Home > Companies > Thought Leaders > Q&A with Bibhakar Pandey, Vice President & Leader of Customer Experience, Marketing Services at Capgemini

Q&A with Bibhakar Pandey, Vice President & Leader of Customer Experience, Marketing Services at Capgemini

Bibhakar Pandey, Vice President & Leader of Customer Experience, Marketing Services at Capgemini, is a dynamic leader with more than 25 years of industry experience leading global, multi-cultural experience teams across North America, Europe, and APAC. Bibhakar has built a career on achieving year-on-year success in driving business-growth objectives and empowering organizations to address challenging business needs through the application of cloud, mobile, content, commerce, analytics, and social technologies. He has built teams with lean and agile cultures and employed new and emerging digital technologies. He has been an enterprising leader, mentor, and coach, driving continuous performance excellence within his team. He has successfully incubated and scaled businesses including marketing services and interactive and digital engineering.

Clients are going to expect a lot of personalization in their businesses; consumers are going to expect the same. To avoid data silos, having an emphasis on driving real-time information from customer data and sources is really core for any company to become digitally native.



MEDIA 7: You come with an extensive professional journey of 25 years, would you like to take us through it?
BIBHAKAR PANDEY: It's been a very exciting, fulfilling, and rewarding journey for me so far. Ever since I started my career as a developer, my focus has been on building and delivering multi-technology solutions. I have always enjoyed driving CX transformation projects, especially when it comes to marketing, sales, service, e-commerce, and the employee experience. However above all else, I most enjoy coaching and mentoring young talent and seeing them flourish as future leaders. So, all in all, it's been a rewarding experience.


M7: How is Capgemini bridging the gap between business, technology and operations to help your clients become digital natives?
BP: At Capgemini, we encourage our clients to look beyond technology. We want them to be technology agnostic and try to solve the business problem or address the opportunities that they are really driving into the market. So, it’s not one silver bullet or technology that can solve the problem for them but it is a combination of technologies that come together to solve the business problem. As customer experience becomes core to any business and transformation project, especially in this pandemic and the post-pandemic world, it is increasingly important for clients to re-look at their customer data and glean meaningful information. Clients are going to expect a lot of personalization in their businesses; consumers are going to expect the same. To avoid data silos, having an emphasis on driving real-time information from customer data and sources is really core for any company to become digitally native.


M7: Speaking of COVID-19, how has the pandemic changed the way you do business at Capgemini?
BP: The pandemic has only accelerated the digital transformation journey that would have happened over the next ten years. Especially in the customer experience world, if you look at some of the analyst data and research that has been done; in the US, 40% of the adults who are shopping online actually don’t feel compelled to go to the stores. In fact, one-third of them actually feel like there’s no need for them to go to the store because they don’t feel these stores have anything extra to offer. What is actually happening is that the wall between the physical and digital is actually blurring a lot and which is then driving behavioural shifts.

Consumers’ attention spans are very limited on digital channels, so that’s all the more important that the right information goes to the consumer at the right time across the engagement lifecycle, not just when they’re exploring in a commerce channel. I keep going back to data and customers; that is playing a huge role in the business to drive a lot more personalized engagement through different channels. Whether you’re on your mobile, laptop, or a kiosk, the clients want to see a seamless engagement across these channels; the problem is the data sits in their respective siloes of the channel, so it’s not that simple to provide that seamless experience. That’s where businesses need to invest and drive a seamless customer experience across their engagement lifecycle.


Consumers’ attention spans are very limited on digital channels, so that’s all the more important that the right information goes to the consumer at the right time across the engagement lifecycle, not just when they’re exploring in a commerce channel.



M7: Speaking of how customers are shifting towards e-commerce, how do you ensure that they get rewarded with the best customer experience?
BP: First of all, you need to rely on contextual customer insights; it’s really important that each business understands their customers’ history and real-time behaviour. Then, you need to enhance your automation and AI capabilities because these are becoming real-time investments across channels. In that sense, AI is going to play a key role in determining real-time personalized content to help drive product information to engage the customers and cater to them during this journey. At Capgemini, we are doing this with multiple partners; there are a lot of niche players, but we also have strategic investments with large platforms that can build a complete unified experience; we are trying to bridge the gap in their solutions through our overlay of business solutions and accelerators to help the client realize the maximum value through these implementations.


