CX Marketing 2026 Day 2

Khwathelani Tshikovhi

Opening keynote. As delegates head back to build their 2027 CX budgets, this is the "how do I prove all of this worked" session — modern metrics and experimentation frameworks that tie experience investment directly to revenue and retention. Leaving the room with a business case, not just inspiration.

Debi Potgieter, CCXP, ACXP®, CCCX

Fireside chat. As AI takes on more customer-facing decisions ahead of the high-stakes festive trading period, this is the session that keeps leaders honest: transparency, fairness, and auditability aren't compliance checkboxes, they're what determines whether customers trust the brand behind the algorithm. Real case studies, real tension, no easy answers — a deliberate change of pace from the keynote.

Pragashani Reddy

Why the future of CX belongs to organisations that can predict what customers need before they ask. Overview: Customer experience has become obsessed with journey maps, channels and touchpoints. But customers don’t experience organisations that way. They experience moments — moments of uncertainty, effort, decision, frustration, relief, trust and delight. This keynote challenges leaders to shift from managing journeys to orchestrating moments. The topic explores how organisations can use AI, customer signals, real-time data and human judgement to recognise what is happening, anticipate what the customer needs and remove friction before the customer has to ask for help. The central argument: The future of CX isn’t about creating more interactions. It’s about creating fewer moments that feel difficult.

Grace Brown, MBA, Duke CE EDP

With festive-season contact volumes about to spike, this is the most operationally urgent session on the agenda. Workforce strategy, agent-assist tooling, and the metrics that prove AI is helping — not replacing — your people, right when capacity is about to be tested hardest.

Samantha Swanepoel

Reframed for November: as businesses head into festive-season peak trading and 2027 planning, AI has moved from pilot to production — it now has to survive volume spikes, outages, and real operational pressure the way any other core system does. This session sets the tone: reliability and infrastructure thinking aren't IT's problem anymore, they're a CX leadership problem.

The economic reality check. With South African consumer spending under continued pressure heading into the most price-sensitive shopping period of the year, this session is squarely about protecting margin without losing loyalty — value framing, frictionless loyalty mechanics, and targeted incentives that hold up under festive discounting pressure.

Closing session, deliberately. Positioned as the "act before Black Friday and December drop-off" session. Real-time signals and alerting let teams catch at-risk customers before the festive noise drowns them out — timed deliberately as the pivot point from operations into commercial strategy.