Imagine this: you are staying in your sweltering holiday hotel and you are shocked to discover that you have not brought any swimming trunks. You can quickly order a modern swimming boxer at your favorite online store. Fortunately, the mail is not long in coming. But the content is disappointing: a size too small. You write – very old school – an e-mail and add a photo of the swimsuit. The e-mail has only just been sent and you will receive a response within a fraction of a second. The correct size will be sent directly to your holiday home. You sip your cocktail with relief.

The e-mail bot, completely driven by Artificial Intelligence, is one of the new assets of pegasystems Pega Infinity™, Pega's next generation digital transformation software across all levels of an organization, across silos. Also called end-to-end customer success solutions, based on common customer journeys. The enhanced email virtual assistant is one such example.

E-mail? Yes, e-mail, because for the time being most customer questions still reach organizations through traditional channels. The Artificial Intelligence software recognizes the customer and registers that it concerns a return shipment. The dedicated OCR software for optical character recognition copies important information from the conversation and knows in which size the swimsuit should be sent to which address. No one was involved in the conversation.

 

Kerim Akgonul, senior VP Products, makes no effort to hide his enthusiasm. He has just live on stage, demonstrated the super-fast email communication with the webshop. Also during this edition of Pegaworld gesturing broadly and pacing, he demonstrates the possibilities of the improved, unified platform.

More than 1,5 business professionals will witness “the largest product launch in Pegasystems history” in sweltering Las Vegas to hear how leading organizations are transforming with Pega solutions. These include mainly banks, insurers and healthcare organizations, but also leading brands such as Google, Dell, Cisco, PayPal and LinkedIn. The organization now handles customer interactions for XNUMX billion consumers worldwide.

Digital chaos

According to Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems, a drastic cut is needed in the digital solutions that the IT industry has developed itself in recent years. “Most organizations simply cannot adapt fast enough to the current, almost constant threat of disruption. Silos housing contact channels operate independently, so channels are isolated.”

“Tasks are not organized around the customer, but are based on internal processes. And finally: the organization of processes does not lead to definitive, customer-oriented solutions. Logical consequence: a coherent, next best action, via all contact channels, is not forthcoming. Organizations therefore need fundamental solutions that add value to their DNA.”

“By providing customers with the right message, at the right time, through any channel, organizations can improve customer satisfaction and increase customer lifetime value. The new platform provides for this.” It is, in its own words, 'the only unified digital platform that connects front-end customer experience with back-end process automation'.

Service design

The software supplier is a strong supporter of design thinking in its actions and thinks in customer cases, something that is emphasized again during the event through all kinds of customer cases. A customer case is a series of steps that are logically connected in a customer journey. Any organization looking to improve customer service should ask itself: Which customer case do I want to improve? For which personas? Via which data and interfaces?

Aflac, a large healthcare organization with 50 million customers and 10.000 employees worldwide, chose the customer case 'pay faster for claims', translated into One Day Pay in product jargon. Senior VP and CIO Julia Davis did this based on several customer conversations where she found out their real needs. Detractors indicated that they wanted to take the helm themselves, wanted a well-functioning website and streamlined processes.

Simple tasks ended up on the robotics board. The forest of all kinds of IT solutions, housed in independently operating silos, made way for new technology that offers customers the speed they want. And service employees could focus on adding value to customers; something that only took off after the necessary training. The Fortune 500 company increased the percentage of payout in one day from 39% (2013) to 79% (2017) using the design thinking methodology.

A financial institution such as JP Morgan Chase also experiences the need to work more customer-oriented. The competition does not only come from other banks, disruptive players such as Google are also viewed with suspicion, says Dutch CIO Saul van Beurden. “More than ever before, customers want service without friction. This means that we have to act faster, ensure faster, always safe and reliable transactions, which are also scalable.”

 

The bank introduced an agile transformation. “We have 1.100 scrum teams operational and deliver improvements in two-week sprints. A super product owner who can act independently makes the decisions. New developments do not take 40 weeks, but only 8 weeks. We involve the customer at every step. If this is not available, we start from personas. We automate everything and eliminate overhead. We have also changed the staff, which allows us to act more flexibly.”

Another financial organization that has been completely turned upside down is Genworth. The organization provides financial solutions for future or immediate care for the elderly. When Chief Transformation Officer Martijn Gribnau joined the organization, Genworth consisted of a collection of 27 companies. His goal: to simplify and digitize the organization, so that the service employees can focus all their attention on what really matters to customers. Because a claim decision took no less than 53 days and opening a policy could take only two months.

Gribnau is also a fan of the agile working method. He focuses his attention in particular on the employees who, like him, see that change is necessary and who want to move forward. This has already led to the development of new products that enable the elderly to live independently at home for longer, and new service concepts to prevent claims. In addition, the entire claim process has been digitized. Will customers adopt the new products?

“That is looking at coffee grounds. You will know the effect of this in 3 years. What will customer service look like? There's nothing sensible to say about that. Will the contact center be scaled down, will new services be added? In any case, things will happen that you cannot predict now. For the time being, AI still has to develop further: not only understanding the question and understanding the context, but also learning from it itself.”
Gribnau's take-home tips: don't see business and IT as separate entities, but as one. Simplify processes before you start transforming. And the last: name your end goal.

Simple and digital

Easy, digital processes, who doesn't love them? Pioneering organizations such as Amazon, Apple and Facebook set the standard against which the customer focus of other organizations is compared. This includes cable giant Liberty Global, which serves 22 million customers in 11 markets. The global player wishes to make a difference through personalized offers.

Deep learning technology recognizes patterns in the enormous amount of data available to the global player. Based on this, personalized offers can be made. Moreover, it is known which data are of great importance in this offer, taking into account the new privacy legislation. The Next Best Moment can be accurately determined on this basis.
In other words: when a personalized offer has the greatest chance of success. For example: within 15 to 30 days this customer shows interest in product A.
Customers are currently gaining their first experiences with personalized offers in the testing ground in England, emphasizes Duncan MacDonald, VP Consumer Solutions and Digital Transformation.

Adding value before the customer has problems or questions. That's the role of customer service for the foreseeable future. “AHT? Customers don't want their request or problem rushed. FCR? The call was not the time you needed service,” said Jeff Nicholson, VP CRM Pegasystems. ”AI adds value to self-service, in the areas of sales, service and marketing. The AI ​​brain, as I call it, is customer brain. They recognize the customer, analyze customer data and advise what the customer's intention will be, even before they contact your organization.”

“Natural Language Processing makes it possible to analyze customer feedback, identify customer needs, solve problems early and provide proactive service. For example, by an augmented agent, who learns from the best performing agent. The life agent is like a co-pilot in an airplane, has a very important role. While the software quickly prepares the answer to a customer question, the agent can still interpret this answer before it is sent to the customer. This makes every conversation, regardless of the channel, smarter.

Pool party people

Congress is over. In the immense MGM Grand Hotel, which still has about 6.000 hotel rooms, the end of the day is very busy. In the shopping mall and on the casino floor, the conference delegates dressed in casual outfits form a striking contrast to the scantily clad pool guests who walk barefoot to their hotel room.

“Both the pool party people and the IT people visibly enjoyed their stay here,” summarizes Kerim Akgonul, senior VP Products. “What the young pool party people don't yet know, however, is that they will soon be served by organizations with solutions that have now been devised. They are going to embrace AI and robotics, just like we did with the internet and mobile.”

Read also Take a 'rock star' like Amazon as a starting point 

 

 

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