Hello, and welcome to this insightful conversation with Sudha Rajagopalan. Today, we’re excited to explore customer experience in exhaustive detail and gain valuable perspectives from Sudha Rajagopalan. Thank you for joining us, and let’s dive right in!
Introduction: Sudha Rajagopalan
Sudha Rajagopalan is a seasoned expert in Customer Experience (CX) and Enterprise Transformation, with nearly 20 years of experience in driving digital innovation. Her expertise spans SaaS solutions and large-scale transformation initiatives, focusing on BPM, Process Mining, AI, and CRM. Sudha Rajagopalan has successfully steered global Process, Platform, and Automation Centers of Excellence (CoE), creating impactful improvements in CX and operational efficiency across industries. As an Independent Consultant, Sudha provides valuable guidance to small and mid-sized companies, helping them leverage digital tools to enhance customer engagement and streamline processes. Known for her hands-on leadership and certifications in Scrum, Agile, Six Sigma, and Celonis, Sudha Rajagopalan excels in building customer-centric processes and inspiring teams to embrace continuous transformation.
Background & Expertise in CX and Transformation
Q. Sudha, could you tell us about a project where your CX and transformation expertise led to significant improvements in both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency?
Sudha Rajagopalan: CX Transformation has three broad elements – Processes, Tech Platforms and People. None of these can be viewed/changed in isolation. When you do (attempt a change) it is essential to have the right mix of tools, technology – be it analysis, process execution or even performance monitoring.
In one of my assignments for an organisation looking to redesign its CSAT framework, the initial vision was to make surveys effectively mandatory and build a response process
around it. However, we realised that the real issue was how customer communication was managed throughout the order delivery process leading unto cancellations.
The business was well invested in a robust CRM platform, but applied generic processes not adapted for their customer specifics. Processes in real life have variances and are chaotic. A static, virtually out-of-date process map isn’t going to cut it, even if it is in a rich BPMN format. Subsequently, the business turned to channeling some of their existing funding to get investigative tech such as process mining to understand how processes are actually applied at an order level and how they interact with each other.
As a result, we were able to identify unnecessary complexities, unclear/overlapping ownership – loads of opportunities to effectively impact CX rather than just measuring it, leading to re-engineering parts of their on ground orchestration of ‘work’ and bringing in rich features to support that work – for instance, a mix of AI and rule based warnings about a certain order instance going off track, or an invoice at risk.
Rewiring CX Teams
CX teams were rewired to use process signals instead of having to retroactively deal with a disappointed customer. This also had quite an impact on where resources would be invested, empowering even the smallest of teams to do a lot more without having crossing too many lanes to get the right support, and that translates to overall efficiency of the process.
Q. With such a rich background in transformation, what core principles do you follow to ensure a customer-centric approach throughout complex projects?
Sudha Rajagopalan: In the past decade especially, CX as a whole has witnessed phenomenal change, but the fundamentals are still the same.
I have 3 core principles that drive my work –
- View CX as a living goal, as a journey, meaning customer expectations will evolve with time. Your vision and tech stack has to evolve with it! Agile in its truest sense. It is
crucial not to be fixated and spot the need to pivot at the right time. - Integrated CX is the only good CX. CX is never standalone or just that which interacts with the customer. It is embedded in every process that ends with a customer or back. This is primarily the function of strong cross functional alignment, speaking the same language and sharing the same cost of failure.
- Choose a unified, customer-outcome-driven metric framework over fractured scorecards. Clearly differentiate between outcomes and KPIs. Don’t make tactical KPIs the target : ex. Incident response within 8 hours vs. Issue Resolution within 1 business day vs. No surprise orders.
Role of Technology in CX Enhancement
Q. How do you see AI and hyper-automation influencing the future of CX, especially in areas like Order Management, Logistics, and Finance?
