Customerland

Designing Trustworthy AI For Real Customers

• mike giambattista • Season 4 • Episode 6

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Customers don’t churn all at once—they leave through a thousand small cuts. We sit down with Katie Costanzo, President of CX at CSG, to unpack how leading brands are closing those gaps with real-time decisioning, smarter use of billing and journey data, and disciplined deployment of agentic AI. If clarity, empathy, and credibility feel scarce in your customer experience, this conversation offers a practical reset and an action plan.

Katie breaks down what CSG Xponent actually does across the journey, from onboarding to service, billing, and support. We explore how billing intelligence can predict confusion, trigger proactive help, and even offer tailored payment plans that preserve trust. Instead of blasting more messages, we talk about cutting the noise by timing communications to intent and choosing the right channel for action. The result: fewer dead ends, fewer escalations, and a measurable lift in customer loyalty.

We also dive into the tension around agentic AI. With 56% of consumers still wary of letting AI act on their behalf, how do you unlock the efficiency without losing hearts and minds? Katie’s take: onboard AI like an employee. Define responsibilities, set guardrails, build transparent governance, and always provide human on-ramps. Start small, solve specific pains, prove value, and scale. As switching costs approach zero, brands that move at the speed of experience—decisions in milliseconds, improvements in weeks—will win the market.

If you’re a CX, product, or operations leader looking to turn data into trust and trust into growth, this episode is your field guide. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review to tell us which micro friction you’ll fix first.

Framing AI As A Brand Employee

SPEAKER_00

I would empower brands to design capabilities, solutions, and interactions, whether it is using AI or not, but particularly when you're using AI, as if you are employee onboarding a normal human employee. I think it is essential for AI to embody the brand tenants and brand standards, just as I and you would, uh, you know, being members of the organizations in which we we serve.

SPEAKER_01

Today on Adventures in Customer Land, Katie Costanza, who's president of CX at CSG. Um, I'm not gonna say this was the longest, most arduous scheduling task we've ever tried to accomplish, but it was certainly up there. So glad we finally made it. And Katie, thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, thanks, Mike. Very excited to be here with you today.

SPEAKER_01

So I've spoken with a handful of your colleagues in the past, fairly familiar with what CSG does, but uh our listeners may not be. So maybe just for additional context, tell us a little bit about what CSG does uh and your role there, if you would.

What CSG Exponent Actually Does

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, absolutely. Uh so CSG is the global leader in customer engagement, billing, and payment solutions. Um, we are a purpose-driven SLAS platform that enables global companies across a wide variety of industries like healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, um, and retail to simplify their complex customer engagement practices in how they monetize in a digital environment. And I have the pleasure of overseeing our customer experience and engagement capability and solution unit. Um, our core product capability in the market as part of our overall platform is CSG Exponent. Um, and that ultimately helps brands deliver real-time customer engagement to help increase revenue, create operational efficiencies, and build brand loyalty.

SPEAKER_01

It's a good thing that wasn't a whole lot just packed into a few sentences that'll take us the rest of this conversation unpacked. Um, CSG Exponent is a decisioning platform. No, it's a workforce process management platform. No, it's a billing assistance and loyalty platform. No, what is it?

SPEAKER_00

Uh so Exponent is a customer engagement platform that leverages uh orchestration and analytics to deliver real-time engagement in the moments that matter the most. So we think about um, you know, five major critical areas across the customer lifecycle, irrespective of the industry that you support, from um onboarding and ordering and service through the billing journey and experience down to the contact center interactions that a consumer may have with the brand. And ensuring that organizations land and nail those five critical moments that matter through real-time decisioning and orchestration and digital engagement is at the heart of what our exponent solution delivers to the market.

Real-Time Decisions Across The Journey

SPEAKER_01

Okay, starting to become a little more clear. I'm I'm faking it here because I actually do understand what you what what CSG does, but I think there are probably listeners out there who just aren't quite as familiar.

