatigue, developments in AI are revolutionising the way in which we create and interpret insights, and our role in driving strategy, innovation and growth continues to increase. Our insights programmes and strategies need to evolve in line with evolving customer strategies and needs of the business.
In this think tank, insights leaders will come together to explore and discuss how their field is evolving, and how we can stay ahead of game. What new research methods should we be experimenting with to create richer insights? What capabilities should we be upskilling in our teams? How are you experimenting with AI to elevate your insights strategy?
11:45
TRACK 1
Is the Notion of Surprise and Delight Being Lost in a World of Operational Efficiency? – How to Supercharge Connection with Customers
Melissa Simpson, Chief Customer Officer, Feros Care
For many businesses, while improving our customer experiences is a big area of focus, improving operational efficiency to benefit the bottom line is an equally important, if not more important, priority. But is this focus on efficiency impacting our ability to truly connect with our customers? How do we ensure that that sense of happiness, emotional connection and surprise and delight isn’t lost in our focus to drive greater efficiency. And how can we enable that surprise and delight at scale?
In this presentation, we’ll hear from a CX leader who is working hard to champion the importance on truly and deeply connecting with customers. How can empower our employees with the tools and permission to surprise and delight our customers? How can we build that sense of happiness into the moments that matter in our customer journey?
TRACK 2
How Can AI Take our Customer Insights to the Next Level?
Sonny Sethi, Senior Director, Marketing Research, Zip
With so much data at our fingertips, the developments in AI have had a profound impact on our ability to analyse both our structured and unstructured data to get a better understanding of our customers’ behaviour and sentiment. But while many of us are already experimenting with applications such as text analytics and sentiment analysis, what is the next frontier of AI and how we can be using it to supercharge our use of customer insights and research?
In this session, we’ll hear from one research leader about the work they’re doing to experiment with newer applications of AI. We’ll explore the potential that synthetic data poses in our ability to better predict customers’ sentiment and help us prioritise new innovations in our customer journey, and how we can be using AI to transform our approach to survey design for richer insights. We’ll also examine the ethical considerations needed when leveraging AI to power our customer insights strategies.
12:15
Thinking Beyond Optimisation: Harnessing Design-Led Innovation to Create an Experience Strategy That Is Good for Both People and Planet
Clare Firth, Head of Design, Zurich Insurance
We’re living in the era of optimisation; it’s all about how efficient we are and can be, and how we can use tools like AI to help us do that. But, while tactical optimisation is important, we can’t lose sight of future innovation and our north star, and for Zurich, that is to become Australia’s leading design-led digital insurer.
In this session, we’re joined by Clare Firth, Head of Design at Zurich, who is on a mission to raise the bar for their customer experience by championing a design-led approach. She’ll share their design strategy to both optimise and innovate the experience they create for their customers; how they demonstrate the value that design creates beyond NPS; and how we can be leveraging design to both improve business, people, and planet outcomes.
12:45
How Can we Better Unlock the Power of our Data in Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences?
Andrew Stamatakis, General Manager – Digital & CX, Hyundai Motor Company Australia & Genesis Motors Australia
As we strive to create more consistent, connected and personalised customer journeys, we often face one big hurdle in limiting what’s possible: the structure of our data and how and where it sits across the organisation. You can’t explore scalability or experimentation with AI without solid foundations of data to build upon.
In our final Keynote, we’re joined by Andrew Stamatakis, General Manager – Digital & CX, Hyundai Motor Company Australia & Genesis Motors Australia, as he candidly shares how they’re working to converge their data points across the business, and with enormous pools of both qualitative and quantitative date, that’s no easy task. He’ll explore the incrementality of how you do that, and how we can drive data and insights into action to create more personalised customer experiences at scale.
13:15
Closing comments
Lunch & close of Symposium