About ACXPA
Raising the standard of customer service and experience — wherever it’s delivered
ACXPA builds the independent tools, standards, benchmarking and learning that help the people responsible for customer outcomes make better decisions.
Born in Australia, grounded in three decades of real operational experience, and increasingly used by practitioners around the world — practical, independent, and built by people who’ve actually done the work.
Why ACXPA exists
Customer service and CX advice is everywhere. Genuinely independent, standards-led guidance — the kind that holds up inside a real operation — is rare.
From the frontline to the C-suite, the people who shape customer outcomes are trying to improve in an environment full of vendor influence, conflicting advice and shallow “best practice” that falls apart the moment it meets a real operation. The same problems persist year after year:
- Service is still undervalued. Too many boards and executives still treat customer experience as a cost to contain, not a driver of revenue, retention and reputation.
- The conversation is vendor-led. Industry knowledge, events and “best practice” are largely shaped by suppliers with something to sell — so genuinely independent guidance is hard to find.
- People work in silos. Practitioners are often isolated inside their own organisations and across the industry, unaware that proven best practice, standards and peer support already exist.
- Technology is outpacing understanding. AI and automation are being adopted faster than their impact is understood, and “automated” keeps getting mistaken for “improved.”
- There’s no clear path to improve. The people accountable for customer outcomes rarely have practical, structured guidance — or a way to build capability over time.
- There’s no shared yardstick. Without common standards or benchmarks, teams can’t tell what “good” really looks like, or prove they’re actually improving.
ACXPA exists to shift the centre of gravity back to what actually works — independent, practitioner-built, and focused on real, measurable improvement rather than trends.
The story behind ACXPA
ACXPA didn’t start in a boardroom, and it didn’t start in 2022. It started with one practitioner deciding the industry deserved better — and then spending more than a decade building it.
Founder & CEO, ACXPA
Justin Tippett has spent over 30 years in customer service and contact centres. He started on the phones and went on to build, run, outsource and transform large-scale customer operations across Australia and New Zealand. He’d seen the industry from every seat — frontline, team leader, operations, executive — and kept arriving at the same conclusion: the people doing the work were underserved, and most of the “help” on offer was really just someone selling software.
So in 2011 he started making the resources himself — independent, practical, and built for real roles and real operations. What followed wasn’t a single product launch but a long, deliberate evolution. As the industry changed, he kept rebuilding the vehicle to match it: community content, then expert knowledge, then recognition for the frontline, then a broader CX lens, then a supplier directory — each step a response to a gap he could see, never a pivot for its own sake.
In 2022, fifteen years of that work was consolidated into a single platform: ACXPA. The name was new. The mission wasn’t.
Today, Justin is Founder and CEO of ACXPA and Chair of the ACXPA Roundtables. He’s the co-creator of the Australian Call Centre Rankings and the Australian Contact Centre Quality Standards, founder of the specialist training organisation CX Skills, and — through his consultancy CX Consult — still hands-on with organisations across the public and private sectors. He’s also a regular independent voice in the media, called on when wait times blow out or complaints surge to explain what’s really going wrong behind the scenes and what actually fixes it.
What sets the work apart isn’t just its length — it’s the intent behind it. For well over a decade, most of what Justin built was given away free, with no commercial agenda: tools, articles, recognition, community and events. ACXPA runs on a membership model today, but a large share of its resources are still free to use — as the site itself makes clear. It would be hard to point to anyone who has put as much sustained time and energy into helping this industry improve, for this long, and asked so little in return.
That blend — three decades in operations, plus the standards and tools to back it up — is why ACXPA can claim something most can’t: it’s genuinely built by a practitioner, for practitioners.
Read Justin’s full profile and media bio →Fifteen years in the making
The detail matters, but the through-line is simple: practitioner-led, independent, and always building toward better outcomes.
- 2011 Ac3TV. Free, independent content showing the real career pathways and operational reality of contact centres.
- 2014 Contact Centre Central. Expert-driven articles, interviews and references to fill the industry’s knowledge gap.
- 2016 Call Centre Legends. A community built to recognise and celebrate the frontline.
- 2018 CX Central. A broader lens as CX matured into a discipline of its own.
- 2019 CX Directory. A structured way to find suppliers and partners — later the ACXPA Supplier Directory.
- 2022 ACXPA. Fifteen years of work consolidated into one membership-led platform for tools, standards, learning and community.
- 2023–26 Acceleration. The Australian Call Centre Rankings, monthly roundtables, the Call Quality Assessment service, an advanced learning platform, the WFM, Coaching & Performance and Training & Onboarding Hubs, the Complaints Handling Toolkit, the CX & Contact Centre Maturity Assessments, and a growing QA and benchmarking tool suite.
- Jun 2026 A global direction. Australia remains ACXPA’s home — the Rankings, events and community stay put. What’s opening up is the knowledge: most of what ACXPA publishes is global best practice, so the same independent standards, tools and resources can now help teams anywhere in the world deliver customer excellence and improve efficiency in the process.
What makes ACXPA different
ACXPA isn’t a membership association you pay simply to belong to. It’s a working resource that gives something back — tools, standards, benchmarking, training and peer support, with a lot of it free. A few things set it apart:
Built by a practitioner, not a committee
Every framework, tool and standard comes from someone who’s been accountable for service performance and lived the trade-offs between cost, quality and capability.
Independent, not vendor-led
There’s some sponsorship and advertising on the site, but vendors don’t shape the content, standards or recommendations — and nothing here is trying to sell you. Education and support always come first.
Standards before slogans
The focus is on shared standards, benchmarks and frameworks that hold up in practice — not catchy ideas that sound good and change nothing.
Built to improve real decisions
Whether you’re assessing a service model, building a CX program or adopting new technology, the job is to help you decide better — not to sell you a single answer.
Where it’s going
The mission was always bigger than geography. The problems ACXPA was built to solve — undervalued service, a vendor-led conversation, siloed teams, and technology adopted without clarity — aren’t unique to Australia. They show up across every developed service economy.
Australia stays ACXPA’s home — the Rankings, the chapters and the community aren’t going anywhere. What’s opening up is the knowledge: most of what ACXPA publishes is global best practice, so the same independent standards, tools and resources can help teams anywhere in the world deliver customer excellence, and improve efficiency in the process.
