Business IT News / AI and Data
The customers who leave without telling you why: what I’m asking Ryan Rayner live on 3 September 2026
PwC found 29% of customers have stopped buying from a brand over a bad experience, and almost none of them say so on the way out. Amazon Connect has just become a family of agentic AI products, with AWS suggesting 60 to 70% of contact centre calls could be handled by machines. iCXeed co-founder and chief customer officer, Ryan Rayner, sits between those 2 facts for a living. I’m putting both to him in a free 45-minute live Q&A on Thursday 3 September.
Registration is open now on iTWire, so I’m publishing my prep in the open. If you’re coming, you’ll know what’s on my list. If I’ve missed the question that actually matters to your business, submit it when you register and I’ll ask it for you.
This is the third of 3 free live sessions run by NEXTGEN and AWS through the AWS SMB Hub, aimed at Australian small and medium businesses trying to get value out of cloud, AI and customer experience without hiring a platform team to do it. AI with Asa Cox runs on 20 August and cloud with Tim Jenkinson on 27 August. More on both at the bottom.
The format is 45 minutes at 11:00am AEST: 5 minutes of welcome, 35 minutes of live conversation and audience questions, 5 minutes to close. There are no slides. My job is to keep it moving and make sure everyone leaves with something sharper than a brochure answer.
Register free for the customer experience session on 3 September
Why this matters to an iTWire reader
Customer service tooling has changed shape in the past 6 months, and most small businesses haven’t noticed yet.
On 28 April 2026, AWS renamed Amazon Connect to Amazon Connect Customer and turned it into a family: Customer for service, Decisions for supply chain, Talent for hiring, Health for patient work. Behind that sit 29 autonomous agent features launched at re:Invent 2025, and a claim from AWS that 60 to 70% of contact centre calls could be handled by AI.
“AI should work like a teammate, not a tool,” said AWS SVP of applied AI solutions, Colleen Aubrey, arguing the products should slot into how a business already works rather than forcing it to rebuild around them.
That’s the supply side. The demand side is less comfortable. PwC’s 2025 research, cited by Ryan Rayner in his iTWire piece on 22 July 2026, found 29% of customers have stopped buying from a brand because of poor experience. They rarely file a complaint. They just go quiet.
For a business with 5,000 customers, that’s a meaningful number of people leaving without ever appearing in a support queue, which means they never appear in the reporting either.
Ryan’s framing is the one I can’t shake: “Customers who drift away never tell you why; they just stop. Our job is to spot their frustration and design it out before you lose them.”
The interesting tension is between those 2 facts. AWS is offering to automate 60 to 70% of the conversations. The customers who matter most are the ones not having a conversation at all.
My guest today is iCXeed co-founder and chief customer officer, Ryan Rayner, in Sydney.
Ryan has spent 20 years inside customer operations across 3 continents. He ran marketing for Australia and South East Asia at Tenova from 2006, then global marketing out of Vancouver, then came back to Sydney to run sales and marketing for the same group. Then 2 stints at TTEC, finishing as regional vice president for Asia Pacific, then head of strategy and growth at Sigma Connected. He co-founded iCXeed in October 2022.
iCXeed is an AWS Advanced Tier services partner holding the Amazon Connect and AI Services competencies, with more than 75 years of combined contact-centre experience across its founders. Its platform, CXperience Builder, is designed to stand up in under an hour with no upfront fee and no lock-in.
Here’s the result that made me want this session. Scene to Believe, the Australian outfit behind a great many Santa and event photographs, lifted customer satisfaction by 40 points, cut voice support costs 70%, now self-serves 78% of queries, and absorbed 35 times its normal volume through the Christmas rush. If you’re going to stress-test a contact centre, Santa season will do it.
The part of Ryan’s argument I want to press on is the diagnosis rather than the tooling. His view is that the underlying problem is fragmentation: every channel running on its own island, customers repeating themselves, and staff who can’t see the whole history of the person they’re talking to.
Questions I will ask in between yours
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You cite PwC’s finding that 29% of customers have walked away from a brand over bad experience, and they don’t announce it. How does a business with no analytics find those people before they’re gone?
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Scene to Believe self-serves 78% of queries. What’s in the remaining 22%, and which parts of it should stay human permanently?
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AWS is now saying 60 to 70% of contact centre calls could be handled by AI. Does that hold in a 10-seat operation, or is it an enterprise number?
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Amazon Connect became Amazon Connect Customer in April, alongside Decisions, Talent and Health. AWS SVP of applied AI solutions, Colleen Aubrey, said “AI should work like a teammate, not a tool.” What actually changed for a small business, past the naming?
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CXperience Builder deploys in under an hour. What still takes 6 weeks, and who has to do it?
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Where does AI in customer experience fail most visibly? I want the specific failure, named, with what it did to the customer.
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What’s the smallest business that should be thinking about journey analytics at all? Is there a floor?
