Don Schuerman, CTO, Pegasystems, Shelly Kramer, Analyst & Digital Transformation Strategist, Futurum Research, and Adrian Swinscoe, Customer Service and Experience Advisor and Best Selling Author sit down with Dave Vellante for a power panel for PegaWorld iNspire.
Visit thecube.net for our full catalog of interviews.
#PegaWorld #theCUBE #PegaSystems @Pegasystems @SiliconANGLE theCUBE
https://siliconangle.com/2020/06/09/reconnecting-with-empathy-how-pegasystems-leads-clients-from-channel-focused-to-customer-centric-pegaworld/
Reconnecting with empathy: How Pegasystems leads clients from channel-focused to customer-centric
It was the third interaction on a customer service call to his cable company that sent Don Schuerman (pictured, right) over the top.
Schuerman, chief technology officer of Pegasystems Inc., needed to increase his home bandwidth as a result of being suddenly forced, along with much of the world, to work remotely this spring. The experience he received as a cable customer turned out to be a prime example of how many enterprises fail to escape from a siloed, channel-focused design.
“When the chatbot flipped me over to the human, the human didn’t know what I was doing with the chatbot,” Schuerman recalled. “That human eventually told me I had to call somebody, and that person didn’t know what I did with the chatbot or the previous human. That to me is a direct result of channel-centric thinking.”
Schuerman spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the PegaWorld iNspire virtual event. He was joined by Shelly Kramer (pictured, center), principal analyst and founding partner at Futurum Research, and Adrian Swinscoe (pictured, left), a customer service and experience advisor and the best-selling author of the books “How to Wow: 68 Effortless Ways to Make Every Customer Experience Amazing” and “Punk CX.” They discussed the importance of building a strong platform for customer engagement, Pegasystems’ latest cloud-based software tool for bridging organizational gaps, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, and the role of empathy in client service. (* Disclosure below.)
Becoming customer-centric
Schuerman’s experience will likely sound familiar to many. Organizations have seized the opportunity to install the latest technology without connecting the flow of critical information between automated and human-reliant systems.
“If you continue to do it in this channel-centric or data-centric way that has historically been the approach, I don’t think you can build a sustainable platform for great customer engagement,” Schuerman said. “How do I truly become customer-centric, and then how do I actually make my technology do it? It’s really important for that to work where you put your business logic in the technology.”
This critical point around where business logic is placed goes to heart of what Pega is seeking to accomplish for its customers. While enterprises think in terms of channels, customers view most companies as monoliths that deliver a service or product they want, regardless of which pipeline provides it. Pegasystems opens a window for its clients to see customer engagement through the eyes of the customer.
“Customers don’t think about journeys in the way that organizations do,” Swinscoe noted. “They expect conversations to be picked up across those different channels. We’ve got to build an architecture that works around supporting different types of journeys.”
Leveraging AI to prioritize tasks
Earlier this month, Pegasystems unveiled a new architecture designed to change the paradigm around customer journeys. A cloud-based software called Pega Process Fabric employs a variety of tools to bridge connectivity gaps between bloated tech stacks.
“Customers don’t interact with microservices,” Schuerman said. “Process Fabric is about putting the technology in place to allow us to take these distributed bits of work that we need to do and weave them together into experiences that are coherent for a customer and easy for an employee to navigate. That’s what the vision of Process Fabric is all about.”
A key element of Process Fabric involves artificial intelligence. Connectors allow an employee to see all of the work being performed for an order or customer and leverages AI to prioritize tasks.
The global pandemic has pushed many companies to find automated solutions, and this has propelled AI more deeply into the enterprise.
“It was kind of like ripping the Band-Aid off,” Kramer said. “We’re finding that AI plays a tremendously important role in relieving the workload on front-line workers. We can go pretty far, and I think AI will happen pretty fast.”
Empathy and evolution
For AI to reach more deeply into the customer experience, it will have to overcome inherent doubts about its use. A study conducted last year by Pegasystems found that only 30% of customers expressed comfort with AI as a tool to interact with them.
