Research note: This June update has been researched across multiple current sources, including Australian and global CX studies, AI adoption research, privacy and scam data, and service leadership reports. The aim is simple: give Australian leaders a practical summary of the hot customer experience trends that should shape business planning for the second half of 2026 and into 2027.

The short version? Australian customers are not asking for theatre. They want fewer broken journeys, faster resolution, safer data use, clearer communication and humans who still show up when the situation gets complicated. They are open to AI, but only when it makes life easier for them, not when it feels like a cost-cutting broom wearing a headset.

For organisations planning CX work now, the opportunity is not to "do more digital". It is to connect customer insight, service design, operations, knowledge, communications, data and AI into a service system that customers can actually feel.

The Australian CX planning snapshot

Trend	What is changing	What to plan now	Where Customer Science helps
CX value has to be proven	Australians choose brands on expected experience, but are less willing than global consumers to pay more for it.	Link CX investment to retention, complaints, first contact resolution, cost-to-serve, advocacy and revenue.	CX strategy, value cases, service performance dashboards and CX roadmaps.
AI is now a service design problem	Leaders are under pressure to implement AI, but customers are wary when it removes empathy or creates dead ends.	Start with customer value, knowledge quality, human handoff and governance before scaling automation.	AI readiness, service automation design, Knowledge Quest and operational governance.
Direct feedback is shrinking	Fewer customers are giving traditional survey feedback, so silent signals matter more.	Combine contact reasons, complaints, call recordings, web behaviour, sentiment and operational data.	Customer Science Insights, BI, journey analytics and customer research.
Trust is part of the experience	Privacy, scams and AI transparency now affect brand choice and channel confidence.	Treat data minimisation, consent, explainability and secure communications as CX design requirements.	Information management, data governance, communications review and AI controls.
Knowledge is becoming front line infrastructure	AI, self-service and human agents all fail when knowledge is stale, fragmented or untrusted.	Create ownership, update rhythms, quality scoring and knowledge health reporting.	Knowledge Quest, service design and contact centre optimisation.
Communication quality is a growth lever	Confusing, tone-deaf or non-compliant messages create avoidable demand and distrust.	Review high-volume customer communications for clarity, empathy, effort and actionability.	CommScore.AI and customer communications review.
Emotional connection is back on the board agenda	Functional adequacy is no longer enough in a flat market.	Design memorable moments at the points customers are most anxious, confused or exposed.	CX research, service design, prototyping and journey redesign.

1. CX is becoming a commercial discipline, not a kindness department

Ipsos' Australian CX research found that 73% of Australian consumers actively choose brands based on the expected quality of the customer experience, ahead of the global average of 70%. But only 39% of Australians said they were willing to pay more for better experiences, compared with 46% globally.

That is the tension. Customers care deeply about experience, but they are not handing out blank cheques for nicer service language and a fresher shade of blue on the app. CX leaders have to show where better experience creates measurable business value.

Forrester's 2025 Global CX Index adds some urgency. In Australia, Singapore and India, 37% of brands' CX scores fell, while 58% were unchanged. In other words, standing still is not a neutral strategy. It is how a brand quietly drifts into the beige middle.

What is working now:

• Build CX business cases around specific value pools: churn reduction, complaint reduction, avoidable contact, conversion leakage, agent productivity, digital containment that customers actually like, and recommendation behaviour.
• Move from generic journey maps to measurable service journeys. A journey map without operating metrics is often just a very attractive wall decoration.
• Prioritise moments that carry financial or emotional weight: onboarding, claims, hardship, complaints, outage response, renewals, appointment changes, escalations and billing surprises.

Customer Science planning move: Start with a CX Health Check or contact centre/service review. Identify the journeys and contact reasons creating the most cost, risk and customer frustration, then turn those into a 90-day improvement roadmap with measurable outcomes.