SPEAKER_00

That's fair.

SPEAKER_01

Um, so the end deliverable would be conceptually deeper engagement. Um, practically speaking, at the contact center level, you're delivering intelligence in real time that agents can respond to and use. Um don't let me put words words in your mouth if I'm getting this wrong, by the way.

SPEAKER_00

I'll stop you.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, good. And uh at the at the billing level, uh I I'm interested to hear what it means at the billing level because you know, uh real-time decisioning and billing is an interesting idea. Or did I miss misplace that?

SPEAKER_00

No, no, you're um you're you're kind of definitely picking up what I'm putting down, Mike. Um so if we think about um some of the heritage of where CSG started in the back-end billing platforms for some of the largest telecommunication and cable businesses in North America, we sit on a mountain of billing, billing information. Um, and uh that ultimately helps us drive better decision making on um prescribing cross-sell upsell opportunities, mitigating billing confusion based off of um what we know um kind of shows up on a monthly bill. Um and for you know, for those who may be having kind of financial burden, um, who are maybe not the most um uh diligent payers of their bills, um, we can um through generative AI solution sets offer up you know payment plans and provide a very prescriptive experience to how a consumer would engage with that brand in that kind of part of the journey. Um ultimately getting making sure your bill is correct and accurate, you know how to pay it, um, and you know what services you are subscribing to. Um, it's essential in building customer trust back to that brand. Um, and Exponent and the suite of CSG products essentially allow us to uh to do that for some of the largest brands in the globe.

Billing Data As A Trust Engine

The Age Of Overwhelm In CX

SPEAKER_01

Gotcha. I've I happen to have spoken to a handful of those people who are um happily using your platform for those purposes. Uh one of the things that prompted this conversation in the first place was CSG's recent state of CX report and some of the findings in it. And it's always interesting to see you know how things are changing, what the highlights are for some of these reports as they come out year after year. Was particularly interested in how CX kind of framed these, some of your findings because they were kind of eye-opening. Um, these are my words, so I'm interpreting here. If I get this wrong, you know, wave me off here. But um credibility, empathy, and clarity are lagging behind on the consumer side. And there's there's data to back that up, but I don't think anybody would would argue that uh clarity is lagging. You can pick any realm of life, and probably that's a truism. Um, empathy and credibility, though, are harder to track. So I'd love to hear more about because you sit on mounds and mounds of consumer data, what that looks like. What what were the highlights? How did those spikes or or drops or gaps, I should say, show up? And what do you think that means for customer-facing businesses, consumer-facing businesses?

Empathy, Clarity, And Execution Gaps

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I mean, I I think there's a really clear intersection where, with you know, empathy and and clarity, um, you know, ultimately consumers in this day and age are striving for a very consistent um end-to-end experience that really shows a brand understands them. Um, there's been concepts in the customer experience market for the better part of a decade of wanting, you know, consumers wanting to be heard, known, and understood. Um, and the brands that are able to close the execution to experience gap, I think are the brands that certainly in the year ahead um in the years to come are, you know, who we're going to start to see gain market share, increase lifetime value of their consumer base, um, and really win in the markets in which they serve. Um, you know, as we, as you referenced, our state of customer experience report um is kind of dubbed this upcoming year as the age of overwhelm. Um and we think about kind of um what it means to provide that clarity to a consumer in an experience, whether it's a billing experience or a context center interaction of the like, um, making sure that um we are helping brands really cut through the noise. Um, consumers and businesses alike are completely inundated with communication overload. I think if you were to look at your phone right now, Mike, you probably have, you know, app notifications, emails missed, text messages missed, and calls missed. And if you pick up your phone, you're trying to figure out, well, what do I address first? Um, and so a lot of the research that was conducted as part of our annual study was to validate how the natural consumer is feeling about this natural state of just being overwhelmed, um, not knowing what to act on, what is, you know, kind of spam or marketing and not necessarily essential to pay attention to. Um, and, you know, we we kind of think obviously about the introduction of AI and all of that promise, um, making sure that at its core a customer understands how to get through a task start to finish without a bump. Um, uh, and that, you know, they can do business with the brands that they want to in a clear and concise fashion, um, one with kind of respect and empathy and and that emotional connection at its core, obviously, given that um, you know, any consumer who does business with a brand is looking to, you know, to do that, you know, relationship largely um because they they trust the the products and services that they're getting, that you know, there is a you know an inherent relationship there. And I think a lot of relationships are built obviously on trunk trust and empathy and a mutual understanding of what the desired outcome is. Um so yeah, I would say, I mean, that's kind of how I would initially describe, you know, some of what the report findings were on what it means for brands to seek getting clarity for customers across the experience and um, you know, how they can um kind of how organizations can route through that um and make sure they're really cutting through the noise in this upcoming year.

