Today’s interview is with Mark Smith, who is Senior Vice President of Digital Experience at CSG and is a business leader with 25 years of global experience in Customer Experience Management, Real-Time Interaction Management, and Analytical CRM. 

Mark is a friend of the podcast and has appeared here twice before. Once in 2017 and again in 2021.

This interview is slightly different this week as it’s a slightly trimmed and repurposed LinkedIn Live conversation that Mark and I had in December. You can check out the original here.  

I thought I’d share it on the podcast as it was a super interesting conversation about customer journey orchestration and some very cool stuff that Mark and his team have been developing across at CSG.

Enjoy!

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leadership lessons from the winner of the 2022 CX Leader of the Year – Interview with Maneesha Bhusal of JD .ID – and is number 452 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Mark:

• CSG has just released some new stuff called Xponent Ignite.
• Research conducted with Forrester showed that 90% of CX leaders said that deciding how to get started picking the first challenge was the number one challenge.
• Ignite is a set of tools in our Xponent platform to help with that, particularly focusing on customer journey orchestration.
• The toolkit also comes with a ROI calculator, a maturity assessment and a set of templates to help customers get started in the right way for their organization and their customers.

• To paraphrase Jack Springman (RIP)…while many in the CX space talk about having empathy for customers too many of them forget that they also have internal customers and you also have to have empathy for them.
• The maturity model is the best way of deciding where to go and what to tackle and helps you understand where you are and provides achievable goals to aim for. 
• In terms of the templates, we’ve essentially encapsulated and engineered all of the know-how we’ve been gathering for 10 years into this library of journeys. 
• The final component is a library of system connectors to about 103 of the most popular communication tools and data systems in an organisation. This is done industry by industry, so the top tools in each industry can plug into the existing infrastructure.
• One client, a bank in the US, is applying this technology and approach top its collections business and has been able to increase collections by around 30% and has allowed them to retain 23% of customers that would have been completely lost to the bank. 
• To really deliver on customer experience for many organisations requires an organisational change. It requires leadership attention because it requires the organisation to break down silos. People often talk about silos in technology and data terms, but many organisations have silos in terms of their organisational structure and their people and their incentives. 
• This journey approach can help tackle alot of the silos that plague many organizations.
• What we have developed will become CX as a service.
• Customers don’t talk about experiences, and they don’t talk about journeys. They talk about stuff that they want to do and achieve and get and or get rid of. 

About Mark

Mark Smith is Senior Vice President of Digital Experience at CSG and is a business leader with 25 years of global experience in Customer Experience Management, Real-Time Interaction Management, and Analytical CRM. He specializes in SaaS journey orchestration, customer analytics intelligence, cross-channel marketing, solution sales, and is a regular speaker at prominent industry conferences and events. Mark holds a PhD in Mathematics and Statistics as well as a BSc in Physics from The University of Edinburgh.

Check out CSG and what they are doing in customer journey orchestration, say Hi to them and Mark on Twitter @csg_i and @MapSmith13, respectively and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Photo by form PxHere