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Power Panel | PegaWorld iNspire
Don Schuerman, CTO, Pegasystems, Shelly Kramer, Analyst & Digital Transformation Strategist, Futurum Research, and Adrian Swinscoe, Customer Service and Experience Advisor and Best Selling Author sit down with Dave Vellante for a power panel for PegaWorld iNspire.
Visit thecube.net for our full catalog of interviews.
#PegaWorld #theCUBE #PegaSystems @Pegasystems @SiliconANGLE theCUBE
https://siliconangle.com/2020/06/09/reconnecting-with-empathy-how-pegasystems-leads-clients-from-channel-focused-to-customer-centric-pegaworld/
Reconnecting with empathy: How Pegasystems leads clients from channel-focused to customer-centric
It was the third interaction on a customer service call to his cable company that sent Don Schuerman (pictured, right) over the top.
Schuerman, chief technology officer of Pegasystems Inc., needed to increase his home bandwidth as a result of being suddenly forced, along with much of the world, to work remotely this spring. The experience he received as a cable customer turned out to be a prime example of how many enterprises fail to escape from a siloed, channel-focused design.
“When the chatbot flipped me over to the human, the human didn’t know what I was doing with the chatbot,” Schuerman recalled. “That human eventually told me I had to call somebody, and that person didn’t know what I did with the chatbot or the previous human. That to me is a direct result of channel-centric thinking.”
Schuerman spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the PegaWorld iNspire virtual event. He was joined by Shelly Kramer (pictured, center), principal analyst and founding partner at Futurum Research, and Adrian Swinscoe (pictured, left), a customer service and experience advisor and the best-selling author of the books “How to Wow: 68 Effortless Ways to Make Every Customer Experience Amazing” and “Punk CX.” They discussed the importance of building a strong platform for customer engagement, Pegasystems’ latest cloud-based software tool for bridging organizational gaps, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, and the role of empathy in client service. (* Disclosure below.)
Becoming customer-centric
Schuerman’s experience will likely sound familiar to many. Organizations have seized the opportunity to install the latest technology without connecting the flow of critical information between automated and human-reliant systems.
“If you continue to do it in this channel-centric or data-centric way that has historically been the approach, I don’t think you can build a sustainable platform for great customer engagement,” Schuerman said. “How do I truly become customer-centric, and then how do I actually make my technology do it? It’s really important for that to work where you put your business logic in the technology.”
This critical point around where business logic is placed goes to heart of what Pega is seeking to accomplish for its customers. While enterprises think in terms of channels, customers view most companies as monoliths that deliver a service or product they want, regardless of which pipeline provides it. Pegasystems opens a window for its clients to see customer engagement through the eyes of the customer.
“Customers don’t think about journeys in the way that organizations do,” Swinscoe noted. “They expect conversations to be picked up across those different channels. We’ve got to build an architecture that works around supporting different types of journeys.”
Leveraging AI to prioritize tasks
Earlier this month, Pegasystems unveiled a new architecture designed to change the paradigm around customer journeys. A cloud-based software called Pega Process Fabric employs a variety of tools to bridge connectivity gaps between bloated tech stacks.
“Customers don’t interact with microservices,” Schuerman said. “Process Fabric is about putting the technology in place to allow us to take these distributed bits of work that we need to do and weave them together into experiences that are coherent for a customer and easy for an employee to navigate. That’s what the vision of Process Fabric is all about.”
A key element of Process Fabric involves artificial intelligence. Connectors allow an employee to see all of the work being performed for an order or customer and leverages AI to prioritize tasks.
The global pandemic has pushed many companies to find automated solutions, and this has propelled AI more deeply into the enterprise.
“It was kind of like ripping the Band-Aid off,” Kramer said. “We’re finding that AI plays a tremendously important role in relieving the workload on front-line workers. We can go pretty far, and I think AI will happen pretty fast.”
Empathy and evolution
For AI to reach more deeply into the customer experience, it will have to overcome inherent doubts about its use. A study conducted last year by Pegasystems found that only 30% of customers expressed comfort with AI as a tool to interact with them.
...