Building Trust At Scale

SPEAKER_01

I've had a few conversations with large-scale technology providers that service uh large consumer-facing enterprises. And the idea of trust is a is a big theme lately. You know, it it erodes really quickly in some realms and is really tough to regain in others. Um, I'd love to hear how CSG, or maybe you specifically, because you kind of sit at the top of the CX pyramid there. Um how you view that kind of what's the right right way to phrase this? How do you build trust at scale when when essentially you're delivering a technology? So how do you how do you build trust that that lasts, that resonates, that doesn't just erode when the first problem happens?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it great question. I mean, I think it starts with understanding what the customer is expecting of that brand in that moment. Um uh and you know, again, whether you are um, you know, regardless of the type of interaction and even the type of channel that a customer is engaging with, um, making sure that um, you know, as a as a brand, you're building that experience with your consumer, right? For for a while, we've heard kind of you know, have the customer be a have a seat at the decision-making table, um, you know, making sure that um the organization kind of embodies that customer obsession and that you're focused on processes um that ultimately hopefully drive efficiency in the business, but that um are also focused on the customer outcome. At the end of the day, a customer wants to, you know, go to their bank and get a transaction done with ease and simplicity. They want to um pay a bill with ease and simplicity. Um, and when those um when those again critical moments have um have challenge or problematic or um there's a ton of channel switching between um those experiences, there's there becomes a ton of friction. And again, consumers don't feel like they are even known. They're just another number. Um, and so brands really need to work in overdrive to regain that trust, knowing that consumers can switch on a dime, right? Um and maybe even less than a dime at this point, right? You know, switching costs are essentially zero brand to brand. And so if we think about um the power and the leverage being on the consumer side, brands have to work in overdrive to make sure that those experiences are flawless and they're taking into consideration and preserving the time and energy of the consumer and making sure that those things get executed. Um, because when the small things break, it doesn't matter if it was one experience or 10 experiences, but when there's a million kind of paper cuts along the way, that's when trust really starts to erode and consumers are just going to go to the next brand that either provides an equal or better service.

Micro Frictions That Break Loyalty

SPEAKER_01

So I think what I heard, I'm I'm interpreting and editorializing here substantially. Uh, what I think I heard is that the real keys to lasting trust happen before the engagement. It happens with a kind of innate understanding of who your customer is, what they're about, what they're there for, what they're trying to accomplish, what their own particular parameters are, which would, I guess if you can if you can start the relationship off with that kind of understanding or close to that, um, you're in a much better position. You've kind of crossed the starting line with some momentum, I guess, the way I would put it. If I've got that right. And so you know, the idea would be that kind of mitigates whatever, as you mentioned, these these, you know, death by a thousand cuts kinds of kinds of problems. Can we talk a little bit about what some of those little micro cuts might be, you know, the little tiny cracks? Because you see them all, or at least you see a a chunk of them. And um it occurs to me that large organizations, especially have a strong tendency to pay attention to the larger gaps. Um but I think a customer doesn't care how big the gap is, they just see a gap. Um and yet and what that means by default is the smaller ones, the tiny fissures and the crackles, just don't get addressed. But um, I first of all, so I'd like to hear what you think some of those cracks and fissures are. And then what does a company do to mitigate that?

