Join ISG’s CMO, Paul Gottsegen, as he interviews ISG Advisor, Prashant Kelker, about digital customer experience trends and predictions for 2022 – and the importance of connecting and leveling up your backend operations.
Transcript:
Prashant
[Continued from previous video]
I think we should go back to the first principles on design of workloads and not fall for newspaper headlines.
Paul
OK, fair enough, and let's fly down from the cloud and talk about the customer experience. Yeah, we've all been through the ringer. Now all the retailers you can go to, there are four or five spots in the parking lot for curbside pickup, which I kind of like. At the Gottsegen household, we don't go to a grocery anymore, but we eat well, and they deliver it. And what’s cool is my sweet wife will give me a heads up where the next delivery is, and then we know that the truck’s within 5 minutes delivering the groceries.
But see, that's all done, so that's the kind of my new normal in in the world of as we live now, kind of settled in. The dust is settled on the real must-haves over the first wave of, you know, these new challenges and the dynamism. Moving into 2022 customer experience, what are some of the interesting opportunities or challenges that organizations will face as they think about better serving their consumers?
Prashant
That's a good question, Paul. I think what organizations have done very well over the last three years is this: they've ticked a few boxes on user experience, be it mobile or portals. They've been working on their front end.
I think COVID-19 forced everybody to start thinking about curbside pickup, which is actually backend processes. So, most of the spends we are seeing at the moment are moving away from front end to connect front end to mid office to back office.
So, you know, we’re asking:
- What's the kind of inventory you need to have curbside pickups?
- How much can you predict in advance?
- Do you have the right stuff in your inventory?
- Do you need a new place to store things?
I think that's that's where the spends are.
The second thing is, of course, on ecommerce. We're seeing lots of spends on connecting customer experience with agent experience with employee experience, and then the ecommerce trail which has to go throughout. That's where I think the next spends will be for the coming four or five quarters.
About the authors
Paul Gottsegen
Paul is President, ISG Client Experience, managing the firm’s marketing activity globally, including demand generation, branding and communications. He is a leader in the firm’s work to establish and maintain a leading position in AI and new technologies and to capitalize on the opportunities they present. From 2019 to 2023, Paul led the ISG Research business to great heights, and continues as Chair, ISG Research.
Paul was a classic product marketing leader for PC hardware for the first 20 years of his career, including launching the industry’s first network servers. He has since applied that product marketing experience to CMO roles in large services firms. While marketing is his “center of gravity,” he has led large sales organizations and has been a general manager with full P&L responsibility.
Prior to ISG, he was the Chief Marketing Officer for Mindtree and Infosys, completing end-to-end branding and marketing turnarounds. As Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at HP, Dell Inc., and Compaq earlier in his career, Paul led product marketing, revenue marketing and enterprise alliances for the network server businesses.
Paul is Board Chair of the Gastric Cancer Foundation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brandeis University and an MBA from The Wharton School.
Prashant Kelker
Prashant Kelker is President, ISG DACH, and Chief Strategy Officer. A globally recognized thought leader in AI and technology-led transformation, Prashant is shaping the firm’s strategic blueprint and bringing together all advisory capabilities to guide clients in the DACH region through the convergence of AI, digital technology and enterprise operating models.
Previously, as Partner, Americas Consulting, he led the effort to be the first sourcing advisory firm to establish a reference architecture for applied Generative AI with the 2023 ISG State of Applied Generative AI Market Report and played a key role in the development of our highly successful ISG NEXT operating model in 2020. Prashant joined ISG in 2012.
Before joining ISG, Prashant was a Technology Director at Accenture, where he won and established several new accounts and created digital offerings on mobility and predictive analytics. He earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore and a BE in Electronics from Bangalore University in India.
