When Michael Chen joined premium Australian mattress manufacturer Sealy Posturepedic nearly 7 years ago, centralising the fragmented CX function was his first priority. Laying the right foundations with the CX team, before introducing process automation tech, was most important. “People, culture, processes, come first and then and only then the technology. If you have people …

Australian customer-service teams are racing toward agentic AI, but speed is becoming the easy part. The harder question is what happens when an automated system cannot resolve a problem, loses context or makes a customer repeat the story from the beginning. CXFocus’s recent coverage of agentic AI in Australian contact centres captures the shift from simple …

Emotional media headlines about AI replacing the jobs currently done by people may be common but they are not supported by history. Technology and labor markets have been constantly changing since the 19th Century but “we’ve never had a tech revolution where there were fewer jobs at the end of it,” according to Martha Gimbel, …

Striking a balance between the continuous pressure for cost efficiency and the undeniable need for empathetic customer care is the defining challenge of 2026. Polling conducted at the Contact Centre Symposium 2026 in May revealed that while AI adoption is accelerating, the friction points are overwhelmingly human and operational rather than purely technological. The poll …

As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in everyday digital experiences, companies are facing a new reality: consumers want to know what is happening to their personal information, why it is happening, and how it affects them. For years, many organisations treated privacy as mainly a legal and compliance exercise. Lengthy terms and conditions and …

Singapore’s plan to train 40,000 tech professionals in agentic AI by 2029 is a serious and necessary investment. For the CX industry, the more pressing question is whether enterprise environments will be ready to deploy AI effectively when the new cohort of trained AI engineers arrives. Based on what we see across enterprise AI deployments …

The Australian customer experience (CX) landscape has reached a critical inflection point. The era of speculative AI experimentation is drawing to a close, replaced by an urgent mandate for enterprise-wide integration. While the first half of 2025 saw a staggering 119% surge in AI agent adoption across the country, moving these initiatives out of the …

AI is rapidly becoming entrenched in customer service operations, and its impact is reshaping the way contact centers function. Organisations are deploying AI to analyse customer interactions and uncover patterns that would have been impossible to identify manually at scale. The pressure to adopt these technologies is growing because the potential value is enormous. While …

Something interesting is happening in the world of customer service. Faced with demand for ever-accelerating response times, teams are tapping AI-powered experience orchestration, giving rise to a generation of super agents. But fragmented systems are holding many back.  Three-quarters (75%) of Australian consumers believe it takes too long to get a service response, according to …

An audience of over 600 professionals across CX, IT, and operations attended Zendesk’s Future of Service event in Sydney last week. The event focused heavily on how AI has become a core component of high-value customer and employee experiences. As well as showcasing a range of local success stories from brands such as Petstock, MYOB, …