Global Speakers

Morris Pentel is a Customer Experience and Contact Strategy Designer and runs one of the most respected private Customer Experience and Contact Strategy consulting businesses in the world. Based in the UK, he has a track record for successful work for some of the largest institutions and government organizations all over the world. He has delivered workshops over the last 18 months in 11 countries and his designs have influenced billions of the world’s Customer Experiences.

Michael Stone is Director of Products at Invigor Group where he is responsible for the company’s portfolio of business intelligence and big data solutions. Prior to his current role he was CEO of Amethon Solutions, which was acquired by Invigor Group at the end of 2014. Before his appointment to Amethon, he spent 15 years at Ericsson in a number of solution management, general management and sales management roles focused on mobile network infrastructure and applications. Throughout his career, Michael has worked across a wide range of retail industries including shopping centres, telecommunications, consumer electronics and liquor to generate meaningful and actionable insights from big data analytics, helping businesses grow through digital and mobile transformation.

A proven leader and innovator with extensive digital platform, marketing, ecommerce and sales expertise covering all areas of digital marketing, technology and process design, and platform integration both B2B and B2C, Jethro is a digital leader who has delivered success for some of the world’s leading brands across a wide variety of sectors including financial services, software as a service (SaaS), IT, and manufacturing and technology across channel execution, platform integration and successful strategic execution both in the APAC region, in the UK, and for global strategic execution.

Jethro has delivered strategic digital marketing including go to market and business strategy and business transformation, and is skilled at building credibility and relationships across business lines to achieve objectives.  He enjoys developing and leading high performing, motivated cross functional teams. A mentor and an advocate of driving direct online sales activation and engagement, he is passionate about the integration of people, process, and technology required to truly achieve great digital experience, and deliver transformation for organizations and customers.

As the Head of Analytics for Microsoft Australia, Des is responsible for the data and analytics platforms used to create value for the customer.  In this marketing leadership role, Des is leading the implementation of a personalization strategy to support modern marketing and a cross-functional, customer-centered program.

Ian Aitchison is the CEO of the Asia Pacific (APAC) region of COPC Inc. and has great expertise in Australian and Asian customer experience, contact center and operational strategy, having worked extensively throughout the region. He has more than twenty years of experience in the customer experience and contact center industry, marked by the consistent delivery of quality, service and process improvement that is the hallmark of the COPC^® Family of Standards.

In addition to leading COPC Inc. in the Asia Pacific region, Ian provides management training and consulting advice to more than 25% of the world’s top 50 brands. He is a senior auditor for the COPC CSP Standard, is a Six Sigma Black Belt, is the Chairman of the Annual Contact Centres Asia Conference and has been a member of the judging panel for the Malaysian Contact Centre of the Year Awards since 2012.

Tom’s career has enabled him to work with some of the world’s biggest commercial and not for profit brands on some of their most successful campaigns. In his current role as Agency Account Director at Amicus Digital, he’s fortunate to work with clients across JAPAC to streamline their social content planning, publishing and reporting.

Anthony has a career spanning over thirteen years in customer focused client-side roles. After over a decade in the banking sector, he set out to demonstrate that using a common set of customer experience principles, he could help the higher education sector embark on the CX journey. Working with La Trobe Univeristy, he set up the first dedicated customer experience tracker in the Australian higher education sector. Anthony implemented the tracker as part of the wider CX program of initiatives to proactively position the student experience as a key benefit in the advent of further industry deregulation.

Anthony recently joined Australian Unity’s Healthcare business, to apply the same principles by mapping the customer journey against key data points, thereby creating measurable tracking of benefits and easy prioritization of improvements.

Anton is an Executive with extensive global experience in developing, growing and managing profitable, innovative technology solutions and services across Utilities, Public Safety, Transport, Media, Mining, Banking, Education and Healthcare that drive value for the business and deliver real outcomes. An Innovator, Thought Leader, Visionary and Technology Strategist who has a proven track record of turning ideas into successful products and taking it to market.

Anton is Head of Customer Solutions & Technology Strategy for Telstra Health. In this role, Anton is leading Telstra Health’s design of customer solutions, business development & technology strategy which drives continuous revenue growth. Provides technological and business leadership in business development, architecture governance framework, technology strategy, future technology, innovation and road map. He is currently an honorary advisory member of The TamilNadu Dr.M.G.R. Medical University.

Ivana Sekanic is currently the Customer Advocacy Manager at Medibank, a leading health insurance provider, responsible for all aspects of the NPS. Prior to joining Medibank, Ivana spent 6 years at Aggreko in various roles encompassing successful initiatives around NPS in the B2B space, whilst identifying root causes and driving continuous improvement.  Ivana began her career at Powerco, one of the leading energy distributors in New Zealand.

With 11 years industry experience spanning across energy and healthcare sectors, Ivana has significant experience in developing organisational strategy around great customer insight.  She is a passionate advocate of using lean methodologies to solve complex customer problems. Ivana holds a Lean Six Sigma qualification from Ohio State University (USA) , Bachelor of Computing and a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing and International Business from University of Tasmania (AUST).

Ivana is focused on delivering customer insights that help inform what drives customer satisfaction and how to create business value through acting on customer feedback.

Rich is Head of Analytics and Innovation at Performics Australia, part of a global performance marketing network built for the relentless pursuit of results. Rich leads the Performics analytics team to drive high impact business insights from data for Australia’s largest brands including Toyota, Lexus, Stan and Michael Page. Rich is an insightful and engaging speaker on a variety of data-driven marketing and analytics topics, drawing on 11 years’ experience to demonstrate how brands can use analytics to drive real business value.

Brandon Ward (Head of Acquisition) leads a high performing marketing team at OFX to identify and scales opportunities across paid and organic search, paid social, and a range of display platforms. Using a fail-fast approach, Brandon has overseen extensive growth and channel diversification globally at OFX, Australia’s preeminent foreign exchange transfer service provider, while delivering substantial reductions on a cost-per-acquisition basis. Prior to OFX, Brandon held performance based digital marketing & conversion rate optimization management roles at Telstra, Optus, and Westpac after earning his stripes agency side at PHD within paid search.

Declan is Manager of Customer Insights & Analytics at Sunsuper. He leads the team that is responsible for Customer Experience, Customer Research & Data Science that works to bring the customer perspective into day-to-day business decisions at all levels of the organization, from CEO to call center representative.

He has spent the last 20 years working in financial services in Australia, Europe & the US with a strong focus on delivering manageable customer insights that can truly be operationalized. His experience spans retail and investment banking, management consulting and, for the last 7 years, superannuation in Australasia.  He strongly believes that the customer perspective needs to be included at the start of every discussion and not at the end, as happens all too frequently. At Sunsuper, he is working to drive a cultural shift from a task oriented, internally focused perspective to a genuine customer-centric perspective. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative customer research and big data analytics, Sunsuper is striving to make the best decisions from a corporate perspective and a customer one.