During the 15th Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit held at the InterContinental Dubai Festival City, Telecom Review welcomed James Kirby, SVP and head of EMEA, CSG, in person. In an exclusive interview, Kirby elaborated on CSG’s technologies and plans for the years to come as well as his outlook on why telecoms is a crucial part of the world’s dynamic and challenging market conditions at present.
How does CSG tackle the ever-growing complexity of business in the digital age?
The digital era we're in has two different kinds of effects. Firstly, as a company, when the pandemic came in, we all had to work remotely and learn new ways of working together. We're in the software development and platform business and are used to working in an environment where teams collaborate closely. Shifting a remote working strategy meant that we had to rethink our working environment and approach to run projects effectively and efficiently for everyone involved. The teams pivoted immediately and have worked extremely hard to ensure the new virtual environment doesn’t affect our customers. I’m so proud of them! Even more so because we've been delivering ahead of schedule in many of our projects despite great uncertainty.
Secondly, the digital transformation we see across our customer base is exciting because this is where we can help enable them to embrace the available and emerging digital technology to accelerate their customer experience now and into the future.
What makes CSG’s capabilities on transformational experiences, customer engagement, digital monetization, and revenue and customer management thrive in the Middle East?
CSG is a purpose-driven, high growth, SaaS platform company that for nearly 40 years has helped some of the world’s most recognisable brands solve their toughest business challenges. We spend a lot of our time looking at customer experience and, whilst e continue to innovate our back-end billing technology, we’re also making significant progress in moving to the cloud and microservices.
We apply a customer-centric perspective and look at the entire customer experience and journey throughout the ecosystem. We constantly reconsider how to improve our customers’ customer experience and minimise the number of touchpoints to make it easier to interact with carrier CSPs.
What more can we expect from CSG’s industry-leading monetization and digital enablement portfolio for 2022 and beyond?
In 2021, CSG has progressively grown our organic research and development on accelerating products into the digital era. An element of this strategy was to acquire long-term partners across our customer engagement and revenue management solutions suites to bring them all together into one combined CSG deliverable that we can provide to our customers as a unified platform and as as a service. Moving into 2022, that means we can deliver a much richer, full stack.
In the Middle East specifically, we have many exciting things going on, with projects that we've been working on during 2021 starting to go live in 2022. More news on that will be announced early in the new year.
Why is telecoms a crucial part to cope with the dynamic and challenging market conditions at present?
In the digital era that we're in, how we communicate is crucial. People expect fast, interactive services and want things to be done in real-time, as and when they want them to. And that's where the carrier community can help drive growth in digital transformation. High agility is an urgent requirement in the B2B environment, and when offices once again start to reopen, the need for hybrid working models will pick back up.
Nothing is more fluid than the changing demands communication carriers experience. With this in mind, CSG work closely with our customers and at the speed of change so that by using our SaaS technologies, they can adapt to the changing market very quickly.