M7: As a business leader how are you preparing for an AI-centric world?
BP: Organizations need to keep pace with the technology because AI, ML, AR, VR and other immersive technologies are becoming more popular. Capgemini is working on a customer experience foundry to meet those expectations and tests new technology for our clients. It’s also important to be engaged with the teams on the ground. I have a lot of senior architects and developers who are on client sites leveraging different types of AI-powered technologies. Our teams have been forthcoming in sharing these thoughts which have helped us a lot.


M7: Has there been any problems regarding working from home? How do you keep yourself and your team motivated in these difficult times?
BP: At Capgemini, we have really helped our employees to be independent and become self-reliant in these remote environments. We do our team celebrations virtually; happy hours that enable our team to be consistently motivated. We do what we used to do as reward and recognition, in fact, this has also helped us in a way that you don’t really have to travel somewhere to meet a person. You can actually meet your team and do more one-on-one with your team on a much more regular basis. We are adapting to remote work culture, and most of the work we used to do in the CX space was in a remote delivery model. So that part is not going to change, in my opinion. I think what will change post-pandemic is we will get a lot more hybrid ecosystems up and running successfully.


I encourage people to be an expert in their domain and take time to learn and understand what these technologies can do in the context of journey orchestration across domains. This is only going to become more important and relevant over the next few years.



M7: What do you read and how do you manage to stay at the top of your game?
BP: I enjoy reading a lot of analyst reports. Especially when it comes to CX transformation, Forrester has invested a lot in doing the research and figuring out what the future is going to look like. So obviously I am very passionate about learning as much as I can about the CX space. I also read a lot of nonfiction books. I am a big fan of Geoffrey Moore, especially one of the books he wrote called Dealing with Darwin. It’s important to remember that as human beings, as companies, as organizations we are going to continuously morph ourselves to meet new challenges.


M7: What is your advice is to the people who are looking to start a career in STEM?
BP: We are going through a massive shift right now, and it’s redefining the way people are going to live now and into the next generation. How you live, engage, interact, and study – all of these things are getting redefined right now and that redefinition is going to continue for the next few years. So, a lot of things are going to keep on changing and technology is going to be a core driver of these changes. I tell people to be patient, be nimble, and be agile, and never stop learning new things.


M7: Anything else you’d like to discuss about?
BP: I am really passionate about developing our STEM workforce as there is so much constant change. For example, new-age software is being built that won’t require a lot of implementation time; it's built on a cloud-native architecture. I encourage people to be an expert in their domain and take time to learn and understand what these technologies can do in the context of journey orchestration across domains. This is only going to become more important and relevant over the next few years.

ABOUT CAPGEMINI

Capgemini is a global leader in partnering with companies to transform and manage their business by harnessing the power of technology. The Group is guided every day by its purpose of unleashing human energy through technology for an inclusive and sustainable future. It is a responsible and diverse organization of 270,000 team members in nearly 50 countries. With its strong 50 year heritage and deep industry expertise, Capgemini is trusted by its clients to address the entire breadth of their business needs, from strategy and design to operations, fueled by the fast-evolving and innovative world of cloud, data, AI, connectivity, software, digital engineering and platforms. The Group reported in 2020 global revenues of €16 billion.

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LambdaTest Integrates with New Relic to Deliver Unmatched Test Observability