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Your delivery talent is in the Philippines and your automation is agentic. How does a 20-person Australian brand still sound like itself across both?
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If an owner can only watch 1 metric weekly, what is it, and what does a bad week look like?
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Give me a real example of designing a problem out rather than answering it faster. What did you change, and what happened to the call volume?
What the room will probably ask, so join us live and ask your own, privately or publicly
CX audiences get personal fast, because they’ve all been on the wrong end of a bad IVR. Questions you could expect, personalise and add to:
Will customers know they’re talking to a bot, and do we have to tell them?
What happens when the bot can’t help? How fast does it hand over, and to whom?
We’re 12 people and everyone answers the phone. Is a contact centre platform overkill?
Can it handle our accents, our product names, our jargon?
What does this do to our team? Are we cutting roles or moving them?
How does it connect to our CRM, our booking system, our shopping cart?
What’s the cost per interaction versus what we pay now?
Our reviews are the real problem. Does any of this touch that?
How long before it sounds like us rather than like every other bot?
This one closes the series, so it does double duty.
I ask Ryan for the single weekly metric and the number that should worry an owner. Then I ask for the 3 things he’d fix in the first 30 days at a business where 6 people answer everything between them.
Once again, I re-state the 3 sharpest things I thought he said, and check I’ve got them right, which should be insightful nuggets of customer experience wisdom worth remembering!
Then an offer: a free 15-minute one-on-one with Ryan through the CX guide page, plus the Must-Know Tech Guide for SMBs.
In this last session, I wrap all 3 sessions and where they can be replayed, and do so in 30 seconds: Asa on where to point AI first, Tim on the foundation underneath it, Ryan on what the customer feels at the other end. Same stack, 3 vantage points.
Previous recordings and the earlier video interviews all three did with iTWire contributor, Nick Ross, including Asa Cox on the Numa platform, are on the resources page.
Why it’s worth your time to register and attend this free event
Your time is the scarcest thing you own, so here’s the case in plain terms.
You get 45 minutes with someone who has spent 20 years inside customer operations and now builds contact centres that swallow 35 times their normal volume without falling over. He can answer at the level of what it cost and how long it took, which is the level that helps you.
You get to ask your own question, live. The Zoom webinar format lets you put it to the room publicly or send it to me privately, and I’ll ask it either way. If it’s the question you’ve been quietly stuck on for 6 months, this is a very cheap way to get it answered.
The format respects your calendar. 5 minutes of introduction, 35 minutes of questions, 5 minutes to close. No slides, and no vendor preamble before anything useful happens.
Anything we run out of time for still gets answered. Ryan will work through the leftover questions in a follow-up article on iTWire, so registering gets your question answered whether or not the clock beats us.
You can keep going one-on-one, for free. Ryan is offering a no-obligation 15-minute session afterwards.
Can’t make the time? Register anyway. The recording goes to everyone who signs up, so you can watch at 5am with a coffee if that’s when your day has a gap in it.
There’s also the free Must-Know Tech Guide for SMBs.
The real reason, though, is the 29% at the top of this page. Those customers already left, they didn’t tell you, and they’re the cheapest ones you’ll ever get back if you can work out what drove them off.
The other 2 sessions in this series
This is 1 of 3, and the other 2 sit underneath the customer experience question. Both are free.
Thursday 20 August, 11:00am AEST: AI, with Arcanum AI CEO and co-founder, Asa Cox. The ABS says 11% of Australian small businesses used AI last financial year. Deloitte Access Economics says two-thirds, and reckons the step from basic to intermediate use is worth 45% more profit, with another 111% beyond that. Asa’s customers have built more than 1,600 AI agents, and one tea company recovered roughly 190 hours of work in 90 days. This is the session about where to point AI first. Read my briefing notes for the AI session, and register free to attend!.
Thursday 27 August, 11:00am AEST: cloud, with Fitzroy IT CEO and founder, Tim Jenkinson. Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report puts wasted cloud spend at 29%, the first rise in 5 years, and it’s pinning the increase on AI workloads. Tim has built more than 500 cloud environments and took Future Super’s 4-hour batch job down to 1 hour. This is the session about the foundation everything else sits on, and what it costs when that foundation is wrong. Read my briefing notes for the cloud session, and register free to attend.
Australia has the infrastructure. AWS is spending AU$20 billion here by 2029 and has trained more than 400,000 Australians since 2017. What’s missing is the layer between that capacity and a business with 30 staff and no platform engineer.
That layer is people like Ryan Rayner, and the honest way to assess him is to ask hard questions in public and watch how he answers. That’s the whole design of this session.
Register free for customer experience with Ryan Rayner on Thursday 3 September – or click the image below.
Bring the question you’re actually stuck on. Ask it live during the Zoom webinar, or send it to us and I’ll ask it for you. Questions we don’t get to can be answered in a follow-up article on iTWire.
Join us, and get the answers and information you seek to make a real difference!
