Intrepid Travel Scores Double Victory At Auscontact National Excellence Awards

Intrepid Travel has taken out two major honours at the 2025 Auscontact National Excellence Awards, earning national recognition for its ANZ Contact Centre and its ongoing investment in AI supported customer experience innovation.

Announced on Friday night, the awards celebrate the achievements of Australia’s top contact centres and customer experience teams. Intrepid stood out among strong competition, winning Contact Centre of the Year as well as Customer Experience Initiative of the Year for Digital Transformation.

The ANZ Contact Centre delivered an impressive year of performance, posting eighteen per cent revenue growth and achieving a record booking Customer Net Promoter Score of 83. The team also reported a jump in employee engagement to 85 per cent, up from 76 per cent the previous year, signalling a workplace culture that continues to strengthen.

Karen Shepherd, General Manager Sales and Customer Service ANZ at Intrepid Travel, said the recognition reflects a team deeply committed to its purpose.

“Every member of Intrepid’s contact centre contributes proudly to our mission to create positive change through the joy of travel. Guided by our core values of Ambitious, Impactful, Real and Together, our ANZ Contact Centre operates with passion and purpose. Our team believes in the work we do, knowing that each day we are delivering the best possible travel experience for our customers and for the planet. This commitment is what truly sets us apart.”

The company’s second win celebrated its digital transformation project, Building Intrepid’s Collective Wisdom and Leveraging AI. The initiative focused on creating a unified knowledge base within Salesforce and incorporating AI tools such as Einstein Search Answers and Service Replies to support faster, more accurate customer service.

Melissa Teo, Knowledge Content Manager at Intrepid Travel, said the transformation placed people at its core.

“At the heart of every metric is our people and their drive to make things clearer and easier for our customers. This initiative has been about unifying our knowledge and using AI in a way that elevates rather than replaces human expertise. To be recognised nationally for this work is incredibly validating and reinforces that human first innovation makes the biggest impact.”

The results of the project highlight its impact. Intrepid’s centralised knowledge base now contains more than six thousand articles and recorded more than three hundred and eleven thousand views in 2024. It supported the resolution of more than sixteen thousand cases, more than triple the original target. The company estimates annual time savings of around four hundred thousand dollars, driven by faster search, AI assisted case handling, smoother onboarding and less time spent switching between platforms.

AI powered Service Replies have also helped consultants respond more confidently and consistently to live messages, with people maintaining full control of all communication. Internal knowledge confidence scores have risen sharply from NPS 36 to 57.

Intrepid’s ANZ Contact Centre supports travellers from planning through to booking across more than eight hundred and eighty six trips in more than eighty countries. The team works across phone, live chat and email channels and consistently keeps Customer Satisfaction above 89 per cent.