LambdaTest | January 09, 2024

LambdaTest, a leading cloud-based unified testing platform, announced an integration with New Relic, the all-in-one observability platform for every engineer, to help bridge the gap between testing and performance monitoring. This integration empowers software engineering, quality assurance, and DevOps teams to visualize and understand their digital experience testing metrics in real-time by providing a single view of their LambdaTest results alongside performance insights from across the entire software stack—all within the New Relic observability platform. With the ability to optimize and monitor automated test execution results, technical teams gain deeper insights into automation scripts that enable them to deliver high-quality products at an accelerated pace. Every modern business is encountering challenges as digital ecosystems become increasingly complex, large, and distributed. At the same time, without a unified platform, software teams and testers have limited visibility into automation script performance, which can lead to collaboration silos, inefficient resource utilization, and slower incident identification and response times. To address the need for observability in test execution data and analytics, this integration arms engineering teams with actionable insights to efficiently address automation script issues, reduce testing bottlenecks, and optimize software performance. This allows organizations to ensure fast and reliable application delivery, so they can produce better digital experiences for their customers—before it impacts their bottom line. The LambdaTest and New Relic integration allow users to: Proactively improve digital experiences with a pre-built, curated New Relic dashboard to monitor key metrics such as test executions, durations, failure rates, and errors. Accelerate troubleshooting with deeper insights into test failures, anomalies, and environments where errors occurred. Build better cross-platform experiences by gaining insights on website and application compatibility and functionality across thousands of different browsers and devices. “In our digital-first world, poor user experiences are more than just an annoyance—they have the power to cause significant loss in revenue,” said Manav Khurana, Chief Product Officer at New Relic. "With the LambdaTest integration for New Relic, we’re combining the power to automate digital experience testing with our unified telemetry and all-in-one observability platform—so organizations can optimize their digital experiences, without needing multiple tools to monitor the rest of their software stack.” Mayank Bhola, Co-Founder and Head of Product at LambdaTest stated, "This integration is not just a technical enhancement but a strategic move towards empowering businesses with data-driven decision-making. The combined strength of LambdaTest and New Relic ensures that businesses can deliver high-quality software at a faster pace, ultimately contributing to their bottom line." This integration is now available to all LambdaTest users and all New Relic full platform users at no additional cost. To get started, check out the LambdaTest quickstart integration for New Relic. About LambdaTest LambdaTest is an intelligent and omnichannel enterprise execution environment that helps businesses drastically reduce time to market through Just in Time Test Orchestration (JITTO), ensuring quality releases and accelerated digital transformation. Over 10,000+ enterprise customers and 2+ million users across 130+ countries rely on LambdaTest for their testing needs.

