Insight into the context of the customer becomes more important in times of corona, according to this Jacqueline van Wees, commercially responsible for the financial sector within Pega. Agents can respond quickly to what they hear, but can companies do that too?

Van Wees kicked off the first Pega Discover event, a series of online meetings for specialists in 1:1 marketing, customer service and intelligent automation, as an alternative to face-to-face events. On October 7, Steven Van Belleghem and, among others, spoke Rob Walker (Pega) about personalization in services, Pega's hobbyhorse. Personalized service is the next big thing in customer experience and fits in perfectly with the trend of recent years where data is seen as increasingly important for the business. Later on during this Pega Discover session, Vodafone also gave an update on personalization.

Online and offline = hybrid

According to Van Belleghem, it is abundantly clear that – partly as a result of corona – we have ended up in a hybrid world more than ever where online and offline come together. He cites an example of this hybrid form as the Chinese medical app Ping An Good Doctor (300 million users). If you enter your symptoms in that app, you immediately receive a video call with a doctor. The same platform also supplies any medication or provides a referral to a nearby hospital. A good example of the merging of offline and online, where the doctor comes to the patient, says Van Belleghem.

Personalized service is not possible without two other conditions: real-time and convenience. Disney is a company that successfully combines these three properties in a hybrid form. In Disney's offline parks, customers get a "magicband', which gives access to all kinds of personalized online and offline services. The magic band is a wristband with RFID and both an identification and a means of transaction: the band gives access to your own hotel room and you can pay with it. You can also use it to send photos of yourself in attractions to your own Disney photo account. Under certain conditions, customers get their magic band for free, but you can also buy it offline and online in all kinds of variants. Perhaps Disney hopes that children also wear their favorite band when they go to school.

How do you include the context in your services?

The challenge for marketers and customer experience specialists is to make this type of personalized service context-based. In the digital world, more and more signals are becoming available that software can work with, says Rob Walker. Signals can be a (new) location, a login, a swipe in an app or a click on a web page. The idea is that this allows you to optimize the relevance of marketing and sales in real time. In other words: in an offer or a response you also include the very latest information. The difference between real time and near real time can, so to speak, amount to a few seconds: the time in which a customer views a new web page after clicking through. Or as Walker puts it: “Yesterday's database is not good enough.”

Walker therefore argues for an architecture in customer service, sales and marketing that is not based on interaction channels, but on a central 'brain' containing all information about the customer. That is also the platform that AI and algorithms can connect to.

“Creepy business”

Disney's magic band looks relatively innocent compared to the amazon halo: a product in which Van Belleghem wonders whether this is not heading towards 'creepy stuff'. The Halo is similar to a smartwatch (with the usual features focused on physical health), but also includes a microphone whose Tweakers says: “In addition, it is possible to have the voice sound analyzed via the built-in microphones. For example, the Halo software can recognize stress in the sound of the voice, and according to Amazon, the feature should help users better understand how they come across to other people.” Van Belleghem wonders whether Amazon will link the emotion detection to the prices you see when you log in to the Amazon web store.

Walker thinks Van Belleghem's concerns are justified. Pega expects AI to be accepted only if applications are fair, transparent (explicable), empathetic and reliable. As far as Walker is concerned, data can be innocent for a long time, but things can turn out differently when you start working with data.

Retention: proposal that meets your wishes

Pega has argued for it before ethical and moral awareness in AI, now summarized by Walker as “We could sell you this, but should we?” However, that discussion about if something is possible, you should also apply it, did not return to Vodafone, Pega's customer that strongly focuses on real-time and personalization.

Simon Esland, Manager Marketing Platforms at Vodafone Group, a company with 400 million customers. Although Esland states that recommendations arising from Next Best Action must match the interests of the customers, upselling and cross-selling are really paramount. Customer retention, for example, looks at the (recent) surfing behavior of the customer. Does anyone turn out to be a heavy iPhone user and a streaming enthusiast? There is a good chance that the customer who threatens to leave will receive a tailor-made proposal that fits in well with those interests.

In fact, the real-time data goes to the agent who is chatting with the customer – if someone has been looking at VodafoneZiggo's 'paid TV' options in the past 30 seconds, the offer that the agent can made even more relevant. In addition to all the information that Vodafone already has about the customer, information about the The intent. According to Estonia, Vodafone Spain has achieved good results with this: “Hyper personalization is promising and a game changer.” It would be nice if we could also start reaping the benefits in customer service.

Consumers and AI: less resistance, more critical attitude

Back to the fears and resistances of consumers when it comes to AI. Maybe Pega needs to worry a little less. From research of Capgemini (a Pega partner by the way) shows that almost half of consumers now trust AI-based interactions with organizations. However, more customers than before think that companies are not transparent enough about the data they collect. Capgemini surveyed more than eight hundred organizations and 2.900 consumers for its research. Consumers believe organizations are not doing enough on a number of key ethical issues: The share of customers who believe organizations are fully transparent about how they use their personal data has fallen from 76 percent in 2019 to 62 percent today. In addition to the aforementioned recommendations as Pega makes, Capgemini also advocates an opportunity for customers to maintain control over their own privacy when doing business with AI.

Slightly less resistance and a slightly more critical attitude: the National AI Course may have contributed to this. The National AI Course is a free online program that explains the basic principles behind AI in an accessible way through explanation videos from professors, stimulating statements and educational animations. This online 'crash course', an initiative of Jim Stolze, has so far been followed by more than 170.000 citizens in the Netherlands.

Customer Experience, Featured pegasystems