Sudha Rajagopalan: Let’s look at the last two decade in this area – from the days of EDI/B2B, through BPM suites, Business Rules Engines, followed by RPA replacing what was earlier swivel chair automation. Then came cloud platform based native automations, integrations through APIs and quick Low Code automation enterprise grade platforms. We have recently
witnessed the emergence of Generative AI, LLMs etc.. Every technology generation has attempted to make workflow and automation more accessible, cost-competitive, safer and more efficient. Large, complex automations are being broken up into smaller, task specific components. That’s a broad trend that is expected to continue.
Hyper-automation as a concept is not that recent. In that sense, we are already experiencing hyper-automation like never before in these areas. An increasing number of businesses are far less resistant to the idea of automation as compared to a decade ago.
‘Touch-less transactions’ is now a key metric, and it does have a strong correlation with good CX in the most exemplary cases, improving customer satisfaction scores, churn rates, and customer lifetime value.. In Order Management for instance, critical elements of a happy flow such as stock updates, delivery tracking, dispatch requests, payments & refunds,
even disputes under a certain threshold, all have a fairly high level of automation.
AI on the other hand, despite the astounding progress it has made especially in the past half-decade, hasn’t quite reached that same level of proliferation. Most businesses are yet to establish a complete vision, much less a clear plan of implementation, still largely working with traditional ML approaches.
Broad trends in AI and Automation:
- The emergence of Agentic AI based apps for complex tasks not limited to transactional automation; bringing automations and AI together. Innovative applications built with frameworks and tools like JADE, ReAct, AutoGen, LangChain, CrewAI, Swarm that focus on nuanced decision making capabilities. There is also a speculation, to say the least, that Agentic AI may even disrupt the broad premise on which Saas operates today.
- Interestingly, just last year, Forbes predicted that within five years, almost every big company will have their own LLM adaptations. In fact, there are some that have made
significant progress already – Bloomberg GPT, Alibaba QwQ and even Open AI’s GPT-4 based JPMorgan’s IndexGPT, McKinsey’s Lilli. - Better conversational bots that do not simply provide static information but can guide customers through specific instances, resolve primary level issues that too in
specialised tasks/areas. - Renewed focus on ROI in AI investments and competitive AI platform offerings.
- There is a demand now, more than ever, for skills that can operationalise and sustain products. These are specialised skills in both tech and business, for various use cases.
- Risks of hallucination are not expected to go away anytime soon. Human-in-the-loop is critical, especially for sensitive activities. Retrieval-Augmented Generation has helped in gaining more control over the output, but context-sensitive decisions are best left to
the human, at the moment. - Greater awareness and prioritisation of safe AI! There’s been an increasing focus in the recent years to safeguard individual rights and enterprise interests.
Process Mining
Q. Can you provide an example of how Process Mining has played a role in enhancing CX in one of your projects? What measurable results did it bring?
Sudha Rajagopalan: Processes by nature, have variations. Every actor or resource introduces some amount of variation. We have, traditionally, always been looking at metrics to gauge performance holistically, but metrics do not necessarily reflect the work that results in these metrics.
Process Mining works very well for large processes that have a lot of variations on ground. Organisations have multiple process perspectives – SOPs, static As-Is maps, exception
management focus groups, technology platforms etc.. Attempts to align across these many perspectives ends up becoming wasteful and expensive, with no measurable outcome.
Mining processes helps identify process inefficiencies, by simply visualising the many variations of a process being performed, and closely analysing data about these events and
cases, to identify bottlenecks and leakages, to be able to pinpoint exactly what in a process needs to change.
For instance, improving Delivery time by removing unnecessary checks, reducing manual intervention, automatically removing trade blocks – opportunities you’d ideally take weeks to spot if not months, are available to you simply by plugging in activity footprint.
Process Mining
Process mining gives you an actual view of your operations through almost real-time process flows happening across multiple systems in your organization – that’s a powerful tool to have. CX teams own Issue Resolution as a whole and for that kind of knowledge work, you need easy access to specific information about specific orders, and who’s handling it.
