Day One - July 15

9:30 am - 10:00 am Exclusive first look: Powering growth for a connected customer experience

Suzanne Edmondson - Senior Client Partner, Capita
Sharang Sharma - Vice President, Everest Group

Customer expectations are rising and organisations across industries are rethinking how they deliver value through experience. 

Join this session for an exclusive, insight-rich session as they unveil findings from their latest research in collaboration with Everest Group: “Transform your customer engagement – a unified approach to CXM for Telecoms.” This is your first-look opportunity to access the report one week ahead of it’s public release.  

The session will explore how intelligent, connected engagement is reshaping the customer experience landscape — and what it takes to move from fragmented operations to a unified, customer-first model. With expert observations, practical guidance, and a strategic roadmap, this webinar offers a timely perspective on how organisations can drive loyalty, retention, and growth through smarter CX. 

Attendees will learn:

  • How to overcome the cost of fragmentation and unlock growth through unified CXM 
  • The core tenets of a successful integrated CX strategy — from AI-driven orchestration to agile governance 
  • Real-world transformation insights from Freenet, including measurable outcomes and practical advice 


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Suzanne Edmondson

Senior Client Partner
Capita

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Sharang Sharma

Vice President
Everest Group

10:00 am - 10:30 am Designing the contact center as a profit center: Brand voice, AI, and creative leadership on the frontline

Ebrahim Hyder - VP, Customer Care, Michael Kors

The best contact centers are no longer just about resolving issues, they are evolving into brand hubs and even profit drivers. But delivering this transformation takes more than new tools: it requires creativity, and bold leadership.

In this session, we’ll explore how Ebrahim Hyder, VP of Customer Care at Michael Kors and a CX Network Top 30 Contact Center Leader, transformed the luxury fashion brand’s contact center into a revenue-generating operation that mirrors both the energy and identity of the retail store. From recreating the in-store vibe, to embedding a store manager in the call center to upskill agents on brand voice, every decision was made to elevate both customer and agent experience.

We’ll also dive into their AI journey from agent-facing guided assistance that reduces handle time and detects fraud, to a unique partnership model that secured buy-in from legal and IT while driving measurable ROI.

Attendees will learn:

  • How to elevate outsourced support while preserving brand integrity, with tips on partner selection, cultural alignment, and frontline empowerment.
  • What it takes to lead from the floor: Why walking the walk matters and how leadership presence shapes performance and culture.
  • How to implement AI in the contact center with real business outcomes from lowering fraud-related losses to maintaining seamless CX at scale.
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Ebrahim Hyder

VP, Customer Care
Michael Kors

10:30 am - 11:00 am Future-proofing customer support with autonomous AI agents

Contact center leaders face a dilemma: maintaining high quality customer service while keeping costs down. Challenges around agent retention and engagement add to the strain.

AI agents, driven by agentic AI, can be a cost-effective solution to this problem, allowing contact centers to scale customer service while keeping costs low. Unlike traditional AI solutions, AI agents can act autonomously, taking initiative, identifying customer issues before they arise and actioning them – all without human intervention. In this, seamless, standardized, high-quality experiences become a reality.

Join this session to learn about how AI agents can help you scale contact center operations and improve customer service. We will delve into the new AI agents on the market and how to choose the best one for your contact center.

Attendees will learn:

  • What makes AI Agents different: Understand how agentic AI enables proactive, autonomous service, reducing the need for human oversight while maintaining consistency and quality.
  • Evaluating the tech landscape: Explore the latest AI agents on the market, their capabilities, and key considerations when selecting the right solution for your contact center.
  • Scaling with efficiency: Learn how AI agents can help you manage volume, lower costs, and ease pressure on human agents without compromising on CX.

11:00 am - 11:30 am Investing in agents to improve retention and CX

With agent retention a continuing challenge for contact centers, workforce engagement has never been more critical.

In this context, it is no surprise that CX Network research found employee experience emerging as the eighth most important trend impacting the role of the practitioner in 2025, the same ranking as in 2024. Investing in teams is still a huge priority for CX and contact center leaders seeking to keep employees engaged, and only 4 percent of our audience said they did not train their team in any new skills in 2024.

Luckily, there is a wealth of workforce engagement on the market to help with this often time-consuming endeavour. In this session, we will explore the options on the market and delve into strategies to keep agents engaged and reduce agent turnover.

Attendees will learn:

  • How to build a high-retention contact center culture: Explore practical approaches to improving agent satisfaction, motivation, and loyalty in fast-paced customer service environments.
  • Tech-powered workforce engagement: Understand how tools like real-time feedback platforms, AI-enabled coaching, and intelligent scheduling can support team wellbeing and performance.
  • Training for tomorrow: Learn how leading organizations are embedding upskilling and career development into day-to-day operations to future-proof their workforce and reduce churn.

11:30 am - 12:00 pm Improving agent experience and efficiency with Copilot

As contact centers deal with increasingly complex customer needs across channels, generative AI-powered Copilot, a real -time assistant that advises agents on responses and next-best actions based on a knowledge pool, comes to the fore as a solution.