Cutting Noise With Real-Time Analytics

SPEAKER_00

Yep. Yeah, I mean, I we've touched on a couple of these, right? But if you think about um a uh a message uh that are get that's getting deleted um in someone's you know, inbox, uh, again, because they're you know inundated with communications from not just one brand, but every brand that they do business with, um, unfortunately, a lot of those messages can often messages can often be mistaken as spam or marketing messages, those things that are not necessarily action-oriented. But if it if it is to pay a bill, pay your mortgage, and you miss that, thinking you know, you've mistaken it, um, that's that becomes problematic. Um uh if you you know miss an appointment because of poor follow-up and communication from a brand, whether it's for a provider, um you're going to your doctor, you're getting a flu shot, um, or you've missed a technician to your home. Um, again, those become pain points for the consumer, right? We all you know live busy lives and are scheduling things around um, you know, when we choose to do business with certain brands. And when those experiences don't happen as expected, it causes a lot of disruption in our personal and professional lives. And um, you know, we we go back to kind of thinking about billing errors. When there's an error or your bill is confusing and there's no real way to explain it other than calling to a call center and screaming representative five times. Um, some of that becomes quite frustrating. Um, and so you think about ways in which you can improve that. Again, it goes back to really understanding and knowing your customer, having the technologies, having a unified set of data. You know, um I feel like the CX market has been plagued with the desire to have all data connected in a single in a single central repository. Um, and in some cases, that that becomes an overwhelming task for internal businesses to be able to unify, to connect all the data. I think if you you start small, you solve for some of those, you know, um, those cracks in the experience. You can build success from there. Um, but making sure that you think about kind of breaking down some of the data silos. So you're using contact center data more powerfully, you're using billing data more powerfully. Um, you're you're again looking at ways to improve the experience gap and understand where kind of brand execution is missing the mark from what's customer experience expectations are. Um uh and from there being able to then really create an improvement strategy that allows for brands to kind of lessen that expect that expectation um with its with its end consumers.

SPEAKER_01

So the next conversation we have, we'll spend more time talking about the problems we both see with CX's, the CX world's approach to building value. Because there are lots of them, and I think I can already tell we agree on most of it. But there are also some really practical solutions to that. So we don't need to make this a tongue-wagging session. But the next time we get together, I want to I do want to spend time discussing how CSG advises clients because a big part of what you do, I know, is advisory in nature. So um we're gonna add that to the agenda for for next call. For now, though, I'd like to pull out some highlights, cherry-pick a couple of data points from your state of CX report. Um, because I mentioned at the top of this call that uh some of them are quite eye-opening. So if you don't mind, I'm just gonna pull them right off the top and we can talk them through.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Seven out of ten consumers feel brands send too many messages. They don't care what brands are saying anymore. Now, before you answer, I want to answer and say yes. Complete agreement. Every single consumer in the Western world would say yes. It's been the case for, you know, ever since email was invented, I think. But CSG has some unique solutions and ideas behind that. So, what are your thoughts on that one?

Agentic AI: Promise And Hesitation

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, um, you know, again, I think it goes back to um, you know, the need to harness information. You know, we we talk about brands being able to move at the speed of experience. Um, and you you need to be able to do that by tapping into um real-time analytics, um, informing, making informed decision using journey analytics is going to be essential. So that as the experiences are unfolding and happening, um, brands are you know equipped with the right intelligence to make the necessary next best action for not just that consumer, but for every consumer that is even yet to go through that experience. So I think that's one area to make sure that you, again, brands start to cut through the noise, is empowered, being empowered with access to the right data and in real time, um, given how fast moving the world is these days. Um, again, you know, consumers want to move at their own pace. They want to get in and they want to get out and on with their lives. And um it's essential for brands to be able to keep up with that, um, that pace of innovation as well. Um, I would say, you know, we touched on this just a little bit ago, but um focusing on kind of data unification and really understanding how to break down those tech silos that are quite prevalent in and across the business. Um, and a topic we haven't talked about a ton yet today, Mike, um, just with the kind of continued evolution of AI, generative AI and now agentic, um, very much showing a ton of promise in driving business efficiency and supporting customers at scale much more effectively than you know, armies of humans can, um, making sure that as you think about deployment of those more advanced capabilities and technologies, that you're doing so in a very tightly scoped way, um, uh, so that those that are um maybe not as comfortable interacting with non-human um forms of support as an example, um that that trust doesn't erode um and that uh they they remain loyal consumers of your brand.