2. AI is hot, but "AI-first" is not the same as customer-first

AI is the loudest trend in 2026, but the useful version of the trend is more precise: AI is moving from experimentation into the operating model of customer service. Gartner reported that 91% of service and support leaders surveyed were under pressure from executive leadership to implement AI in 2026. Those leaders named customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and self-service success as top priorities.

The trap is treating AI as a channel deflection tool. Australian customers have already worked out when a bot exists mainly to keep them away from a person. Ipsos found a sharp AI perception gap in Australia: 41% of customers believe companies will benefit most from AI development, while only 6% think customers will be the primary beneficiaries.

ServiceNow's Australian research gives a practical clue about where AI can help without annoying everyone. Australians spent 113.5 million hours on hold in 2025, down 10 million hours from the previous year, and hold times fell 13% year on year. Yet nearly half of Australians cited slow or poor customer service as a reason to switch, and 51% were concerned AI would not understand their concerns.

The new conventional wisdom:

• Old thinking: "Use AI to reduce contacts."
• Better thinking: "Use AI to remove dumb effort, improve decisions and make the human moments better."

AI use cases that are working:

• Triage that gets customers to the right path faster.
• Agent assist that summarises context and suggests next best actions.
• Knowledge generation and quality checks from real customer interactions.
• Proactive service alerts that prevent avoidable contacts.
• Communications review that catches confusing, risky or off-brand messages before they go out.
• Analytics that lets leaders ask better questions of service data without waiting three weeks for a dashboard request.

Customer Science planning move: Run an AI readiness assessment for service teams before scaling automation. The assessment should check customer value, data quality, privacy risk, knowledge maturity, handoff design, human oversight, measurement and operational ownership.

The Australian Government's National AI Centre points in the same practical direction: successful AI adoption needs several parts of the business working together, fit-for-purpose data, process redesign and responsible AI practices such as accountability, risk management, transparency, testing, monitoring and human control. That is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is how AI becomes dependable enough to put in front of customers.

3. The feedback economy is changing because customers are going quiet

Qualtrics' 2026 Consumer Experience Trends research surveyed 20,000 consumers across 14 countries and 18 industries. One of its starkest findings is that only 3 out of 10 customers are giving direct feedback.

This matters because many CX programs still behave as though surveys are the main source of truth. They are not. Surveys are useful, but they are a shrinking window into a much larger house.

The practical shift is from "voice of customer" as a survey program to "customer intelligence" as an operating capability. Leaders need to combine:

• direct feedback,
• complaint themes,
• contact centre recordings and transcripts,
• digital behaviour,
• product and service usage,
• operational performance,
• sentiment,
• agent notes,
• knowledge gaps,
• resolution outcomes.

The organisations breaking conventional thinking are treating every service interaction as research. That does not mean spying on customers or drowning teams in dashboards. It means designing a disciplined insight engine that helps leaders see where demand is coming from, why customers are stuck and what would change the outcome.

Customer Science planning move: Use Customer Science Insights to connect contact centre and service data, turn it into trusted reporting, and feed BI, AI, digital and human workforces. Then use targeted qualitative research to explain the "why" behind the patterns.

4. Trust is now a CX feature

Trust used to be treated as a brand attribute or a legal matter. In 2026, it is operational. It shows up in whether customers open your messages, use your digital channels, accept your AI, share data, believe your advice and forgive you when something goes wrong.

The Australian evidence is clear. OAIC research found 62% of Australians see protection of their personal information as a major concern, data privacy ranks as the third most important factor when choosing a product or service after quality and price, and only 32% feel in control of their data privacy. The same research found 92% would like businesses to do more to protect their personal information.

The National Anti-Scam Centre's 2025 report adds another layer. Australians made 481,523 combined scam reports in 2025 and reported losses of more than $2.18 billion, up 7.8% from 2024.

That affects CX because every digital interaction now carries a small question in the customer's mind: "Is this real, is this safe, and what happens if I click?"

