In an era where customer expectations evolve at lightning speed, businesses must embrace AI-driven insights, personalization, and seamless integrations to stay ahead. In this panel, PROS and industry trailblazers explore the future of customer experience. Discover how AI is revolutionizing interactions, enabling businesses to anticipate needs, optimize every touchpoint, and drive sustainable growth.
Featuring:
- Eileen Sweeney, Head of Global Sales, PROS
- Alyse Blackburn, VP of Pricing, North America, Schneider Electric
- Scot Stein, Chief Information and Digital Officer, IEWC
- Prabh sharan Singh, Director, Revenue Management and Pricing, Saudia Airlines
Full Transcript
Eileen Sweeney: Well, hello everyone. I know our last speaker ran over a little bit. So our clients who are our customer panel and I will probably do this in a speed round. But as I crutched up here, I loved this last thought around customer obsession is the surest compass because what we’re going to talk about is customer experience. And although it was a little slow coming up here with my leg, I have not in waned my passion for customer experience. And really at PROS we really think about customer experience is not just about having the right product at the right price at the right time, but it’s really more about how you’re interacting with your customer.
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Eileen Sweeney: What is the experience that you’re providing for them and what’s that buying journey looking at for them? So I am thrilled to announce with our panel coming up here today, please welcome our three panelists. Alyse from Schneider Electric, Scot from IEWC as well as Prabh from Saudia Airlines. Give them a round welcome of applause please. All right. So let’s jump in, folks. I’m just going to have you introduce yourself really quick. Prabh, I’m going to start with you.
Prabh Singh: Hi, Prabh Sharan Singh. I’m the director for pricing and revenue management Center of Excellence at Saudi Air.
Eileen Sweeney: Excellent. Scot.
Scot Stein: Hi. Good morning everyone. Scot Stein, chief information and digital officer at IEWC where I oversee our digital transformation roadmap, our digital marketing, all things data and AI, plus all the traditional enterprise IT technologies. IEWC is a global value added wire and cable distributor primarily serving large OEM customers and contract manufacturers. Through our smaller CableCon division, we do fiber optic as well as copper assemblies largely for the data center market and telecom.
Eileen Sweeney: Awesome.
Alyse Blackburn: I’m Alyse Blackburn. I lead pricing for Schneider Electric for North America. At Schneider Electric, we are a large industrial technology leader in electrical equipment services and software that helps you monitor it from anywhere in the world.
Eileen Sweeney: Great. And Alyse, I will say that when we shook hands on our partnership, you said you wanted to be on stage at Outperform and it wasn’t for all of these lights. But why was it?
Alyse Blackburn: Just to know that we had a successful project execution.
Eileen Sweeney: And it’s been a terrific partnership. And I will say you heard Scot give a rundown of what he distributes and stuff. Alyse and Scot are both customers of each other with Schneider and IEWC. So let’s jump into our questions as we move forward. I’m going to start with Alyse and Scot on this one. In terms of when you think about your own business, what does a truly seamless customer experience look like and how are expectations evolving?
Alyse Blackburn: I’ll start, I think really it’s just about bringing the B2C experience to a B2B market. When I think about what my expectations are set at, it’s set at what is the easiest experience I have on a daily basis and that’s that consumer experience that we’ve all grown used to. So how can we bring that into the B2B space that many of us operate in?
Eileen Sweeney: Scot.
Scot Stein: Yeah, agree. I would add for us, you know, thinking about seamless is repeatedly and reliably getting customers the information they want in any channel, any way that they want it. Certainly I would echo the Amazon effect that we see in B2C has for sure made its way into industrial B and B.
Eileen Sweeney: Terrific. And Prabh.
Prabh Singh: So customer expectations, particularly for the travel industry have dramatically increased since post-Covid and, you know, the ability for us to have synchronized experiences both digital and offline has become the need of the hour today.
Eileen Sweeney: I’m going to stick with this one for you, Prabh, while we’re on the airlines. A full journey from offer and order and quote to cash. It’s not really about always the perfect offer isn’t always about price. It could be about combining the price and the product to create the right offer and getting it in front of the customers at the right time. How is Saudia working through the complexity of the traditional airline systems to make this process both seamless and scalable?
Prabh Singh: So, a lot. Creating the perfect offer means aligning data which is sitting in silos, getting the decision making correct and delivery of this across multiple complex systems and exactly that’s where the entire complexity is. Traditionally, we have had a lot of changes that have happened over the last four or five years. And particularly how at Saudia we’re trying to transition into a much more modular, open offer and order platform which will allow us to create the right kind of dynamic bundling for seats and ancillaries across both digital and offline channels.
