Customer experience in Australia is good but not great, according to consumers surveyed for the 2019 KPMG Customer Experience Excellence report. The brands leading on customer experience are community-led, values-driven and rate higher than brands focused solely on building their customer base, according to the report.

Nestlé Australia and InSites Consulting's chatbot research experiment has just secured top honours at the Australian Market and Social Research Society (AMSRS) national conference, winning the Best Paper Award.

Consumers are bombarded with thousands of brand messages every day. Which makes it increasingly important for marketers to understand the complete brand experience and have rich, actionable insights through a broad array of data.

Confirmit has appointed Andrew Farries, former customer strategy leader at National Australia Bank, as director of customer experience (CX) consulting in Australia.

More than 300 Optus employees have already completed at least one class within the telco’s new CX Academy since its launch five months ago.

​Personalisation done right can have a dramatic effect on how customers experience a brand and a positive effect on marketing efforts, which flow through to the bottom line. At last week’s Sitecore Experience 2019 event in Sydney, three very different examples were provided to the audience on the experience of embarking on a personalisation programme and the impact of effective personalisation.

In the Asia-Pacific region, businesses lose US$325 billion per year to disconnected customer experiences. Yet according to research recent, at least 90 per cent see CX as a competitive differentiator and 89 per link to commercial success.

For a franchise business operating in a highly competitive environment, marketing consistency and data analysis is key.

It’s been 12 months since the University of Canberra confirmed a new digital partner and began rolling out Adobe’s Experience Cloud platform, and two months since it debuted its new-look current student portal.

Mobile customer experience consultancy, Geronimo, has brought on BT Financial’s former chief marketing officer as its new COO.

Adopting a freshly minted document and data extraction technology is enabling MYOB to tackle a whopping big customer pain point while improving SMB tax time compliance, its product chief says.

Customer strategy consultancy, Ellipsis, has taken the wrappers off a new company aimed at bridging the gap between Aussie brands looking to solve known customer pain points, with emerging CX solutions globally.

Former Westpac head of advertising, Samuel Viney, has a new role as general manager, customer, at Amart Furniture. The role had been vacant since earlier this year.

It’s not often a digital experience leader tells you he wishes staff could be more like Io, the Jupiter moon transforming itself completely every 12 months. But it’s an apt analogy for the way all of us need to strive to be more adaptive and evolutionary in our approach to customer experience design.

Moving a legacy brand from being product-centric to customer centric has been no small feat for running shoe brand, Asics. But by embracing the challenge with gusto, creating an omnichannel vision and building a tech stack, the company is achieving it on a global scale.

CX is not the same as customer service, nor is it another name for user experience, CRM, technology or digital transformation, according to Gartner VP distinguished analyst, Don Scheibenreif.

​Sunsuper was born in the late 80s in an era when the government was moving towards compulsory superannuation for all Australians as a key pillar in supporting their retirement. Superannuation started as a simple idea that people paid forward their retirement on a regular basis for their working life without relying on a government funded pension.

The top customer experience-focused organisations globally are the ones who recognise they’re the problem, can act boldly, and are even willing to reduce their product lines to make things easier for customers.

Customer analytics is ultimately an exercise in asking the right questions and successful change management, Gartner senior analyst, Melissa Davis, claims. And to get there, you’re better off giving up on a 360-degree of your customers and instead, building a minimal viable customer data view to inform your approach.

​For a company that receives over 200,000 customer responses each year, implementing a voice of customer (VoC) platform can seem more than a little daunting. Add in some 25 different trackers (most companies have two), and the program can become downright unmanageable.

Brands who don’t start embracing trust as a corporate philosophy and proactively protect the interests of their customers will find themselves very quickly out of the competitive running.