In addition to real-time help for agents, copilots also reduce post-contact work, providing instant call summaries with analysis.

In this, copilots not only lighten the load for agents but help them to work more efficiently and more consistently, reducing the chance of human error during service. The reduced workload frees up agent time for more meaningful (and profitable) tasks.

Join this session to learn why copilot is an essential tool for a modern contact center and how to successfully implement it and integrate it with existing tools and platforms.

Attendees will learn:

  • How to boost engagement and retention: Discover proven strategies for improving agent satisfaction, reducing burnout, and keeping top talent in an increasingly competitive labor market.
  • Leveraging technology for workforce management: Explore the latest tools in workforce engagement, like AI-driven scheduling, real-time coaching, and performance analytics, and how they’re making life easier for teams and leaders alike.
  • Building a culture of growth: Understand how to upskill agents for evolving roles, embed continuous learning into daily workflows, and align employee experience with wider CX goals.

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm Beyond the bot: Virgin Money’s contact center evolution through conversational AI

Laura MacLeod - Digital Product Strategy Senior Manager, Virgin Money

Virgin Money has restructured its contact center operations to include the conversational banking function, placing digital and human touchpoints on a level playing field. In this fireside chat, Laura MacLeod, Digital Product Strategy Senior Manager at Virgin Money, is joining to explain how this shift is enabling a smarter, more joined-up service experience, and why AI isn’t replacing agents, but enhancing their value.

With hundreds of thousands of monthly interactions now handled by a 24/7 virtual assistant, including complex queries like fraud, Virgin Money is seeing a surprising trend: contact volumes are rising. Easier, faster service is driving repeat use of the virtual assistants, especially in the small hours when support used to be out of reach.

Discover how the team is using Microsoft Copilot to summarise conversations and support agents through a unified desktop, and why transparent, ethical AI is central to both colleague buy-in and customer trust.

Attendees will learn:

  • Why contact volumes can rise after AI is implemented and why that’s a good thing
  • How Virgin Money is embedding AI to support, not replace, its contact center teams
  • The role of ethical design in building trust across digital and human channels
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Laura MacLeod

Digital Product Strategy Senior Manager
Virgin Money

Customer self-service continues to rise, with AI continually absorbing low-level manual tasks in the contact center. Pair this with evolving hybrid working conditions and increasing customer expectations, and a picture starts to emerge. The job of a contact centre agent is becoming more emotionally and cognitively demanding, and leaders are being called to reimagine what frontline work looks like, and what kind of leadership it now requires. In this panel discussion, long-time CX leader and advisor Vinay Parmar, CX Network Advisory Board member and Managing Director, Customer Whisperers, joins industry pioneer Brad Cleveland, Senior Advisor to the ICMI and author of bestselling Contact Center Management on Fast Forward, to share what skills today’s contact centre leaders need to stay effective in a continually changing environment.

Vinay brings sharp insight into the everyday realities of agent life such as hybrid work, heightened emotional strain, and a younger workforce with different needs. Brad, who has been shaping the contact center industry since its inception, offers a macro lens on how leadership, AI, and agent enablement must evolve together.

Attendees will learn:

  • Why resilience-building, empathy, and environmental awareness are core leadership skills, not just “soft skills”, in the hybrid contact center
  • How to lead in an AI-first future where agents need to be supervisors, collaborators, and creative thinkers, not just problem solvers
  • The importance of narrative-based data storytelling to influence stakeholders and elevate the contact center's strategic value

 

Both speakers featured in our Top 30 contact center leaders to watch in 2025 list

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Vinay Parmar

Managing Director / Advisory Board member / Top 30 Contact Center Leader
Customer Whisperers / CX Network

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Brad Cleveland

Author & Top 30 Contact Center Leader
Contact Center Management on Fast Forward

1:00 pm - 1:30 pm Virtual roundtable: What skills do agents need in the contact center of 2025?

The proliferation of AI in contact centers and customer serivce has changed agent experience forever. AI has enabled automation of simpler tasks for years now, but the recent developments in generative and agentic AI have led to increased use cases in the contact center, including improved, empathetic generative-AI-powered chatbots and autonomous AI agents that can carry out complex tasks from start to finish without human intervention.

With these newer tools, the skills required of contact center agents are shifting and new challenges in agent retention are cropping up. In this All Access virtual roundtable discussion, we will discuss the skills that agents in the contact center of 2025 need, and how to nurture and grow these and retain agents.

CX Network invites all attendees and network members to join this inclusive virtual roundtable discussion, where all participants will be encouraged to enable cameras and microphones.

We will discuss:

  • What skills are becoming more critical for agents in an AI-augmented contact center—empathy, complex problem-solving, tech literacy, and beyond
  • How training and upskilling programs can evolve to support agents in working alongside generative and autonomous AI
  • Strategies to keep agents motivated, engaged, and retained in a landscape where their roles are rapidly changing