Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pega. Don joins me today to talk about resiliency, focus, reducing complexity, how tech can help, what lessons he has learned from the pandemic, the upcoming Pegaworld (www.pegaworld.com) and who he is most looking forward to hearing speak.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Busting some CCaaS and CX technology myths – Interview with Vasili Triant of UJET – and is number 425 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 this month.

Pega is a low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation. It’s scalable architecture helps the world’s leading organizations work smarter, unify experiences, and adapt instantly – so they’re always ready for what’s next.

Check out the latest from Pega at their annual conference, PegaWorld iNspire, which will focus on how to address constantly shifting perspectives in an ever-evolving world, including guidance, strategies, and powerful tools to achieve resiliency in the face of rapid change. Agenda and registration details can be found at pegaworld.com. The event will be held virtually on May 24 from 9:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. EDT for the Americas and Europe and again on May 25 from 10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. AEST for Asia Pacific.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Don:

• We’ve been through about 10 years of transformation in the past two years and a lot of what we’re going to be talking about at Pegaworld is how do we maintain that momentum.
• I don’t think that the pace of change is going to slow down. I think it’s just going to accelerate and the leaders in business are going to have to keep the pedal floored in order to keep up with the customer’s experience.
• You need great employee experience to deliver great customer experience.
• Really looking forward to hearing from T-Mobile and booking.com at Pegaworld.
  • T-Mobile are a great brand that are really focused on the experience of their clients or customers. They’re going to be talking about how they have used AI powered decisioning capability to deliver incredibly personalized and relevant conversations with their custom.
  • Booking.com, a European travel company, will be talking about how they’re using technology, especially automation, to improve the customer experience and service experience.
• So much of the breaks that we see in the service experience are really breaks in workflow and process.
• Things just feel so different and sometimes a little bit uneasy right now with all that’s going on in the world.
• There’s this shift happening in IT where it’s not just hard tech anymore it’s got to be human. It’s got to be empathetic. You’ve got to have people who are collaborators with the business leaders and business leaders and innovators themselves.
• How does IT shift its perspective to become coaches for business people? IT has to help business leaders understand how to use this technology in a way that is sustainable, secure and scalable.
• Businesses have learned and seen how much agility and innovation is possible when you’ve no choice but to innovate.
• The challenge is how do we maintain that agility and innovation while building the human connection as we transition to a hybrid way of working.
• The thing that we need to have learned from the pandemic is that there will be big shifts that happen that we don’t predict.
• And, rather than trying to always predict what’s next, we need to be building resiliency and agility into our business and into our technology so that we’re building something that is designed to respond to what’s next, even when we don’t always know what that next is.
• Build for change.
• Don’s Punk CX word(s): Stripped down.
• Don’s Punk XL brand: REI

About Don

Don Schuerman is CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pega, responsible for Pega’s industry-leading platform and CRM applications. He has 20 years of experience delivering enterprise software solutions for Fortune 500 organizations, with a focus on digital transformation, mobility, analytics, business process management, cloud and CRM. Don has led enterprise software implementations and provided technology and architecture consulting to senior business and technology executives from Fortune 500 organizations, including American Express, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and BP. Don holds a BS in Physics and Philosophy from Boston College.

As a longtime improv comedian, Don believes that “Build for Change®” is more than a tagline – it’s a mindset, and that great teams bring adaptability, diverse voices, and a sense of fun to all they do.

Check out Pega, say Hi to Pega and Don on Twitter @pega and @donpega and check out Don’s LinkedIn profile.

Thanks to albertoadan on Pixabay for the image.