An internal IT Resolution desk project I was associated with, had a long wait time indicating poor accessibility, high repeat volumes and historically low resolution rates. Internally, there
were a lot of complaints about misrouting of cases. Most of these impacts sound anecdotal and it is difficult to know what exactly needed to be fixed. Process Mining was instrumental
in highlighting specific case types with peculiar hand-off patterns, and data issues with missing information, incorrect troubleshooting.
This led to the discovery a number of improvement opportunities and subsequent redesign initiatives to address process gaps such as restructuring ticket classification to support routing, customising first incident forms, providing AI tailored tips to the user to avoid raising the ticket in the first place. The team’s wait time reduced by almost 70% in the first six months and internal customer approval turned significantly positive in the annual employee feedback. This was possible
simply because process mining based process fixes are likely to be more specific and targeted, instead of generic and symptomatic fixes such as retraining, continual improvement or even outsourcing.
Process Mining and Data Governance
Q. How do you approach integrating process mining tools to elevate CX? What are some of the challenges you encounter during this integration?
Sudha Rajagopalan: The biggest challenge in integration, is not just to bring the data together, but also the different elements that make a good process application. Integrating process mining tools has three dimensions – Data, Workflow and Operational Framework.
The real benefit is in having the platform read directly from the source and frequent enough to support seamless operations. Complexity increases with an increase in scope – systems,
processes, value chains and so on. One of the initial challenges is simply trust in terms of data security. Most well established SaaS platforms have robust data security compliance certifications such as GDPR, ISO. SOC, HIPAA, FedRAMP, HITRUST Beyond that, it is really about data availability and quality – whether or not the source systems are designed to
capture digital footprint specifics, and some parts of the process may be offline without a digital footprint. Further, custom/non-standard platforms that require custom connections are, needless to say, time-consuming if not tedious, and more importantly, require subject matter expertise.
Beyond Data
Beyond data, the challenge is to define how this should integrate with the process flow. The key challenge here is measurability and to be able to get to a point where you can commit to a unified CX outcome. Does the design of the process itself require that users work on the platform actively? Cross-functional alignment and commitment, defining a unified customer outcome, cost of building functionality to cover the larger scope, the time and cost to train, user access, design for data security/segregation of duties are a few critical elements to pay attention to.
Finally, the larger picture is about how process mining fit into your operational framework. Is it the single source of truth or a control centre for operational metrics? Or is it just limited
to analytics for the continuous improvement team?. The challenge here is in keeping the framework simple and streamlined, to ensure all metrics get covered and are true to original definition of the metric.
Migration
One of the most common reasons for failure is operating frameworks that overwhelm user groups, creating multiple sources of metrics Enterprises should migrate all only when it
makes sense. In most cases, using APIs offers a lot of flexibility.
Q. How do you align data and process governance with CX objectives? Could you share an instance where strong data governance directly improved customer experience?
Sudha Rajagopalan: Data Governance from a CX point of view, is primarily about Customer Data – what you collect, store, secure, data retention, how it is used and most importantly customer consent.
It is about sensitivity to individual and group based privacy. Operationally, poor data quality is also indicative of poor CX outcomes, mostly – poor delivery reliability, disputes and poor communication flow with customers to state a few. For the business, it causes an inability to enrich data for marketing and poorer customer segmentation leading to poor product offerings. More serious issues could lead to legal trouble and huge penalties. During Transformation, it delays implementations and fixing is often expensive. It could create obstacles for process automations or even an integrated flow/view across departments. It’s best to be proactive and fix this as a part of your preparedness reviews.
Process Governance
Process Governance has a far more significant impact on CX, because ‘process’ is how CX is delivered. It has the usual elements of rigorous process SOPs, omni-channel alignment,
lead and lag measures, audit and feedback mechanisms. But the most fundamental building block in an organisation’s CX roadmap is to define Process Failures – both reactive and proactive. It brings together a process element, a metric element and a feedback element into a meaningful object that works both as a metric and an active goal to pursue.
