I am several weeks into my journey at Selligent, and I could not be more excited about my role and the team!
As someone who has spent his entire career in the Customer Experience (CX) and Contact Center world, the move to a traditionally martech-focused company may not seem like an obvious choice. However, the link is closer than it appears. If my time spent running a consulting business reinforced one thing, it’s that the only constant is change. Just because there is a presumed gap between Customer Experience and Marketing doesn’t mean it has to be that way.
Marketing is often seen as a promotion machine, leading demand-gen/demand-creation activities, while CX is typically viewed as sales and post-conversion service and support. The reality is that these worlds often aren’t, but should be connected.
Why should everything that an organization knows about a customer go out the window once they convert? This is more often than not the case. We’ve all experienced this: we purchase a product or sign up for a service and then marketing keeps bombarding us with a similar, if not the same offer; even after they have already sold us. As a mentor of mine has frequently reminded me, “Don’t sell past the close.” Worse yet, there is a broken feedback loop that when I have a poor post-sale experience, I still get marketed to before the situation is even rectified.
These are only a couple of the immediate problems that I found that Selligent’s technology solves. While these may sound simple, why is it that many of the companies we interact with on a daily basis – and the very same companies I have worked with over the last 15+ years – are not able to deliver the seamless experiences consumers today expect?
Over the last few years, Selligent has built an incredible leadership team with a deep heritage and background in the service/customer care, contact center, and martech industries. It’s a unique place to help with the intersection of marketing and CX – with the Selligent platform being at the heart of it all – helping organizations leverage customer data to intelligently deliver on omnichannel experiences.
So what does my role actually entail? Essentially, I am here to lead the CX go-to-market team in North America, to more closely tailor our solution to the needs of the CX market, including partnerships and integrations with key technology platforms. To do this, we’re focusing on helping to solve three key problems:
Overall, it has already been a tremendous learning experience for me, both personally and professionally, even with only a few weeks into the company. Beyond learning about the martech space in more depth than I ever expected, it’s been a pleasure to work for a product company to begin influencing the overall product and marketing message direction, especially coming from the System Integration and Service Provider world. It’s also been great to spend time with our sales teams and the broader organization to further educate them about the CX market, buyers, drivers, and target outcomes.
I look forward to a very exciting 2020 with Selligent, and to (re)connecting with all of my industry friends at Enterprise Connect and other CX events this year.
Matthew Saskin is VP of Customer Experience at Selligent, driving the company’s growing CX business in North America. Matthew has spent more than 15 years in digital strategy and customer experience, working with and selling to a diverse range of clients ranging from mid-market through global enterprise across verticals like Retail, Health Care, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and Insurance.
Prior to joining Selligent, Matthew served as VP and General Manager of Dimension Data’s Customer Experience practice for the Americas where he defined and executed against a multi-year growth plan that led to substantial growth in both cloud and services bookings.
Based in Chapel Hill, Matthew enjoys spending time with his family, cooking, learning about new technology, and is a fan of modern architecture and design.
Click here to read the Selligent press release about Matthew Saskin joining our company.
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