Prabh Singh: We also have a unique mix of customer base. As most of you in this room would know, Saudi as the flagship carrier for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it has also got a relatively large religious traffic movement and a large segments of this customer segment is still legacy processes and legacy paper driven customer experiences. And what it means for us is extremely challenging is drawing that fine balance between what we are able to deliver online versus offline and to this particular customer segment. So for us the complexity is amplified but we are up for it. Saudi has been behind the curve from our competitors within the region. But we don’t look at it that way. We look at it as an advantage because we can now literally just, you know, skip the queue and jump right ahead.
Eileen Sweeney: Right. You can meet the customer where they’re at.
Prabh Singh: Yes.
Eileen Sweeney: Excellent. Great. I’m gonna send this next one to Alyse. I want to jump ahead here. Alyse, at Schneider Electric, you made the hard decision to change your pricing platform and come to PROS. And a lot of that was adoption, customer experience. How has your implementation with PROS been different? And how have you been able to collaborate with your Salesforce teams to drive the adoption and to get the buy in that you’ve needed?
Alyse Blackburn: Yeah, I would say one of the questions we asked ourselves early on was where does sort of change management begin? And the answer is it began at the beginning. So before we ever signed on the dotted line, we did an almost year long RFP and we had some conflict within internal stakeholders who had maybe preferences toward other systems. And we managed through that conflict by saying while we were ready to sign on the dotted line a year earlier to work with PROS, we needed to use that opportunity to bring some of our global digital or IT stakeholders and pricing stakeholders on that journey with us.
Alyse Blackburn: So it started in the RFP process where we all ultimately decided to choose and select PROS. And then when we went from RFP to let’s put this project into reality, we established a really strong team. And we also had an existing team that was incredible, that had all of the knowledge and foundational awareness of sort of the existing vendor and how we were working, that we didn’t feel like we were starting from square one. We had a team that understood what price optimization was, understood what these technologies could do for us, and they were all there.
Alyse Blackburn: They were all ready to participate. We brought, I think, 20 people out to Houston for one of our earliest meetings with PROS, including our frontline pricers and authorizers. The people dealing with what the system would produce day in and day out validated our model all the way through. And now we are sitting here today, six months in, and really transitioning out of a hypercare period and into a run state period and determining how we base our knowledge sharing, how we take our core project team into sort of our core SME team and work with our existing teams to make sure that going forward, especially in today’s market, which as an industrial manufacturer is definitely a volatile one, we’re ready and we’re prepared to respond with great agility.
Eileen Sweeney: Great. Thanks. Scot, I’m gonna come back to you in terms of at IEWC, how are you thinking about the end to end customer journey from an IT perspective and a digital experience?
Scot Stein: So it’s interesting. I’ll start with kind of a mantra our CEO talks about for our business and it’s speed wins. So when we looked and started mapping out our customer journeys, really keeping this speed wins mantra in the forefront, we looked at the moments that matter in the customer experience and thought about how do we digitize, how do we speed things up? Which is in part what led us to PROS and using the real time pricing.
Scot Stein: The other thing, kind of key element here, aside from speed, was data. And how do we have the data available across the customer journey and customer experience? And we did a lot of pre-work on our enterprise data strategy, from governance to master data management and integration, moving data across our enterprise to really facilitate and enable our omnichannel digital customer experience at speed.
Eileen Sweeney: Great. I’m gonna stick with you, Scot, on this next one because I’m seeing this more and more as our sales teams are working with new logos, new clients. And what we’re seeing as part of the approval process or selection process is committees that are formed at the corporate level around the use of AI in the corporation. Understanding the data, understanding how the models are being trained. So you have that chief digital officer, CIO hat on. What are you doing at IEWC along those lines, or have you formalized it as much? Where is that trend going for you guys in the company?
Scot Stein: Yeah, I think about it in two ways. And Dr. Wu yesterday and his session actually reinforced and validated my thinking. So that was great.
Eileen Sweeney: All right.
Scot Stein: But I think traditionally about SaaS providers, and we’re always providing data and we’ve got some traditional processes. We review SOC reports and analyze vendor viability and data security of those providers that we’re sharing data with. I think generative AI has kind of amped up the game. This is where for us, we’ve put some limited governance in place, try to educate users what to do, what not to do. I’m very much encouraging folks to do it, but just, you know, don’t throw our entire financials into a model. Let’s be smart. What’s going on.