SPEAKER_01

Um just on that point, uh if I understood correctly, 50%, 56% of the consumers your report surveyed are uncomfortable letting AI take action on their behalf. So agentic AI, and uh well let me not comment here. I'd really like to hear your opinions rather than my own. But agentic AI has some has some room to go to achieve kind of um you know comfort and ubiquity.

Governance, Transparency, And On-Ramps

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yeah, I mean it uh the the pace of innovation has certainly been quite astonishing. Um, you know, I think about um some of the you know the early um capabilities that came out, you know, over the last even few years. We're seeing the, the, you know, the innovation pace substantially increase. It's now things are getting done in days and weeks, not months and years any longer. And again, for CSG to keep up with it, for any brand to be able to keep up with it, um, you've got to have a level of discipline, you know, in your organization. You've got to start thinking about the right governance structures, um, which are essential for the right deployment of that uh kind of solution set inside a business and especially anything that's going to kind of interact or touch a consumer or customer is going to be critical. Um I mean, there's a ton of promise that um agentic solutions certainly offer um organizations and our consumers. Um, I mean, the fact that you are essentially giving agency to a non-human individual to perform an end-to-end task and execute flawlessly. Um, you know, again, it's it's um uh it feels a bit sometimes, at least for me, a bit sci-fi in nature, right? Uh, that we are at really this point of kind of technological advancement. Um, but it it again, it is gonna be the way in which we work. And while, you know, as you said, 56 some odd percent of our consumers are not yet comfortable, it also means that there is a high proportion who are. And so really making sure that you're deploying those solutions, gaining the efficiencies where you can slowly introducing um agentic like capabilities in ways that make consumers comfortable when they're not, right? So offering on-ramps to human interactions when a task can't be fully completed, as an example, or somebody just wants to talk through in a one-to-one interaction is gonna be essential for building that trust and getting that additional, you know, percentage of employee, you know, of population comfortable with using the technology over time. I think there's a lot of strategies brands need to be thinking about. Um, I again, you know, um, you know, on-ramps and off-ramps is gonna be one of them. The governance, being really clear when agentic solutions are being used, when they're not, what they can do and what they can't is all part of that trust building factor. Um, uh, and making sure that organizations also know kind of what is a chatbot, what what isn't a chatbot, um, uh where there's more rigidity and when to properly deploy, because not um there's been a ton of studies, I'm sure you've seen them, whether it's MIT, EY, there's been a ton of publications on that agentic solutions haven't yet fully delivered on the promise that they have, you know, businesses have expected by way of business efficiencies and maybe cost savings. Um, I think I don't think we're that far away from that full um expectation coming to fruition. But making sure that there is um a pragmatic deployment of agentic solutions in your business is essential for any organization that's contemplating uh and using. Because certainly if you're if you're not in the game, you're going to be very quickly left behind come 2026.

