Pega Infinity and DPA: Customer Engagement and BPM without Limits

I recently attended the 2018 PegaWorld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The atmosphere was electric, in more ways than one. First off, of course, it was Vegas – consequently, electric experiences were everywhere. In addition, we were treated on one of the evenings with live entertainment from the rock band Train, with amazing vocals and electric guitar performances. And then there was the star of the event: Pega’s new product announcement – Pega Infinity!

So, you may be asking: who, or what, is Pega? If you asked me that question two years ago, I would not have been able to answer it. But, now, after two visits to PegaWorld (2017 and 2018), I believe that any large enterprise (and even small to medium size enterprises) should check out Pega's software products and services for customer relationship management (CRM), digital process automation (DPA), and business process management (BPM). Pega's client portfolio includes some of the most successful consumer-facing brands in the world, serving a base of 1.5 billion consumers! That is an electric number all by itself! That's practically to infinity and beyond!

Pega was founded in 1983 with a focus on delivering software for the automation of customer case management processes. That BPA (Business Process Automation) focus has not shifted, but in fact has accelerated in depth and breadth: growing into RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and now expanding fully into DPA (Digital Process Automation). Since the world is now digital, more specifically “data”, then the modern digital business is synonymous with digital transformation. In many industries and sectors, this transformation is experienced as digital disruption.

Much fanfare is made of small, innovative, agile tech startups that are disrupting industries, from healthcare (Healthtech) to finance (Fintech) to marketing (Martech) to human resources (HRtech), and more. While large corporations can and should tap into this innovation economy as much as possible, they also need the depth of software maturity and breadth of software services that only a major software vendor like Pega can deliver. And Pega has delivered for many years.

Pega not only delivers in the major releases of their CRM, BPM, and BPA (now RPA and DPA) products, but also in their value-added services like training programs (Pega Academy), university academic programs, Pega App exchange, product tutorials and client testimonials (at the annual PegaWorld conferences), and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner program. Pega also delivers in their new product and services’ capabilities, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robotics (bots), and predictive analytics (data science).

Pega’s latest product release, Pega Infinity, is being branded as Future-Proof and Built for Change. It is clear that this means several things for Pega’s client community of large consumer-facing corporations: scalable, extensible, visual, cognitive, design thinking-inspired, able to integrate new models seamlessly, able to score and present different models (ranked probabilistically), and fully automated.

Full automation is now an absolute necessity. That’s because it is no longer adequate to say that your data analytics and digital services must move at the speed of business. Instead, because data are flowing in and through all channels at ever-increasing rates, your business must move at the speed of data! That challenge is addressed in the DPA capabilities of Pega Infinity, which include:

• The one-click “start my day” feature that boots up all of the essential applications for each customer service representative's unique daily consumer-facing activities, organizing their applications in a logical and well-designed visual layout for ease of discovery, access, use, and interoperability.
• AI-powered custom interfaces that are built autonomously on-the-fly for each employee task.
• The no-code self-optimizing UI that includes REST-based APIs to connect to third-party UI tools, as needed.
• The no-code self-optimizing UI also includes drag-and-drop bot connectors that connect tasks, services, and data flows into the employee's processes effortlessly and seamlessly. 
• The CRM and case management AI that identifies the consumer’s needs and concerns, then creates the customer service representative’s task list, opens the right applications, displays the necessary forms, retrieves the essential data, routes the work to an RPA bot, guides the employee’s customer interaction, updates the case file, and informs the customer of case resolution and conclusion – all delivered automatically.
• A virtual assistant that is specifically designed for text recognition in email, which can identify and extract relevant data, context, and content from messages, then automatically populates the appropriate data fields in the customer forms.
• Built-in native predictive apps that further keep the customer service rep moving "faster than the speed of light", sometimes arriving at the desired destination for a particular consumer need before the customer even knew that they were going there.

That's Pega Infinity: customer engagement without limits.

Enterprise users of the Pega software system can invoke the Prediction Studio to generate predictions and insights about customer care. Such Anticipatory Analytics is future-proofing your customer engagement, by anticipating evolving customer needs and adapting to changing expectations. The application informs the case manager about next best actions throughout the customer journey. This is what Pega calls "next best conversation".

Keeping the customer engagement simple and smart (the new “KISS principle”) also explains why Pega refers to their customer delivery as the MLP “minimally lovable product” – no longer will the minimally viable product (MVP) be sufficient. All cases are now edge cases – what you previously thought was a typical (viable) customer solution is no longer loved by the modern digital native. Each consumer wants their experience to be personalized, relevant to their needs and preferences. Consumers will now test every corner of your business-facing services, products, and applications for relevance and “lovability”. 

The modern digital consumer is a new type of customer threatening to fundamentally change how companies do business. That's what Pega’s CEO and Founder Alan Trefler refers to as Gen-D (Generation D). As Trefler explains in his book Build for Change, "The companies that are advertising [in traditional ways] to Gen D members are making them angry by wasting their time and violating their need to be in control of discovery."

Efficient and effective personalized customer experience (CX) and engagement is the goal (for both the consumer and the business). Data-informed, AI-powered CX is the means to reach that goal. As markets, interests and expectations change, so are your customers. If you aren't building for change, then you are building toward obsolescence, by breaking the chain of customer loyalty.

Matthew Wride’s definition of EX (Employee Experience) can be paraphrased within the context of CX in this way: “The Customer Experience is the sum of the various perceptions that customers have about their interactions with your organization.” Pega Infinity enables an optimum sum of those perceptions, by delivering CX and customer engagement without limits through data-informed, AI-enabled end-to-end automation with anticipatory and predictive analytics for the next best customer moments.

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[Disclaimer: I was compensated by an independent third-party marketing firm for my attendance at the PegaWorld conference. My role at the event was as an independent analyst and social reporter. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own, based on my personal observations, research, reading of external (non-Pega) analysts’ market reports and evaluations, seeing product capabilities’ demonstrations, hearing Pega clients’ testimonials, and my experience with and understanding of the AI, marketing automation, and customer analytics industries.]