Scot Stein: We do have an AI Council which I chair. It’s made up of directors and other folks in the business. I kind of use them as my evangelists out there and ambassadors to make sure they’re training, you know, their colleagues as to how to and how not to use these tools. But I guess I’m the believer of don’t over govern it. Let’s experiment smartly and see where we get.
Eileen Sweeney: Are you having any restrictions on the data that can be out there in the AI models? Do you have to come down that path a little bit?
Scot Stein: We have it via some policy, but as far as enforcing it, no. We actually ran into the first instance of this last week about somebody actually downloading some third party AI note taking tool into one of our employee meetings which we have to look at actually maybe trying to block that kind of stuff. But that was a first.
Eileen Sweeney: Good. Great. So Prabh, I’m going to come back to you in terms of when it comes to the airlines, creating the best offer is that delicate balance that you’ve talked about around how is Saudia using AI to move beyond the traditional fair filing and towards a more dynamic personalized offers? And then how do you do that with the paper process that you still have to balance that you talked about a little bit.
Prabh Singh: So first of all, fair filing is static and is not going to change anytime soon. As much as we hear about it, it is what it is. And we as an airline, we alone cannot make that shift. We have to work together with all of our other partners in the ecosystem. However, what we are doing is, before the fair filing occurs there is a decision making process and we are leveraging machine learning and AI and where we’ve consolidated all of the data sets that go into this decision making process. And we have created this next best action recommendation engine that actually is empowering our analysts to make decisions much faster, smarter and be able to get to market as quickly as possible.
Prabh Singh: We’re now also going to start looking at analyzing our booking patterns, from what channels we’re getting them, what are customers preferring in terms of ancillaries like seats, bags, et cetera, et cetera. And we are leveraging all of this through machine learning, leveraging the willingness to pay model to position ourselves in a near real time basis across our digital channels. This will allow us to dynamically generate offers which will be based on full context of who our customer is, where is he at and what is he searching for. So we are on this journey. It’s not an overnight thing, but we’ve already started this journey. PROS has been a critical partner with us on this journey in the last 12 months and will continue to do so.
Eileen Sweeney: Awesome. Thank you. So let’s talk about balancing innovation and value and this is going to be the whole panel. So, Alyse, I’ll start with you. At PROS, we believe innovation only really matters if it delivers real, meaningful value for every customer. You saw agentic AI and some of the stuff that we talked about in the keynote today, how do you balance the push to innovate, whether through AI, automation or integrations? And how do you balance that with making sure your customers are actually gonna capture the value of what you’re trying to deliver to them and adopt it?
Alyse Blackburn: Yeah, I mentioned earlier, we have a really strong foundation in our pricing organization. And so for us, it’s, do you have the right to do that bold innovation. I think there’s no shortage of an appetite for it. But is your data clean? Do you have a team that sort of is staffed and ready with the right talent to go take that innovation forward and communicate those innovations out to the market?
Alyse Blackburn: And so it all comes back to me for the foundation. If you are set on good principles, good data, good policies and practices, then you can go automate and drive value and drive that speed through innovation to your partners, your customers, whomever you’re working with. But without that, I find it to be almost a distraction. And so in the background, we establish sort of an innovation roadmap, but we make sure our ducks are in a row before we start that journey, so that way we can be as successful as possible.
Eileen Sweeney: Great. Scot, what’s that mean for you guys? How do you do that?
Scot Stein: Yeah, I think this was a great question, because for a long time, if you don’t have a customer that wants to use it or your internal users that aren’t going to adopt it, it’s just a really fun technical science experiment, which is great sometimes if you’re in IT, but there’s no real value. So I always try and start with the voice of customer in mind. Are customers asking for something in this space? And if they’re not, and we’re going down this path, they better wind up using it. And I think that’s okay. I’m a big believer in innovation failing fast. You gotta try it. And we really try to be close to our customers, get feedback.
Scot Stein: So if it does fail, how do we get that feedback quickly to move on to the next thing? I do think, as Alyse was saying, there’s a couple things up front to really consider with innovation, and again, very important from a competitive advantage perspective, but looking at change management and the ability to measure an outcome. I don’t want to start an innovation initiative if I don’t know what I’m trying to improve.