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Software

Lynx Software Technologies Announces Acquisition of Thompson Software Solutions

Lynx Software Technologies | January 10, 2024

Lynx Software Technologies (Lynx), a leader in the development of foundational, open architecture software solutions for the Mission Critical Edge, today announced the acquisition of Thompson Software Solutions, LLC. (TSS), a provider of software development, engineering, and integration solutions to mission-critical aerospace and defense (A&D) platforms, spanning military and commercial fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, commercial space flight, hypersonic platforms, and command-and-control systems. Its customers include the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), prime integrators, A&D original equipment manufacturers, and commercial space companies. Since its founding in 2004, TSS has delivered technical capabilities and strategic insights to enable innovative software products requiring the highest reliability, security, and performance standards. With expertise spanning high-integrity software architecture and development, DevSecOps, cybersecurity, airworthiness certifications, open systems architecture, simulation and training, and AI and machine learning, customers across the A&D end-markets rely upon TSS to provide strategic guidance, differentiated technical capabilities, and a deep understanding of mission requirements. TSS’s Chief Executive Officer, Les Thompson, and Chief Strategy Officer, Patrick McClellen, have taken on senior roles within Lynx following the close of the transaction. The combination of Lynx and TSS creates a scaled provider of mission-critical software solutions for customers with complex interoperability, safety, and security challenges. Lynx’s foundational software products, open-source expertise, productivity- and security-enhancing development tools, highly technical software engineering services, delivered via both professional and managed services business models, and its highly skilled and security-cleared employee base combine to create a platform company uniquely positioned to support the full software development lifecycle for clients in aerospace, defense, and other heavily regulated end-markets. “The TSS team has built the company on a solid foundation of trusted customer relationships, innovative and cutting-edge technical capabilities, and flawless execution. With TSS’s high-value and differentiated software development and integration capabilities, we will be better equipped to enable aerospace and defense OEMs and prime integrators to accelerate the design, development, and deployment of their products and platforms,” commented Tim Reed, Chief Executive Officer of Lynx. “As we end 2023, Lynx’s portfolio of solutions spans from the operating system to the application layer, certifiable real-time, to general purpose and open-source, and from commercial-off-the-shelf (“COTS”) to government-off-the-shelf (“GOTS”) software products. I’m thrilled to work with Les and the TSS team as we continue delivering comprehensive and unique software-enabled solutions to customers whose needs extend from the development pipeline to the Mission Critical Edge.” “Throughout my twenty years leading TSS, we’ve been consistently committed to delivering robust software solutions that meet the stringent requirements of our customers while ensuring they can stay on schedule and budget,” commented Les Thompson, Chief Executive Officer of TSS. “From our first discussions with Tim and the Lynx team, it became clear that Lynx is not just a vendor looking to push products but a committed, mission-oriented partner with the same objectives we have here at TSS, which includes continuing to deliver on our shared goal of providing resilient, secure, and performant software solutions targeted at the most demanding mission-critical environments.” “The combination of Lynx and TSS creates a software solutions platform placed at the center of priority aerospace and defense investment areas, notably open standards, modularity, and security. Like TSS, Lynx has an established track record of exceeding customer expectations with its innovation, performance, and value proposition. As a combined company, Lynx and TSS are well-positioned to grow as our clients continue to execute on the software modernization, integration, and development priorities,” commented Patrick McClellen, Chief Strategy Officer of TSS. About Lynx Software Technologies Lynx Software Technologies is on a mission to improve the economics of developing, deploying, and maintaining high-assurance Mission Critical Edge platforms with modular software solutions based on open standards. Our proven technology leadership, extensive system certification expertise, and commitment to open standards have consistently saved our customers millions of dollars in development costs while delivering desired system performance, security, and reliability on schedule. Lynx is committed to enabling customers to build and manage orchestrated, cloud-connected platforms that harness a broad array of modern technologies and unique design methodologies to enable accurate, deterministic decisions at the Mission Critical Edge without compromising safety or cybersecurity requirements. For more information, visit www.lynx.com. About Thompson Software Solutions Founded in 2004 with locations in Atlanta, GA and Fort Worth, TX, the Thompson Software Solutions team understands what is required to develop, integrate, test, and deploy software with a safety-critical pedigree while meeting the challenges of modernization and digital transformation. Our team of proven and dedicated employees takes pride in our ability to react quickly and produce quality solutions to difficult technical challenges. We work with partners to find the right path to meet operational needs while future-proofing systems with portability and sustainment considerations to ensure next-generation success. For more information, visit https://www.thompsonsoftwaresolutions.com. About OceanSound Partners OceanSound Partners is a New York-based private equity firm that pursues control investments in technology and technology-enabled services companies serving government and enterprise end markets. OceanSound employs a partnership approach, working closely with founders, entrepreneurs, and executives of middle market businesses to drive transformational growth. For more information, visit www.oceansoundpartners.com.

