ACXPA National Advisory Board Member
Simon Blair
General Manager, Benchmarking — ACXPA
Australia’s leading expert in contact centre quality assessment and mystery shopping, with more than 30 years in the industry and over 50,000 sales, service and retention calls personally assessed.
Profile
Simon Blair is the General Manager, Benchmarking at ACXPA, responsible for the monthly Australian Call Centre Rankings report, the Customer Service Benchmarking service and the fixed-price Contact Centre CX Benchmarking service.
Simon is widely regarded as Australia’s #1 expert in Contact Centre Quality Assessment and mystery shopping for sales and customer service. Across his 30+ year career within the contact centre industry, Simon has personally assessed in excess of 50,000 sales, service and retention calls — so more than anyone in this space, he knows definitively what works and what doesn’t.
Career
From starting at the coalface with Telstra back in the 90s, Simon worked as a Team Leader and Management Coach, and then with ANZ in the early 2000s as the Quality Manager and Trainer for their Consumer Credit Card business.
In 2005, Simon joined Global Reviews as the Head of Contact Centre Benchmarking and developed Australia’s premier model and program for mystery shopping and benchmarking of the inbound sales customer experience. He facilitated Performance Insights Workshops in the boardrooms and senior management forums for many of Australia’s leading service companies, such as Telstra, ING Direct, NAB, HSBC, Medibank and AGL.
In 2009, he established his own consultancy business, Five Degrees, with a focus on quality assessment, mystery shopping, training and coaching for clients such as Toyota, VicRoads, Sony, RACT, Unisys and Willoughby Council — helping to both measure and improve their sales and service experiences.
Training
Simon is also one of the lead trainers at CX Skills, delivering courses across customer service, inbound sales, technical support, retail and contact centre leadership — including Contact Centre Coaching PRO. His courses have averaged a customer review rating of 4.9 out of 5.0.
Why ACXPA
With decades of continuously developing, testing and refining his call quality metrics and methodology, Simon is excited to help clients objectively and accurately measure the quality of their customer interactions — and to share those powerful, actionable insights to drive improvement.