Scot Stein: Have in mind what’s that outcome, that business outcome you’re trying to measure or improve before you start the innovation and then that can lead you to was I successful? And also starting that change management early is good. We’ve all heard if they’re not ready to adopt, if they’re not ready to do it, it’s gonna fall. Any technology solution’s gonna fall dead on arrival if nobody’s ready to pick it up.
Eileen Sweeney: Prabh, I’ll let you answer that.
Prabh Singh: Honestly, they’ve stolen my answers.
Eileen Sweeney: Well, we’re close to lunch, so we can keep going if you want.
Prabh Singh: So for us, I think a couple of things like Scot mentioned, we follow the same, which is try and adopt and fail fast so that you’re able to pivot and move to the next one. Eventually, it boils down to each and every initiative has to be anchored with one key metric which is driving a business value. Just like what you said, Scot, that there’s no point in just driving an AI or an automation initiative if there’s no real measurable impact that you make to the business or to your customer experience or whatever it is. So I think it’s important that each and every initiative is backed with a measurable business impact.
Eileen Sweeney: Great. Thank you. So I’m going to talk around… Alyse, you mentioned setting that foundation and your ability to be bold. So for companies listening today who are just beginning their AI driven customer journey experience, what’s the one mindset shift or the first step you’d recommend they focus on?
Alyse Blackburn: I think it’s as simple as understanding sort of what you put in is what you get out and where it becomes very important is the data that you’re putting in. So almost at like ground level in shifting toward this, do you have clean customer data? Do you have clean product or offer data? Do you know your sales history or is it in 27 different ERPs that you’re going to need to consolidate and bring together?
Alyse Blackburn: Because the goal for any sort of AI journey and transformation that you’re running in a business is to be able to extract value as fast as humanly possible. But there is a danger in the sense of if that data isn’t clean or if you don’t understand what that data holds, then you could send yourself very quickly as that machine is learning down a path that doesn’t make sense. So know your data, make sure your data is clean and think about that in every single step that you take between now and when you’re going to deploy because it really all comes back to that.
Eileen Sweeney: So Scot, for you, as you think about AI and automation becoming more central to that customer engagement, how will you define excellence in customer engagement over the next few years and how are you preparing for it today at least hit the data point. Are you doing anything different or in addition to?
Scot Stein: Yeah, I think data is part of it. That’s how we’re preparing to make sure we have access to our data, where it needs to be, when it needs to be there across the organization, not sitting in silos. You know, I think excellence from a customer experience perspective is, you know, how do our customers get personalized answers at speed whenever they want it and through any channel they want it. So data is a huge part of it. It’s kind of the foundation of what we call and how we’re working on our digital transformation and then also kind of this mindset of we call it the any channel strategy. However our customers want to interact with us and there’s six or seven points that they do, I want that data and those answers to be readily available regardless of how they want to interact with us.
Eileen Sweeney: Prabh, any suggestions?
Prabh Singh: I think the biggest is it’s a mindset shift. Don’t think of it as a technology upgrade. You have to use it and look at it as a tool or a mechanism through which you can actually deepen the customer experience. Don’t start with the algorithms. Start with the friction that your customer feels and then try and look to resolving that through the algorithms. Leverage the algorithms, leverage the science to resolve that friction. And that to me will be the setting stone of creating the right mindset across the organization.
Eileen Sweeney: That’s terrific. I know we’re into the lunch hour, so I’m just going to ask one final question as we’re starting to lose the audience a little bit. And I know a couple of you have your own commitments that you have to make. If you could sum it up in one line for us, what does a wonderful customer experience mean to you, regardless of industry or technology? Prabh?
Prabh Singh: Okay. So I think that is where every interaction, be it offline or online, is clear, timely, and it solves a need with minimal or no friction, is a great customer experience.
Eileen Sweeney: Okay. Scot, how about you?
Scot Stein: Kind of one line. They ask for more. They’re coming back to buy again and a repeat customer due to the amazing experience they have.
Eileen Sweeney: I can’t be the head of sales and not ask you for an order. And I hope you’ve had a wonderful customer experience. That’s at 12:30.
Scot Stein: That’s at 2:30. Today I’ve got that meeting.
Eileen Sweeney: I think so. Okay. Perfect. And Alyse, we’ll end with you.
Alyse Blackburn: It’s pretty simple for me. If I’m the customer, I want you to be anticipating my needs before I even know that they exist. So if I’m having the best experience I’ve ever had and it’s better than any other competitor, then I feel like you’re winning.
Eileen Sweeney: Terrific. Well guys, please give them a round of applause and thank them for their time. And we’ll head to lunch now. Thank you all very much.