Venk Korla of HGS Digital on 5 ways to create a wow customer experience

Fine-tune customer experiences based on segmented customer needs: Improve loyalty and brand relationships via personalized customer journeys based on segmentation and prediction models. Lead from a place of empathy. Truly understand your customers and the moments that they are in. If I book an airline ticket, I don’t want to open the app and see a generic ad to buy another plane ticket, I want to see an ad for a hotel in the place I am flying to.

Venk Korla is President & CEO of HGS Digital, a global leader in the customer experience (CX) lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management. A visionary entrepreneur and technologist, Venk has a proven record of delivering outstanding shareholder returns through innovative growth strategies and strong execution. Before joining HGS Digital, Venk was Founder & CEO of Element Solutions and also served as Director of Software Engineering for Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I went to engineering school in India and started my first company in the technology space doing electronics work when I was 19 years old. I built that up and sold it, then started another company selling computer parts. After school, I transitioned to the U.S. in the early 2000s and started consulting for an e-commerce company. After a couple of different entrepreneurial ventures, I realized that online digital experiences were calling my name. Focusing on the online experience was relatively new, so I really leaned into the solutions and offerings that would shape a better experience for retailers and even the healthcare space. My consulting company was ultimately sold to HGS and that’s what brought me here today.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?