Moving from a collection of individual touchpoints to a seamless omnichannel experience takes far more than new technology; it demands cultural alignment, empowered teams, and a mindset shift across the organisation.

In this International case study, you’ll step inside a real-world transformation journey that reimagined customer and employee experience across channels, reshaped ways of working, and repositioned insights as a strategic driver.

Hear how the team navigated complex stakeholder dynamics, balanced organisational expectations, and supported their own people through change. Discover why asking “what?” rather than “why?” became a powerful catalyst for collaboration, trust-building, and clearer communication.

This session will uncover the steps, missteps, and lessons learned on the path to building an integrated, high-performing omnichannel CX framework; one that delivers consistently for customers and creates the conditions for teams to thrive.

Many healthcare companies have patient data in different places (silos), making it hard to see the full journey. In this session you will hear briefly from Medallia about what has been happening and then Medallia will chat with Healius about their focus on patient experience. We will share how Healius connects all these points.

You will learn:
How to listen: How Healius collects feedback from every channel (online, clinics, and phone).
How to act: How to give this information to the right teams in real-time so they can improve the service immediately.
The results: How a better patient experience leads to better business results.

As customer expectations evolve and the volume of feedback, data sources, and internal stakeholders grows, insights and CX teams are being called to step into a new role, one that goes far beyond reporting.

Strategic listening is emerging as a core organisational capability: the ability to synthesise signals across channels, interpret nuance, connect disparate insights, and guide the business towards clearer, more confident decisions.

This presentation explores how one organisation is reframing the listening function to meet these demands. With customer signals coming from research, operations, complaints, social sentiment, frontline teams and more, the challenge is no longer access to data, but creating a coherent, reliable, and meaningful narrative the business can act on.

We’ll unpack how to leverage strategic listening to sharpen decision-making, deepen customer connection and elevate the impact of CX and insights across the organisation.

RAC is transforming how they listen, learn, and act on member feedback by shifting toward a more dynamic, member-led insight model.

In this session, the presenter will showcase how they are using AI-driven enrichment and analysis to unlock the untapped value within unstructured complaints records and call transcripts. The session will demonstrate how AI is deepening RAC’s understanding of complaint drivers, identifying risk signals, and helping quantify the true incidence and impact of key member pain points through the integration of insights with their traditional VoM program. It will also highlight how this new approach is strengthening the complaints handling teams’ performance by surfacing clearer, data-driven coaching opportunities.

Attendees will gain a practical, real-world case study of how AI can extract meaningful insight from previously untapped data sources – elevating voice-of-customer programs and accelerating action across the organisation.

As AI rapidly becomes mainstream, many CX leaders feel pressure to “do something with AI” – often before their data, processes, or problem definitions are ready. The result is a wave of impressive demos, auto-summaries labelled as “transformational AI,” and experimental agents layered onto broken customer journeys that never scale or deliver consistent outcomes.

In this session, we’ll explore why successful AI adoption across customer experience is less about chasing the latest language model and more about orchestration, process design, and organisational readiness.

We’ll examine the two paths emerging across the industry: organisations with a clear AI strategy grounded in real operational challenges across the customer lifecycle, and those assuming AI alone can fix complexity without redesigning the underlying processes.

Using real-world examples, we’ll explore:
• Why unstructured customer data and unclear problem statements derail AI initiatives
• The difference between automation, agentic AI, and true CX process transformation
• How commoditised LLMs are shifting value away from models and toward orchestration platforms
• Why probabilistic AI outcomes introduce risk in regulated, enterprise-scale environments
• What leading organisations are doing differently to achieve consistency, trust, and measurable ROI across customer journeys

This session offers a practical, vendor-neutral perspective designed to help CX leaders cut through the hype, ask better questions of their teams and vendors, and make more informed decisions about where AI truly belongs in modern customer experience.

As AI-driven tools, dashboards, and DIY research platforms proliferate across organisations, customer insights have never been more accessible, or more at risk. In an era where anyone can generate a persona, run sentiment analysis, or produce “synthetic” sample data at the click of a button, how do CX and insights leaders safeguard the discipline’s rigour, context, and craft?

This candid fireside chat explores the growing friction between democratising insights for speed and empowerment, and maintaining the guardrails that protect data integrity, research fundamentals, and customer truth. We’ll explore how to lean into democratisation to accelerate decision-making; how to create frameworks where innovations and experimentation can flourish safely; and the evolving role of insights teams as orchestrators, educators, and guardians of customer understanding.

Every brand has a loyalty program – but few have true loyalty.

In today’s attention economy, loyalty is no longer built through points, perks, or clever mechanics alone. It requires delivering a value exchange customers genuinely believe is worthwhile.

In this session, Honeycomb Strategy shares the latest research revealing why some loyalty programs and subscription models become embedded in customer behaviour – while many others fall short.

Drawing on Australia’s largest loyalty program study alongside an exclusive preview of the upcoming Subscription Friction report, this session uncovers the behavioural forces shaping how customers engage with loyalty today.

Through a behavioural science lens, the session will reveal the hidden drivers of loyalty, the friction points causing customers to disengage, and what the most effective programs do differently.

Delegates will leave with practical frameworks to design and refine programs that drive deeper engagement, strengthen customer relationships, and deliver measurable impact on spend.

In a landscape defined by rising customer expectations, structural complexity, and rapid technological shifts, the role of CX leadership has never been more critical or more challenging. In this candid panel discussion, some of Australia’s leading Chief Customer Officers share what’s really happening across the CX industry right now.