What is working now:

• Plain-English privacy and consent moments built into the journey, not buried in policy pages.
• Communications that are recognisable, consistent and easy to verify.
• Data minimisation as a design principle: ask for less, keep it for less time, explain it better.
• AI transparency that tells customers when AI is involved and how human review works.
• Secure service design for vulnerable, anxious or high-risk journeys.

Customer Science planning move: Review high-volume communications, digital journeys and data capture points through a trust lens. If a message looks like it could have been written by a scammer in a hurry, fix it before your customers make that joke for you.

5. Knowledge management is having a comeback, and this time it has teeth

AI has made knowledge management fashionable again, which is slightly awkward for everyone who has been quietly saying it matters for the last 20 years.

The reason is simple. AI does not fix bad knowledge. It scales it. Stale answers, policy fragments, product exceptions, undocumented workarounds and "ask Karen, she knows" operating models become bigger problems once self-service and AI agents start relying on them.

Gartner found 58% of service leaders aim to upskill agents into knowledge management specialists. That is a strong signal. The best service teams are not treating knowledge as a back-office library. They are treating it as live CX infrastructure.

What is working now:

• Knowledge health scores by product, journey, issue type and channel.
• Clear ownership for each knowledge domain.
• Closed-loop updates from customer interactions, complaints and agent searches.
• Content designed for customers, agents and AI retrieval.
• Governance that balances speed with accuracy and compliance.

Customer Science planning move: Use Knowledge Quest to convert live customer interactions into accurate, brand-aligned knowledge articles and answers, then report and manage knowledge health. This is the foundation for better self-service, better AI and better human service.

6. Communication quality is becoming measurable

Many organisations accidentally create demand with their own communications. A renewal email prompts a call. A policy letter creates confusion. A chatbot answer sounds confident but misses the customer's actual worry. A form asks for information the customer already provided last week. The customer then enters the service system annoyed, and everyone acts surprised.

Communication quality is one of the most practical CX levers because it sits upstream of contact volume, complaints, digital abandonment and trust.

The breaking shift is that communications can now be scored, tested and improved faster. With AI-assisted review, organisations can assess messages for clarity, empathy, risk, brand alignment, reading level, next-best-action and likely customer effort before they are sent at scale.

What to plan:

• Identify the top 20 communications that generate the most contacts, complaints or confusion.
• Score them for clarity, customer effort, actionability, empathy and risk.
• Rewrite with plain English, customer context and clear next steps.
• Test impact against contact rates, complaints, completion rates and satisfaction.
• Create a communication quality standard that applies across teams.

Customer Science planning move: Use CommScore.AI and a customer communications review to turn communications from a risk source into a CX performance lever.

7. Emotional connection is not fluffy. It is measurable.

One of the strongest Australian findings comes from Ipsos: nearly half of customer recollections of interactions in Australia were rated "nothing notable", and only 35% were considered genuinely good. Ipsos also found a major difference between emotionally attached and unfulfilled customers: 72% of emotionally attached customers were likely to continue with their provider, compared with 12% of unfulfilled customers.

This is not an argument for jazz hands. It is an argument for designing the moments that customers remember.

Australian customers often do not need delight. They need recognition, certainty, control and resolution at the point where the stakes feel high. In many service journeys, the emotional moment is not the glossy brand moment. It is the moment the customer realises they do not have to explain the whole thing again.

What is working now:

• Designing for anxiety, not just task completion.
• Giving customers certainty about what happens next.
• Reducing repeat explanation across channels.
• Making exception pathways visible and humane.
• Equipping agents with context, authority and better knowledge.
• Measuring emotional outcomes alongside effort and resolution.

Customer Science planning move: Use customer research and service design to identify the emotional load-bearing moments in the journey, prototype better experiences quickly, and operationalise the changes into process, knowledge, communications, data and technology.

