Learn more about CX Central 

CX Central was an industry initiative started by Justin Tippett, a veteran of the Australian Contact Centre industry, who launched the website in 2011.

Justin’s goal was to provide useful resources for people looking to learn more about the contact centre industry all in one central location and without all the marketing spin and vendor-promoted content.

The sad reality was and still is, that the majority of content produced about contact centres and customer experience is ultimately marketing material designed to promote a particular product or service or generate leads rather than genuinely share knowledge and help progress the industry as a whole.

Unfortunately, the reality is that there is no commercial value in spending hours writing industry glossaries, maintaining an industry events calendar to make it easy for people to find upcoming events (like conferences, training courses etc), sharing best practice ideas, expert tips, thought leadership articles etc.

The only time content is typically produced is when someone is trying to sell something.

Our motivation for changing

Without great content, resources and tools to help educate and inspire people, how does our industry continue to grow and prosper?

Typically the role of industry bodies or government, it seems that whether it’s through a lack of resources or funding, strategic direction and so on there has been little industry progress in the past 20-odd years:

• Most associations now just seem to promote vendor content and awards programs rather than provide genuine industry resources.
• The biggest ‘industry’ conferences are produced by professional events organisations who see them as money-making events.
• There has been a lack of advocacy around our industry highlighting the important role contact centres, BPOs and customer experience practitioners play to the broader business community.
• In the broader business community, the importance of Contact Centres and Customer Experience still seems like an uphill battle despite the overwhelming evidence that when businesses invest in their customer experience, all key metrics improve.

So we need to do more.

And we are.

In September 2022, we launched a new Industry Association called the Australian Customer Experience Professionals Association (ACXPA).

ACXPA connects Australia’s contact centre, customer experience, digital service and customer service professions and has been founded, and is managed, by industry leaders to create better customer, business, career and industry outcomes.

What’s going to happen to CX Central?

All new content (articles, podcasts, glossary, resources etc.) will be published on the ACXPA website. We’ll be maintaining CX Central for a while longer as there are still thousands of people who still regularly access the content.

Over time, we’ll be migrating a lot of the popular articles over to ACXPA. Once all the key articles and glossary terms are moved across we’ll eventually turn the lights off on the CX Central website.

The evolution of CX Central

Like many great ideas, CX Central started as a concept over a few drinks (OK a lot of drinks!) about how we could try and change the perception of call centre work which at the time, was certainly not seen even remotely as a viable career choice.

Starting with Ac3TV (Australian Contact Centre Community TV) our initial focus was on video content where we had two key ‘channels’, one for operational employees and one for executives.

It’s a bit cringy going back to watch some of the videos now but our hearts and passion was in the right place!

Over time that morphed into articles and industry news on our Contact Centre Central website.  We launched our popular Call Centre Legends Facebook page back in 2016 and it’s now followed by over 23k people who enjoy the regular memes and the odd article.

As the traffic to the website continued to increase, in 2018, we transitioned to this website and launched our new branding as CX Central as our focus shifted to more than just the contact centre channel.

In 2019 we launched a new stand-alone new Supplier Directory to help people to connect to businesses providing products and services to the industry.

And finally, in October 2022, we had a soft launch of the ACXPA website and formally kicked things off in early 2023.