Adoption Trends And Multichannel Comfort

SPEAKER_01

One of the things that um kind of occurs to me as I talk to folks in similar positions who are all kind of recognizing the potential of agentic AI, dealing with some of the current hesitations and trust levels that are still not quite there, is that agentic AI seems to have this kind of all-in-one label to it right now. And yet, agentic AI, as it's deployed across really critical functions, consumers will rightly be a little bit less like just giving and trusting. You can't just turn the keys over to somebody who you've never really done this kind of thing before for you know uh life critical tasks. I'm thinking of healthcare right now.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Um the other thing too is agentic AI, by definition, will eventually be built to interact with other agents. And so the complexity of the relationships there between these agents grows, and so will the I think the potential for mistakes, failures, uh, bad actors uh in these chains, because it's all gonna be invisible. But I am really, really um, I think impressed because the as you mentioned, the other side of that 56% that aren't comfortable with agentic AI right now, um, that means that 43% are. And that's that's really a giant number if you consider that three years ago, two years ago, even the consuming public really wasn't wasn't trusting AI at all as a concept. So here we are, you know, maybe uh baby steps towards trusting those things, but it all it all comes back to uh brands and companies, consumer-facing uh organizations' ability to gauge that trust and those expectations and manage towards it. So there I'll have to get off my soapbox now because that was actually your soapbox.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, no, I again I think um AI transparency is gonna be critical. And I think the fact that there's been um such a significant shift in just adoption comfortability, it I, you know, again, from from my kind of seat, you know, I think it has more to do with the fact that AI is more mainstream now than when it first really started to be discussed. And again, if you're using any of the AI capabilities, maybe not full agenc for your own personal use, I think there's general comfortability that starts to get built. And then when you see those capabilities being offered by your brands, you're more likely to use those, especially if they can truly operate autonomously and allow you to, you know, again, get get whatever it is that you need done faster and more efficiently. Um, you know, not everybody wants to talk to a human all the time, um, regardless. Uh and so, you know, brands that have those multi-channel ways of interaction, I think, are gonna start to see separation in the market.

A Playbook For 2026 Readiness

SPEAKER_01

If you had the worldwide microphone, you don't. We have a small but dedicated audience. It is not the worldwide microphone. But if you did for two minutes, what would you what would you like enterprise level consumer-facing organizations to know about this moment in time and what's coming down the pike and how they can either avoid the pitfalls or leverage those things that can be leveraged?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Um, I mean, certainly uh, you know, just on kind of continuing to pull the thread on um on all things kind of AI and agentic, given it is a lot of what certainly um we are contemplating at CSG on how we deliver uh more AI ready solutions to the market. Um, I would empower brands um to design capabilities, solutions, um, and interactions, uh, whether it is using AI or not, um, but particularly when you're using AI, as if you are employed, onboarding a normal human employee. Um, I think it is essential for AI to embody the brand tenants and brand standards, just as I and you would, uh, you know, being members of the organizations in which we we serve, um, ensuring that, you know, empathy, the necessary guardrails, um, there's clear accountability, um, uh, that all of those are kind of embodied as you think about what it means to deploy kind of, you know, AI in really pragmatic ways as you enter kind of 26 and think about the year ahead. Um, I also think that there's got to be a level of actioning, right? Brands need to start. They need to start somewhere, or you're going to get left behind. Um, need to prove value, continuously test and learn and evolve your strategies over the course of the upcoming year to constantly be ideally one or two steps ahead of the market and what your consumers are demanding of you. Um, and then I would just say continue to focus on closing the experience, uh, the experience gaps that your consumers are still frustrated with. Leverage the wealth of data the brands sit on and act on it. Do so in real time and use analytics to fuel what to focus on next so that you know organizations can meet the need and meet the demand of their consumers.

SPEAKER_01

Well, this was the rich conversation I anticipated it would be. So thank you for that. Um and I do want to get back on your schedule because I think uh maybe elevating the conversation a couple of rungs up the up the ladder here just to talk about some of the the broader concepts that I'm I'm I know that you you and CSG are well aware of and the the hurdles uh conceptually and strategically that the world faces with these these new technologies and how CX in specific is going to try and solve some of those. But for now, Katie, thanks a million. I really appreciate this.

SPEAKER_00

I appreciate it, Mike. Love the conversation. Thanks so much.

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Mike Giambattista

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