CSG’s Reid Jenkins on Broadband Innovation & AI-Driven CX

1. As demand for multi-gig broadband services grows, how are you helping customers align product innovation with infrastructure investment to ensure sustainable market expansion?

Today, broadband leaders need the operational agility to launch new products, packages and bundles in days, not months. As customers expect faster, more personalized experiences, organizations need the infrastructure flexibility to adapt to market trends in real time and bring tailored offerings to customers.

Mediacom comes to mind as a perfect example of a broadband leader that knows how to scale and innovate without leaving existing customers behind. As the demand for multi-gig broadband continues to accelerate, Mediacom is expanding one of rural America’s most robust 10G broadband platforms. While growing their customer base, they are swiftly bringing new innovations to the market, ensuring their existing customers can maximize the value of their services across cable television, internet and telephone.

CSG works with broadband leaders like Mediacom to create operational efficiencies and to secure customer loyalty with a personalized, timely experience.

2. How are you helping organizations integrate real-time customer data to drive personalization, reduce churn, and enhance customer loyalty?

Loyalty is more critical than ever for sustainable growth, as it leads to increased customer lifetime value, higher profit margins and more stable revenue streams.  In a crowded market, customers are more inclined to make decisions based on value and their experience with the brand, rather than service capabilities alone.

With that in mind, organizations need to prioritize clarity and personalization in every customer interaction.

First, they need to understand the customer. CSG helps organizations break down data silos to get a complete view of the customer across all lines of business. Second, they need to take action. With operational agility, organizations can use that data to deliver clear, contextual communications and quickly build new, personalized offerings that they know will resonate and drive loyalty.

3. What role do automation and proactive service delivery (e.g., proactive billing insights or order accuracy) play in your customer experience and operational efficiency roadmap?

Automation is crucial to deliver a proactive, timely customer experience at scale. But an automation strategy needs to be carefully scoped and designed with the customer in mind.

AI is not the answer to every problem. When approaching new AI use cases, organizations should focus on ones that positively impact their customers the most  – identifying and solving breaks in the customer experience, strengthening data security and ensuring order accuracy.

CSG Bill Explainer, for instance, is an AI-powered solution designed to solve bill confusion, a multi-million-dollar problem for subscription businesses and a driver for as much as 50% of contact center volume. Organizations use CSG Bill Explainer to proactively reach out to customers in their preferred channels to explain changes to their bill – before they need to ask. This customer-focused automation allows organizations to reduce billing-related inbound contact, increase on-time payments, reduce contact center volume and build trust with customers.

4. How do shared values and a people-first culture influence your choice of technology or service partners, and how do you evaluate the long-term impact of these relationships?

To me, being a people-first company means that we care deeply about our customers and the outcomes we deliver. We care about trust and authenticity, and we don’t overpromise.

We choose strategic partners that share those same values and help us solve real problems, not buzzy trends. Our partner ecosystem is designed to eliminate complexity, accelerate innovation and scale solutions for sustainable growth.

Those shared values are also what makes our customer relationships so enduring. Once again, our relationship with Mediacom is a prime example. With three decades of successful collaboration, our business relationship has been built on mutual trust, a shared commitment to customer-centric innovation and a focus on delivering intuitive experiences. United in our goal of creating clear, connected experiences, we’ve achieved serious value and positioned Mediacom to meet and exceed expectations today and in the future.

5. What criteria do you prioritize when extending long-term partnerships to ensure alignment with future business goals, customer needs, and technological evolution? 

Great question – because it really is about the future. When evaluating long-term partnerships, we focus not only in creating value today, but long term value. It’s never a one-and-done; it’s about helping our customers prepare for anything the future may hold.

Success to us is when our customers can move with total agility, responding to their customer needs in real time while planning for future customer expectations.

Take our expanded partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which we’ve just announced. The fact is, organizations that don’t move to the cloud and embrace AI today will fall behind. In particular, telecom and financial services companies are under enormous pressure to modernize and innovate faster. We partnered with AWS to help our customers fast-track cloud transformation and gain access to advanced GenAI and agentic AI solutions, so they can innovate with confidence in the AI-driven future.

6. What emerging technologies are you exploring to enhance broadband delivery, reduce service friction, and create new revenue opportunities in a saturated market?

I’d be remiss not to bring up AI again. Broadband leaders are facing an ultra-competitive market, where customers have sky-high expectations for value. By applying AI to create faster, easier and more personal experiences, broadband providers can stand out and win.

As broadband and other organization leaders plan for the future, they will need to view AI not only as a way to cut costs, but as a tool for sustainable value-creation. We’re helping our customers identify the right AI applications and use cases for their businesses – ones with clearly defined scopes that actually solve a problem and generate value.

For example, when it comes to agentic AI, the opportunity is enormous – but so are the risks. A true agentic AI solution is completely autonomous, with the agency to remember, decide and execute. That means that it must be applied very thoughtfully, ideally layered over a platform that already understands the customer and the business. In fact, despite the amount of market chatter, right now there are only a handful of use cases where agentic AI works reliably. We’re helping organizations find the areas where they have the data, the system integration and the governance for agentic AI to be effective and trustworthy.

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