8. The operating model is the real CX battleground

The best Australian CX planning in 2026 is less about isolated projects and more about the operating model. KPMG's Australian CX research argues that leaders need to connect customers, employees, partners, systems and data into one adaptive service environment. KPMG's 2026 Global AI Pulse also found Australian businesses are ahead on AI governance focus, but behind global peers on productivity focus and advanced analytics use.

That combination matters. Australia can build trusted AI and still miss value if the operating model does not change.

The useful planning question is not "What AI tool should we buy?" It is:

What customer outcomes do we need to improve, what operating constraints are causing the current experience, and what mix of people, process, knowledge, data, technology and governance will change the result?

That is slower than buying a shiny thing. It is also how the shiny thing avoids becoming another system people complain about in meetings.

A 90-day CX planning sprint for Australian organisations

If you are planning CX work for the second half of 2026, this is a practical sequence.

Days 1-15: Find the value

• Pick 2 or 3 high-value journeys or service domains.
• Baseline cost, volume, complaints, wait time, repeat contact, resolution, digital abandonment and customer sentiment.
• Identify the moments where customers feel uncertainty, loss of control or lack of recognition.

Days 16-35: Diagnose the service system

• Review process, policy, knowledge, data, technology, communications and handoffs.
• Identify where AI could remove effort or improve decisions.
• Identify where AI would increase risk because knowledge, data or handoff design is not ready.

Days 36-60: Prototype the fixes

• Redesign the priority journey moments.
• Rewrite the top communications.
• Improve knowledge articles and ownership.
• Test AI assist or automation in a controlled use case.
• Build dashboards that connect customer outcomes to operational drivers.

Days 61-90: Operationalise and measure

• Train teams on the new service model.
• Put governance around AI, knowledge and communications.
• Measure customer, operational and commercial outcomes.
• Decide what to scale, stop or redesign.

What leaders should do next

The Australian CX winners in 2026 will not be the organisations with the most automation. They will be the organisations that use technology, data and design to make service feel more human, more reliable and easier to trust.

For business planning, focus on five no-regret moves:

1. Prove where CX creates value.
2. Build AI around customer outcomes, not just cost reduction.
3. Turn service data into a decision engine.
4. Treat trust, privacy and communication clarity as CX requirements.
5. Fix knowledge before scaling self-service or AI.

Customer Science works across exactly these areas: CX research and service design, CX consulting, contact centre and service reviews, AI readiness, customer communications, business intelligence, information management, service automation and practical tools like Customer Science Insights, Knowledge Quest and CommScore.AI.

If you are setting your CX agenda for the next 6 to 12 months, start with the question customers are already asking silently: "Will this organisation make my life easier when it matters?"

That is the trend underneath all the trends.

Book a CX transformation discovery call with Customer Science

Useful Customer Science resources

• CX Research and Service Design
• CX Consulting and Professional Services
• AI Readiness for Service Teams
• Contact Centre Review Australia
• Customer Communications Review
• Customer Science Insights
• Knowledge Quest
• CommScore.AI
• Book a CX Transformation Discovery Call

Sources reviewed

• Ipsos, Customer Experience in Australia: The Missing Link - Australia's Emotional CX Blindspot, 2025
• Qualtrics, 2026 Consumer Experience Trends Report
• Gartner, Survey Finds 91% of Customer Service Leaders Under Pressure to Implement AI in 2026
• ServiceNow, AI helps cut 10 million hours from Australia's on-hold crisis, 2026
• OAIC, Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey 2023 infographic
• National Anti-Scam Centre, Targeting Scams Report 2025
• Forrester, Global Customer Experience Index Rankings 2025
• KPMG Australia, Customer Experience Excellence FY25-26 report
• KPMG Australia, Australia leads the world on responsible AI, but lags on productivity gains, 2026
• National AI Centre, AI Adoption Tracker
• National AI Centre, Get ready for AI
• National AI Centre, Guidance for AI adoption: implementation guidance