It supports defining priority and relevant responses to any given interaction, through deliberate design such as routing. But most importantly, it builds a culture of objective sensitivity across functions because requests and failures are defined from the customer’s perspectives.
One of the best examples of strong data governance was for a transformation program for a business that had acquired another firm. The biggest challenge was that their master data was not integrated, despite having common customers. As a first step, even before delivering the lager (systems + process + teams) integration, they decided to spend 6 months simply cleaning up and integrating their customer master data extended to their Contract Management systems. A key deliverable was a robust ongoing data governance framework that had oversight on absolutely any system collecting, generating, applying, storing and providing entity and transaction data.
The data clean-up and subsequent governance framework was credited with reducing many Service Failures and improved CX as evident in contract renewal trends. Further, it helped them fix their customer journey with dedicated touchpoint and a renewed sense of customer centricity.
CRM & BPM Tool Mastery
Q. Given your vast experience with CRM and BPM tools, how do you select the platform that best aligns with a client’s CX goals? Can you share a scenario where a particular tool was key to a successful CX transformation? How have popular Saas platforms been instrumental in your CX transformation projects?
Sudha Rajagopalan: There are just about 4 or 5 broad areas to look at before buying software:
- Feature offerings, Roadmap alignment and Support – Businesses must have their vision, mission and CX requirements lined up to at least cover the outcomes they are aiming for. If a business expects to rely on a platform for their critical needs, besides stability, support has to be accessible and able to resolve concerns actively.
- Legal, Security Compliance policies align – this is not limited to security certifications alone. Extends to where the data is hosted, data retention policies and data back up and retrieval.
- Tech Talent required – This is a challenge for lesser popular platforms or those that introduce new tech. It takes a while for developers to acquire the right amount of applied knowledge and designers to gain intuition about what works or doesn’t. It is crucial for software delivery to keep up with ideation, else there’s a fatigue that sets in, and creates adoption issues, or your offering is no longer relevant in the transformation journey.
- Acquisition and ongoing costs of a platform/tool including environmental sensibility, compared with the outcome expected.
ERP/CRM
A well integrated enterprise solution, such as most popular ERP/CRM off-the-shelf platforms, add a lot of power in transformation initiatives, primarily because of the visibility they create. Information becomes more accessible and process quality improves, with fewer surprises. From a. CX perspective, it results in improved information quality shared with customers that has in turn significant improvements in trust and reliability. For a business, this translates to greater efficiency. Let’s take Banking for instance – today, you are able to walk into any branch and get the info you need about your account, which
wasn’t quite the same 30 years ago. We’ve already talked about the transformative impact of process mining, especially for processes that are exceptions-heavy and chaotic.
There are always companies large enough that successfully build their own operating system stack, including CRM, messaging and other essential software. Tesla is good example. It makes sense to do so, because after a while, the new feature offerings from off-the-shelf software fail to keep pace with the aspirations of the CX process. However, this
demands a robust infrastructure, strong process discovery and talented teams capable of effective collaboration.
Strategy and Change Management
Q. With over 8 years of experience in change management, how do you guide diverse teams to adopt new CX-Focused processes and technologies? Could you describe how you built a network of Change Leaders to drive a unified CX strategy across multiple regions? What impact did this have?
Sudha Rajagopalan: I have always found Kotter’s 8 steps to change acceleration useful when navigating change for large organisations. There’s a 1996 and a more recent 2014 version, which adapts to the more agile philosophy that we work with today. Couple of the early steps mention the need to build a ‘Guiding Coalition’ and ‘Enlisting an Army of Volunteers’ which has stuck with me.
Co-creating processes and change frameworks, within a coalition, goes a long way in ensuring smooth implementations. I am tempted to say that week-long workshops are the best method, but to get real value from such community activities, a series of well-spaced calibration sessions with clear deliverables are a clear winner. It takes time to get diverse groups thinking as a team, and on the right path.