Together, our panellists will unpack the big questions shaping the future of customer experience:
• How do we stay relevant when products become commoditised and friction is designed out?
• What does “good” look like in an era of shifting expectations?
• How are CX leaders navigating resource pressure, executive sponsorship challenges, and the rise of DIY insights across the business?
• What capabilities, structures, and mindsets will define the next generation of customer-led organisations?

This is the unfiltered view from the top: where CX is heading, what must change, and how leaders are preparing their organisations for the next chapter.

This session explores how leading brands like Nespresso and Dell are using AI to deliver consistent, grounded answers across every channel without losing trust or control.

• How to unify fragmented enterprise knowledge so customers, agents, and AI draw from the same source of truth.
• How to ground generative AI in approved content to avoid hallucinations and inconsistent answers across channels.
• How to link self-service, search, and resolution data to measurable ROI from case deflection to cost-to-serve.

Every enterprise has a CX strategy. Most of them are already obsolete.

They were built in workshops, mapped into IVR trees, and locked into transformation roadmaps that take longer to deliver than the problems they were meant to solve.

Meanwhile, customer behaviour shifts daily and the system can’t keep up. The next era of CX won’t be designed. It will be operated.

In this keynote, Trusst AI tells the story of ripping out a legacy IVR inside a major government vehicle registration department. 1.2 million calls and 100K chats a month. A staged pathway to 70% automation in under 90 days. Multi-million dollar impact from day one, not after a three-year transformation roadmap. And every bit of it delivered securely inside the customer’s own cloud.

No data leaves. Ever.

What happens when you actually hear 100% of your customer interactions? Not sample them. Not survey them. Listen to every single one. You stop redesigning experiences. You start operating them. Automation strategies change. Governance models change. Outcomes compound.

This is Adaptive Customer Experience: where judgment and learning are embedded into the operating model, and CX evolves continuously. Not through redesign, but through intelligent execution.

At enterprise scale, customer experience must be both efficient and effective. Reusability, shared platforms, and automation are no longer optional. They’re vital to agentic systems across markets, channels, and millions of customers.

But scale alone does not create advantage. When 80% of experience is standardised, the remaining 20% is human difference, local context, and leadership judgment. To deliver branded CX means decisive in ambiguity. Designing for all humans means knowing what should be the same and investing deliberately in what must be different. The organisations that succeed are those that use reusability to free creativity, listen at scale, and turn diverse human signals into growth, relevance, and trust.

We’ll be joined by a speaker from DBS Bank, recently named Global Bank of the Year by The Banker, who will explore these themes and share hands-on experience leading customer experience at scale across Southeast Asia.

As customer expectations rise and behaviours become more complex, linear journey models and sales funnels no longer reflect how people actually engage with brands. Today’s journeys are multi-channel, dynamic and increasingly influenced by AI-driven interactions.

In this session, Concentrix and Australian Unity share how they are redesigning experiences to support non-linear customer journeys. We’ll explore the architectural foundations required to support non-linear journeys, how AI is being introduced into the funnel to enhance relevance and decision-making, and how experience, data and technology are brought together in practice.

This session offers a realistic look into how modern customer journeys and therefore sales funnels are evolving, what this means for digital, CX and marketing teams, and how organisations can design for flexibility while staying focused on outcomes.

As AI summarisation, synthetic samples, automated text analytics and DIY research tools sweep through organisations, CX and insights teams face a new challenge: how do we preserve nuance, emotion, and context when machines increasingly shape the first read of customer data?

This discussion-led think tank invites senior CX and insights leaders to explore the emerging gap between speed and subtlety. From AI inventing quotes, to auto-generated personas, to synthetic survey responses that flatten outliers and dampen the “why,” leaders are asking: What gets lost when AI becomes the intermediary between us and our customers? And what new skills, guardrails, and mindsets are required to ensure we don’t lose the craft of interpretation, or the intimate understanding that drives real change?

Together, participants will unpack:
• Where AI enhances our ability to see patterns—and where it obscures the story
• What “nuance” truly means in customer research, and how to protect it
• How to blend AI-enabled efficiency with human-led interrogation
• Practical approaches to ensuring depth, emotion, and micro-signals are not lost in the noise
• How teams can adapt, evolve, and upskill to stay close to the customer in an era of acceleration

Designed to spark debate, reflection, and shared learning, this session goes beyond tools and tactics to confront a core question for the future of CX: How do we stay deeply connected to our customers when AI is doing so much of the listening?

As email response rates continue to fall and customer attention becomes increasingly fragmented, many organisations are discovering that their Voice of Customer programmes aren’t performing as well as they once did. This session takes a candid look at the operational health of today’s VoC ecosystems, exploring how declining engagement through traditional channels may be signalling deeper issues in programme design, channel mix, and organisational adoption.

The presentation will unpack what “healthy” really looks like, from timely, representative feedback to integrated touchpoints that capture the customer voice without relying solely on email. It will also examine emerging opportunities to rebuild cut-through by connecting VoC with loyalty moments, personalisation strategies, and new channels such as WhatsApp and other low-cost messaging platforms. Attendees will gain a practical lens for assessing whether their VoC programme is still fit for purpose, and how to modernise it to secure richer, more meaningful customer insight across the journey.

Ashton Media’s hit podcast, where we talk to leaders about the missteps, mistakes and failures in their careers that have helped them become the leader they are today, takes to the stage in a special live recording. This will be a session unlike any other as we take a deep dive with a very brave CX leader as they share what’s gone wrong in their CX career and how to pivot when things don’t quite work out as they’ve planned…