Today’s interview is with Tom Libretto, the CMO of Pega, an enterprise software vendor that focuses on customer engagement, intelligent automation and customer service solutions for the world’s largest brands. Tom joins today to talk about the upcoming PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems, what we are likely to see and learn, some of the big challenges that enterprises are currently facing, particularly in response to the coronavirus outbreak, and how they have been responding.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why we need to democratise leadership development and how the coronavirus pandemic is highlighting the strength and power of a more feminine way of leading – Interview with Lauren Currie of Stride – and is number 343 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.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

It’s almost time for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems. Join them online for free on June 2nd from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time to learn how the world’s most impactful companies are driving digital transformation – which is more important than ever in the COVID-19 age. They’ll have compelling keynotes, demos, and case studies in a highly interactive virtual format and a few surprises as well. Go to www.pegaworld.com to register for free and check out the full agenda. I’ve attended the last several PegaWorlds in person and I can’t recommend it highly enough, so go register today! That’s www.pegaworld.com.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Tom:

• The current acute requirements of today have established a foundation for pervasive transformation on the other side of the crisis.
• Some commonalities that we’ve found include how clients have been inundated with customer requests at a much higher level than they have typically dealt with in a business as usual environment.
• Handling and triaging that volume and responding to customers or constituents has been an enormous challenge.
• One of the biggest challenges that the financial services sector has faced has been the need to quickly adopt government mandated care and payment relief programs or small business and personal loan programs.
• Whereas many large government clients are having to deal with large volumes of new intake requirements relative to unemployment claims.
• Traditionally digital transformation initiatives were long lead cycle affairs and nice to have with vague end dates in mind.
• The crisis has put a very pragmatic lens on top of the digital transformation definition.
• Many initiatives were previously more ambition vs immediate outcome oriented. No longer.
• Every company on the planet has quickly realized that that a digital business model or digital interactions will forever now be the norm.
• Here are some examples of what Pega put together to help their clients: Crisis Response Solutions Portfolio, the COVID-19 Tracker, and the Small Business Lending application.
• Customers are watching how brands are responding to this crisis and the stakes are extremely high. It really is going to be a moment of either destroying brand loyalty and retention levels or becoming a leader in that regard and coming out the other end of this stronger.
• Paraphrasing a Churchill quote: This the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.
• Firms need to take a center out approach and start from the middle of their business by adopting a digital platform that that can be the source for defining their business logic and that can be then driven it into all channels all of the time.
• In terms of the future of service and what it looks like:
  • The concepts of seamless or frictionless customer experiences, omnichannel or channel less experiences etc has long been on everyone’s Powerpoint charts. But, the current crisis has put a face to some of those concepts that has resulted in real action, particularly around self service or diverting requests to digital channels so that they can 5x the number of concurrent calls that a CSR can handle.
• The crisis is forcing people to clean up the gaps that have been exposed by the current environment.
• Tom’s Punk CX word: Grit (resiliency)

About Tom

Tom Libretto is the SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of of Pega, an enterprise software vendor that focuses on customer engagement, intelligent automation and customer service solutions for the world’s largest brands.

Tom joined Pega in August 2016 and is responsible for leading global marketing initiatives, including brand, advertising, digital marketing, product marketing, industry marketing demand generation, corporate communications, customer engagement, events, and marketing operations. He has more than 20 years of marketing leadership experience in global technology organizations including Lotus, IBM, Nokia, and JPMorgan Chase. His expertise includes marketing, sales, product management, corporate strategy, and business development.

Find out more about Pega at www.pega.com, go to www.pegaworld.com to check out the agenda and register for free, say Hi to them on Twitter @pega and feel free to connect with Tom on LinkedIn here.

The image: “Android vs iPhone” by zugaldia is licensed under CC BY 2.0