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Future Tech

Zendesk signs definitive agreement to acquire Klaus

Zendesk | January 08, 2024

Zendesk today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Klaus, the industry leading AI-powered quality management platform. AI is driving a rapid increase in customer interactions and radically transforming the world of customer service. Customer service teams are being asked to increase their ROI by managing a rising volume of interactions while providing quality service, and increasing their organization's efficiency in the process. With Klaus, Zendesk customers will be able to deliver consistent, high quality service across every channel and across both human and digital agents (bots) – all while unlocking the power of everyday customer interactions to increase loyalty. "As AI drives up the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only AI-powered quality assurance (QA) can keep up as companies work to identify and fix gaps in their customer service operations," said Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer, Zendesk. "The combination of Zendesk AI and Klaus' capabilities will help businesses navigate greater complexity and volume and ensure both digital and human agents deliver highly personal and empathetic service." "Zendesk and Klaus share a vision of AI-led, personalized CX with businesses fully anticipating and acting on their customers' needs," said Martin Kõiva, CEO and founder, Klaus. "QA software plays a critical role in this, ensuring consistency, assessing both human and digital agent performance and providing actionable insights for strategic planning. As part of Zendesk, we will continue to build and deliver these crucial capabilities, but now at an even greater scale." With digital agents resolving more service inquiries without human interaction, having a QA solution that analyzes both human and digital agent performance is crucial to maintaining quality control and providing best-in-class customer service. While most QA software is capable of only scoring 1 to 2 percent of interactions and cannot recognize systemic trends, Klaus' AI scores 100 percent of customer support interactions. It pinpoints conversations with positive or negative sentiment, identifies outliers, churn risk, escalations and follow-ups across all conversations – even those done by digital agents or outsourced teams. Klaus spots knowledge gaps and coaching opportunities that can be used to improve agent performance and productivity, all of which results in higher customer satisfaction. WEM is a critical capability for today's customer service leaders. The acquisition of Klaus will be the latest addition to the company's existing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions which includes Tymeshift, a modern workforce management tool built exclusively for Zendesk. The company acquired Tymeshift in June 2023. The acquisition of Klaus is anticipated to close in the first quarter of 2024 upon receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. About Zendesk Zendesk is on a mission to simplify the complexity of business and make it easy for companies and customers to create connections. Our customer experience software unlocks the power of billions of interactions, enabling businesses to build rich, meaningful relationships with their customers. The company was conceived in Copenhagen, Denmark and today operates in more than 20 countries around the world. About Klaus Klaus is an AI-powered quality management platform that helps companies drive revenue through excellent customer service. Headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, Klaus was founded in 2018 by Martin Kõiva, Kair Käsper and Egon Sale and has nearly 100 employees.

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Software

LambdaTest Integrates with New Relic to Deliver Unmatched Test Observability

LambdaTest | January 09, 2024

LambdaTest, a leading cloud-based unified testing platform, announced an integration with New Relic, the all-in-one observability platform for every engineer, to help bridge the gap between testing and performance monitoring. This integration empowers software engineering, quality assurance, and DevOps teams to visualize and understand their digital experience testing metrics in real-time by providing a single view of their LambdaTest results alongside performance insights from across the entire software stack—all within the New Relic observability platform. With the ability to optimize and monitor automated test execution results, technical teams gain deeper insights into automation scripts that enable them to deliver high-quality products at an accelerated pace. Every modern business is encountering challenges as digital ecosystems become increasingly complex, large, and distributed. At the same time, without a unified platform, software teams and testers have limited visibility into automation script performance, which can lead to collaboration silos, inefficient resource utilization, and slower incident identification and response times. To address the need for observability in test execution data and analytics, this integration arms engineering teams with actionable insights to efficiently address automation script issues, reduce testing bottlenecks, and optimize software performance. This allows organizations to ensure fast and reliable application delivery, so they can produce better digital experiences for their customers—before it impacts their bottom line. The LambdaTest and New Relic integration allow users to: Proactively improve digital experiences with a pre-built, curated New Relic dashboard to monitor key metrics such as test executions, durations, failure rates, and errors. Accelerate troubleshooting with deeper insights into test failures, anomalies, and environments where errors occurred. Build better cross-platform experiences by gaining insights on website and application compatibility and functionality across thousands of different browsers and devices. “In our digital-first world, poor user experiences are more than just an annoyance—they have the power to cause significant loss in revenue,” said Manav Khurana, Chief Product Officer at New Relic. "With the LambdaTest integration for New Relic, we’re combining the power to automate digital experience testing with our unified telemetry and all-in-one observability platform—so organizations can optimize their digital experiences, without needing multiple tools to monitor the rest of their software stack.” Mayank Bhola, Co-Founder and Head of Product at LambdaTest stated, "This integration is not just a technical enhancement but a strategic move towards empowering businesses with data-driven decision-making. The combined strength of LambdaTest and New Relic ensures that businesses can deliver high-quality software at a faster pace, ultimately contributing to their bottom line." This integration is now available to all LambdaTest users and all New Relic full platform users at no additional cost. To get started, check out the LambdaTest quickstart integration for New Relic. About LambdaTest LambdaTest is an intelligent and omnichannel enterprise execution environment that helps businesses drastically reduce time to market through Just in Time Test Orchestration (JITTO), ensuring quality releases and accelerated digital transformation. Over 10,000+ enterprise customers and 2+ million users across 130+ countries rely on LambdaTest for their testing needs.

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