Change Management
Change Management is complex because no one person or department can lead it. Almost every successful ‘global’ scale transformation initiative has strong and grounded local sponsorship that brings in regional flavours for both the business and the customer. While top leadership approval and support at a regional level is of utmost important, what is often overlooked is the tactical and executive level of change leadership – this layer is your biggest strength and it takes time to nurture talent. It is more often than not, a very organic process but with formal commitment where you describe the goal of the role distinctly, the support they can expect from a central transformation team, the empowerment they have and how their local objectives work in tandem with the global outlook. The key here is to focus on the role and not necessarily a level.
The role of a Change leader involves Information dissemination, regular review of local implementation of global processes and policies, conflict management and most importantly to be a well informed voice for the region – users, managers, customers, vendors. Communication flows.
Central Governance
A global platform such as a CRM (should) connects various departments and process groups, both at a local and global level. The central governance group is responsible for well-thought policies and guidelines, with high accessibility and involvement, but regional anchors are empowered and encouraged to resolve conflicts between functions. This leads
to a naturally unified and calibrated process globally. Their tact is not to influence user adoption directly, but to remove impediments in the course of.
It is not uncommon that some of the best ideas and ambitions come from those closest to the process and the customer. These ideas are usually never shared with the right groups, simply lost or just reduced to an annual funnel creation activity. For large platforms with thousands of users, it would even make sense to have a simple app to submit, review and
implement such ideas – improving user engagement and adoption in the long run and democratising the process of building a product roadmap.
We tend to view global scale, unified transformations as challenging and that so many things can go wrong. However, with a more federated approach to change management, it is
difficult to fail if done in the right spirit.
Leadership and Mentorship
Q. You have a strong track record in capability building and establishing federated CoEs. What’s your approach to mentorship and skill development in the context of CX? Can you share an example of inspiring citizen development within an organization, and how it supported your CX goals?
Sudha Rajagopalan: A Federated CoE structure acts both as an enabler and a governance framework, similar to C4E. Traditional CoEs own and control almost everything, and it is usually the logical start to any CoE, but it gradually needs to evolve into a more federated network of decision making and solution development that is closer to the source of ideas.
Fed CoEs are proven to be better at capability building, because of loosening up restrictions on who can be invested in, providing ample opportunities for talent in the business to spin off crucial skills in transformation. This allows enterprises to tap into the talent they have already – tech and business, instead of having to hire entire teams each time, especially for skills that are harder to hire for.
It is important to have a clear definition of hard and soft skills, plus the experience required for a given set of transformation initiatives. L&D teams across organisations have been rapidly embracing micro learning.
Insights from Sudha Rajagopalan
From my experience, I can recollect a process mining rollout where the MVP was well received but limited to dashboards and some process compliance insights. Most functional groups failed to see where this would fit in with their work, and . The dev team was under 30 in strength, and versatile, but lacking in business know-how. That’s when the team decided to try out Citizen Dev in a phased manner. It was initially a 6 months plan with phased objectives, with pivotal checkpoints: Launch to
Idea Generation (1.5 months), Validation (1), Build, Test & Rollout (3), Monitor (3). It took a month to build the first diverse group of mentors who were aligned with the objectives. Mentors became the program’s advocates, champions and evangelists, and helped socialise this in wider, diverse forums. We then designed and promoted DIY/self-paced exploratory
learning material (few platforms have curated citizen developer tracks) including internal design standards to follow. We then invited new ideas and prototype submissions.
Tech Development
For tech development, there’s a need to provide platform playgrounds for some SaaS products and for others it is simply access, and this is a constraint and should be budgeted at the
beginning. The C4E also actively facilitated user interviews and online workshops with tech and business, to keep costs in check. Formal learning and certifications were sponsored,
based on accepted entries. Limited sandbox access was allowed – permissions were very carefully crafted and monitored. This initiative was directly responsible for 2 of the 4 apps that were released that year, with features that directly enabled multiple functions, microautomations that improved productivity by at least 30%, simply by tapping into the
knowledge and experience of users on ground. Citizen development should not be allowed to open the floodgates of doom, and for most enterprises, it works best if focused on internal processes. It needs to be nurtured at a healthy pace, sometimes taking a couple of years to fully bloom. It’s well suited for no code/low code platforms such as RPA, process mining, and now with prompt engineering in AI.
