CX Roundtable March 2026

Australia’s CX Crossroads

Australia’s customer-experience landscape stands at a tipping point. National scores have improved, yet the drivers of that progress—chiefly retail’s embrace of seamless journeys—mask deeper tensions as artificial intelligence reshapes interactions and consumers grow choosier.

KPMG’s latest assessment puts the overall CX benchmark at 7.30, up 1.67 points year on year. Advances in empathy, resolution and expectation management propelled the gain, with retailers dominating the honours list. Brands such as Specsavers, Bunnings and Mecca have turned data, personalisation and omnichannel execution into competitive weapons.

Economic reality tempers the optimism. Into 2026, cost-of-living strains have Australians shopping with greater deliberation. Online habits remain entrenched, but success now hinges less on volume than on relevance: experiences that feel earned, controllable and transparently valuable. Trust accrues to owned channels; interruptive tactics erode it.

Agentic AI—systems that sense, reason and act autonomously—is the next frontier. Utilities experiment with predictive maintenance, banks with fraud detection and proactive offers, retailers with anticipatory recommendations. The prize is efficiency and loyalty. The peril is a service layer that feels mechanical rather than human, especially when consumers increasingly rely on their own AI tools to cut through brand noise.

The subtler challenge is integration. Delivering coherent experiences demands breaking silos between technology, data and people. Public services have made strides in proactive engagement; private sectors risk lagging if they prioritise automation speed over empathetic design. The trade-off between scale and authenticity will separate leaders from also-rans.