Customer Experience Conference

Arrival, Check-in & Networking Coffee

AI Beyond Automation: Creating Real Customer Value

• Rethinking AI through customer value creation
• AI shifts emotional workload to humans
• Human–AI symbiosis scales empathy effectively

The Best CX Teams Work Towards Their Own Obsolescence

Sarah West Keogh challenges one of the core assumptions of the Customer Experience profession: is the goal to build stronger CX teams, or to build organisations that no longer need a CX team to advocate for the customer? The session explores the provocative idea that the existence of a CX function is not always a sign of organisational maturity. In many cases, it may indicate that customer-centricity has yet to be fully embedded across the business. While organisations have long recognised that customer-centricity should be everyone's responsibility, many still rely on specialist teams to represent the customer in critical decisions. This question is becoming increasingly important in the age of AI. As AI takes on a greater role in shaping customer journeys, recommendations and interactions, the experiences customers receive will increasingly reflect the decisions, priorities and assumptions embedded across the organisation. AI is not making customer-centricity everyone's job; it always was. What AI is doing is making the consequences of failing to embed it across strategy, product, technology, operations and leadership impossible to ignore. Drawing on experience leading Customer Experience, Digital and enterprise transformation, Sarah will explore why the endgame for CX was never to create a permanent team responsible for representing the customer. It was to build organisations where customer thinking is so deeply embedded that it no longer requires a dedicated function to keep it alive. The session will challenge leaders to rethink how customer-centricity is created, sustained and scaled, and ask a simple but powerful question: Are we building stronger CX teams, or organisations that no longer need one?

Driving Digital Adoption by Designing Around Customer Needs

Digital adoption isn't about pushing customers online, it's about creating experiences they choose to use. This session explores how understanding customer demand, simplifying journeys, and investing in the right digital capabilities can increase self-service adoption, reduce avoidable contact, and improve both customer and operational outcomes. Drawing on practical examples, it will share lessons learned from scaling digital channels while keeping the customer at the centre of every decision.

The Psychology Behind Customer Experience: Understanding Customer Behavior

As we have no contracts one of the most vulnerable moment in the customer journey isn't the sales pitch - it's the day after our customer starts spending. When money starts leaving the account but results haven't materialized yet, anxiety spikes. Because we don't use contracts, our onboarding team has to proactively manage human sensitivities and earn the customer's trust every single day. This session breaks down the psychology of the critical launch period and how to turn early hesitation into long-term loyalty. Key Takeaways for the Audience: - Navigating Launch Anxiety: How to manage the emotional rollercoaster of the first 90 days, especially on the critical "Day 1" of spending when the instinct to hit pause is highest. - The Consultative Pushback: Overcoming the human resistance to change. How to safely challenge a customer on their own business blockers (like website friction and conversion flows) and guide them through complex measurement migrations. - The Psychology of Churn (Boom or Bust): Why understanding exactly when and why a customer switches off is just as important as studying your successes. - The AI Advantage: How new AI tools are creating creative ways to demonstrate early value, ease customer anxiety, and elevate the overall customer experience.

The Great Debate

From Digital Transformation to Intelligent Customer Experiences: How AI and Agentic Systems are Reshaping Customer Engagement

As customer expectations continue to evolve, organizations must move beyond traditional digital transformation and embrace intelligent, AI-driven experiences. This session explores how emerging technologies, digital signals, AI, copilots, and agentic systems are enabling organizations to create proactive, personalized, and scalable customer engagement experience.

CX Beyond the CX Team: Building a Customer-Centric Agile Organisation

In Three Customer Experience is not owned by one team but enabled by an entire organisation. I will share practical examples of how to connect customer insight, agile delivery, digital transformation, and organisational culture to create experiences that customers value and businesses benefit from. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for elevating CX from a function to a capability embedded across every team.

Building a Customer-Centric Culture – Every Colleague Counts

A true customer centric culture is top down and bottom up and requires all colleagues to understand how their role connects to the customer experience. When we get it right for customers, it’s good for business – customer trust and loyalty is strengthened, advocacy grows, and retention, acquisition and business performance all go in the right direction. This session will share practical interventions, lessons learned and examples from building a customer culture in Bank of Ireland.

Building Customer Trust Through Network Excellence

Session explores what it means to place the customer at the heart of ESB Networks’ role as a critical national infrastructure provider. It begins by framing the customer in the context of a changing energy landscape, where rising expectations, decarbonisation and increased reliance on electricity are reshaping the relationship between networks and the people, businesses, and communities they serve. The session then examines why customer centricity matters even more in a monopoly environment, where trust, clarity and accountability are essential, before outlining the shift from an engineering-first mindset to customer-centric engineering excellence. Through ESB Networks’ customer excellence model and practical case examples, it will show how insight, root cause analysis and process improvement can translate customer needs into better operational outcomes. The session closes by reflecting on what is being learned and the importance of building customer confidence as a core part of delivering Ireland’s network for the future.

The Why Behind the What: Turning Customer Behaviour into Lasting Strategy

Great B2B decisions start where data meets real customer behaviour; the real value lies in understanding the why, then turning it into insight that stays accessible and enduring organisation-wide. This session explores how research can move from a one-time project phase to being a continuous partner in strategy. By engaging with research early, to shape decisions rather than validate them after the fact, leaders and teams can make decisions grounded in genuine user understanding, building lasting alignment between user needs and business success.