Citizen development is rare, and successful ones rarer, because it takes a strong pipeline to sustain it. In other words, there has to be a compelling need for resources, lower costs, or niche business domain knowledge.
Citizen development has both benefits and challenges –
- adoption rates are higher than usual, resistance to new tech is much lower
- Faster turnaround (RPA), naturally agile processes, DevOps governance works very well
- much lower dev costs especially for internal utilities and use cases
- needs strict quality oversight, not building without purpose/benefit
- Is not free, borrowed resource cost must be factored in
- employee aspirations need to be addressed
Future Trends and Vision
Q. With CX and digital transformation rapidly evolving, what emerging trends or technologies do you believe will redefine customer experience in the coming years?
Sudha Rajagopalan: + The most anticipated wave in 2025, Agentic AI solutions/platforms are expected to grow, such as OpenAI’s Swarm, Integral, GALE, Crew AI, Vertex, Magentic-One, Autogen.
Increasing number of enterprise platforms will start offering solutions on these lines. The initial market feedback I sense on this is more of fatigue of being given overhyped, repackaged solutions. I wish we avoided the overhype but also be open to accept that its is now a phase for iteration and not as much that of innovation, although at times these are subjective.
Nevertheless, Hyper-automation is gaining pace, with humans now focusing on quality of an outcome.
- We should expect to start seeing disruptive moves in SaaS, with Agentic AI forcing us to re-imagine enterprise software platforms and utilities. It is also important to remember that applying AI instead of traditional software, to address every productivity opportunity, isn’t efficient.
- CX Analytics – There’s a growing need for deeper analysis, going beyond metrics. With advanced language models of varying sizes, tapping into opportunities in text based,
unstructured data, making hyper- personalisation, sentiment analysis much easier. - CX Processes – We are transitioning from single process to multi-process and a journey centric approach. AI in Processes is still evolving with Graph Neural Networks and other technologies.
- Conversational AI uptake is gaining pace, and likely to be applied alongside omni-channel CX. Despite the progress in the past couple of years, on ground implementation has been poor, but expect that to change rapidly.
- Greater attention is being paid to data collection, data that has utility but also Safe.
- Agile in practice, will become sharper as testing an idea becomes all the more easier
Digital Transformation
Q. For organisations just starting their digital transformation journey, what advice would you give on building a more integrated, customer-focused model?
Sudha Rajagopalan: • Start with the Customer Journey that packs in critical detail. Understand process variations to get an idea of what’s ideal. Streamline your processes before you automate
them.
- Strengthen your data governance in advance, and drive compliance.
- Invest in a healthy talent mix: tech and non-tech, internal and external hires, geographies. CX needs strong allies in every function
- Be requirements driven – who, what and why. It’s never Speed and Volume over Quality. Be brave but also pragmatic enough to know when to pivot.
- As you redesign your core business processes, even the ones that are not directly interacting with the customer, keep aligning with CX. For example, if you are making a
change in your order management systems, it is important to regularly observe how it impacts customers - CX oriented culture is of great importance, especially during transformation
- Instil a culture of learning, especially for middle to senior level leaders. Even if they are not directly delivering in tech or business, I strongly believe it is important for everyone working closely to have more than cursory knowledge about how a certain tech works. I personally have great respect for those who keep pursuing some kind of learning alongside, to simply become smarter at work.
Thank you, Sudha Rajagopalan, for sharing your time and expertise with us today. Your insights into customer experience have been truly enlightening. We wish you continued success in your journey, and thank you to our esteemed readers. Until next time, stay curious and inspired!
