Rob Walker

General Manager, 1:1 Customer Engagement , Pega

Supernova Award Category: 
Marketing Transformation
The Organization: 

Pega is a low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation that helps the world’s leading organizations reduce complexity, make better decisions, and get work done with enhanced efficiency and productivity. We help the world’s leading brands solve their biggest business challenges: maximizing customer lifetime value, streamlining customer service, and boosting operational efficiency. Pega technology is powered by real-time AI and intelligent automation, while our scalable architecture and low-code platform help enterprises adapt to rapid change and transform for tomorrow.

The Problem: 

Many customer engagement tools today still rely on segments to categorize and target their audience instead of engaging with them one-on-one. These outdated processes require time-consuming, manual decision making that does not keep pace with changing needs and predetermined customer journeys that do not meet individual needs. Brands need a way to adjust outreach in real time aligned with every customer’s unique situation to proactively deliver personalized messages on their customers' channel of choice. As customers’ expectations continue to change, it is imperative that marketers have the right tools to enhance the work they’re already doing to get the best possible outcomes. Because our experiences with brands have shifted to being entirely digital, we expect seamlessly connected experiences that speak to us as people, not as segments. For example, someone with a high credit card balance who is continually inundated with irrelevant offers such as low mortgage rates, contests, free checking options, auto loans, or other flashy offerings will eventually tune out your brand and move to a competitor with the right offer for a low-rate credit card during their moment of need. Today’s brands need technology that marries customer journeys with next-best action, letting them use all their organization’s available data to list the actions that AI can consider in each stage to ensure every interaction is personalized, helpful, and empathetic.

The Solution: 

Pega Customer Decision Hub (CDH) optimizes customer lifetime value by providing an “Always-On Brain” that evaluates data in real time to suggest the next-best action for each customer in context. Most engagement software makes decisions based on rules, segments, or a single propensity score for an offer. But Pega analyzes each person individually – using hundreds of different predictive models to make sure we understand exactly what that unique person needs at that moment - then we personalize the communication just for them.  We make these decisions faster than anyone in the market – in less than 200 milliseconds. This enables us to redecision over and over again in the same customer visit as new pieces of relevant information about the customer become known. This ensures the right message, education, service, or offer the company makes is based on their customers’ real-time situation.

The Results: 

The fourth largest bank in the world used Pega CDH to successfully personalize experiences for 70 million customers by constantly delivering next-best conversations into its mobile app, retail branch, contact center, and outbound channels. This drove a massive improvement in customer engagement, increasing rates from 3-10x. A leading Communications Service Provider used Pega's AI-powered decisioning to supercharge sales and experienced a 2x attach rate and 15% win rate improvement with an offer acceptance rate of 41% and 10-20% reduction in handling time across 3 million monthly customer interactions using over 400 dynamically scored models. Updates to Pega CDH include: Always-On Insights integrates real-time data capturing and identity solutions with AI-powered decisioning to help brands continuously react to consumer behavior to drive higher response rates. Next-Best-Action decisioning models optimize interactions with AI, intelligent decisioning, and propensity modeling. Customer Profile Viewer transforms individual customer’s propensities, behaviors, suppressions, potential value, and omnichannel interaction history into optimal, contextual responses. Action Performance Tracker monitors offer performance and determines the success of next-best action recommendations through anomaly detection and triage. Adaptive Gradient Boosting learning algorithms increase predictive accuracy by allowing users to understand the impact of each model feature on overall performance.

Metrics: 

Clients typically see 2–3x improvement across the board and achieve a 489% return on investment with:  Empathetic selling: Pega CDH uses all available sources of customer data to increase the predictive accuracy and relevancy of every experience in real time. Clients using an empathetic approach to selling routinely see a 3–6x increase in response/conversion rates and generate an average of $226 million in incremental revenue every year.  Proactive customer retention: Pega CDH constantly monitors customer situations for signs of churn. Using this approach, Pega clients routinely reduce churn rates by 10–50% and retain an average of $193 million annually.  Loyalty through preemptive service: Pega CDH identifies customers who are likely in need of service and delivers preemptive messages – helping resolve issues before they happen. By getting ahead of customer problems, clients typically receive a 10–40-point increase in NPS. 

The Technology: 

Pega CDH helps the world’s largest and most demanding organizations make millions of decisions per day, for hundreds of thousands of customers, across dozens of channels – all in less than 150 milliseconds. It is an always-on brain providing centralized AI across all customer touchpoints – inbound, outbound, owned, and paid – to optimize every interaction and maximize customer value.

Disruptive Factor: 

A powerful intelligent decisioning strategy enables organizations to use real-time customer data to understand exactly where their customers are on their journeys. Pega CDH uses predictive analytics and customer decision management to enable leading enterprises to surface unique insights and recommend the relevant, hyper-personalized next-best action in real time during every step of the customer lifecycle – from marketing to sales to customer service and retention. This differs from conventional marketing because CDH actively listens, understands an individual’s context “right now,” and predicts needs or issues before they escalate.

Traditionally, brands leverage third-party data collected through cookies as well as slowly compiled first-party data to engage audiences with broad segment-based campaigns. These widely used techniques are not only ineffective, but some will become obsolete when third-party cookies are retired in 2023. CDH can eliminate brands’ dependence on third-party cookies by capturing consent-based first-party data, distilling it, and then transforming it into insights that fuel Pega’s AI-powered decision engine to deliver hyper-personalized messages.

Shining Moment: 

Pega was named a Leader Forrester’s Real-Time Interaction Management Q2 2022 report stating “Pegasystems sets the gold standard for sophisticated enterprise deployments. Pega aligns RTIM with its digital process automation and customer services portfolio to allow clients to optimize CX across the customer lifecycle ... Its value-based approach and innovation track record earn Pega near-perfect marks across our strategy criteria.”

About Pega

Pega delivers innovative software that crushes business complexity so our clients can make better decisions and get work done. We help the world's leading brands solve their biggest business challenges: maximizing customer lifetime value, streamlining customer service, and boosting operational efficiency.