Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
How Pega is Changing Real-Time Customer Engagement
On the heels of Pega's recent "Blueprint" announcement, I got to spend some time with CTO Don Schuerman pulling apart the tech, the capabilites, and more importantly, what brands are doing with these new superpowers. Discover key insights into how real-time technology solutions can transform customer engagement and minimize tech debt. We discuss the concept of "next best action," emphasizing timely customer interactions that align with business goals.
• Explanation of the next best action concept
• Insights into the challenges posed by tech debt
• Overview of Pega’s Customer Engagement Blueprint
• Discussion on the significance of personalized customer engagement
• Exploration of transitioning from product-centric to customer-centric strategies
• Understanding how technology can enhance decision-making in marketing
Let us know what you think of the tools we discussed. Have you tried elevating your customer engagement approaches? We’d love to hear from you.
Some of our technology that does what the industry calls next best action right. So the ability to figure out in real time, based on everything we know about this customer and frankly everything we're trying to achieve as a business in terms of maintaining profitability, growing revenue.
Speaker 1:what's the conversation that's going to balance the relatability and suitability for the customer with the conversation that's also going to help the business drive the most profitable and growing relationship possible? And being able to do that in milliseconds, hundreds of millions of times a day, is what we've built some pretty scalable technology.
Speaker 2:Today on Customer Land, don Shurman, who is CTO at Pega, and having just hung out with a handful of Don's colleagues yesterday in New York City, they were demoing some new features and functionality on their giant platform, which is really eye-opening. I hope we'll get into that in depth here in this conversation. But everybody was like, first of all, say hi to Don when you see him, so hello from your team there and you have a huge fan base down there. But I don't know why don't we just introduce you, and then we have a lot to talk about here. So, don, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, as you said, I'm CTO of Pega. I think these days CTO for me means chief translation officer. There is so much going on in the technology space, whether it's around AI or agentic automation and all these different pieces. What I view my team's job is to sort of act as the translator between the technology and what our customers need to do with it, and making sure that our customers understand how to use the technology and make sure that we're make sure that also our product teams are building technology that actually align with our customers problems. So that's that that. That's where I spend most of my time one foot with our customers and one foot with our tech there's a lot going on here, and I had had a first row view of exactly what that meant.
Speaker 2:Interesting little side note, though, was talking with somebody from Accenture at the end of the day who said you know, pega's got this remarkable technology and there are a lot of remarkable MarTech type platforms out there. Even though they're designing and producing technology to help communicate better, so many of these MarTech platforms just do a terrible job of communicating it, except for Pega, and yesterday was this great example of how Pega has kind of gone out of their way to design communications. Just to explain what you can do with your technology.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I mean, I think that's. I think you know I've been, I've been with Pega for a while and you know Pega has one of the things that that that I think we very much are is a technology platform, and that that requires us being able to really help our clients understand the power of our platform is it's applicable to a wide range of problems. But what that means is it's not like a neatly fit box, that's just like oh, do you need one of these?
Speaker 2:We got that widget. It's like no, we're selling you a platform.
Speaker 1:We're selling you a collection of tools.
Speaker 1:So we have to be really proactive about explaining to our clients why those tools deliver massive amounts of business value. The great thing is, I think, what you saw yesterday in terms of Blueprint on the customer engagement side. We've done also work with Blueprint on more of our workflow automation side and our process side. We're now using Gen AI to actually drive that communication and that explanation in ways that I think are really experiential and really powerful, and it's shifting the way our clients take that journey to value and helping it be much faster for them and us.
Speaker 2:Case in point, one of the people speaking there and I don't think I'm allowed to say who this is, but so I won't but one of, uh, a very sophisticated financial services client um unpacked in great detail how they're using Pega's system um to solve some insanely complex large scale communications problems, and these are things that I've only imagined before, but it was pretty fascinating to see someone's actual kind of decision tree matrix and how that all gets worked out in basically real time for over a million customers.
Speaker 1:I mean it is pretty, you know the thing that I think is also astounding for people is some of the stuff that we're doing, and you know you're speaking specifically around some of our technology that does what the industry calls next best action right. So the ability to figure out in real time, based on everything we know about this customer and, frankly, everything we're trying to achieve as a business in terms of maintaining profitability, growing revenue what's the conversation that's going to balance the relatability and suitability for the customer with the conversation that's also going to help the business drive the most profitable and growing relationship possible. And being able to do that in milliseconds, hundreds of millions of times a day, is what we've built some pretty scalable technology to enable.
Speaker 2:I want to say it was Greg DeMello, but there was so much of. I mean, yesterday was kind of a fire hose effect on lay people like myself. So I think it was Greg, but it might not have been. But somebody from your team put up a graphic that showed efficacy with propensity and it was pretty remarkable to say. You know, your system can system can determine the pretty high level of accuracy what propensity looks like and how quickly it decays, um, because it's not a stable thing, and how messaging should change accordingly. But you know, um, yeah, again, I don't want to give away too much of the secret sauce. I don't know how much I'm actually allowed to talk about this, but it was one of those graphic representations of an idea that I've had and wondered about. But here it is, with actual data behind it, showing that, like, look, if propensity isn't one of your, if not the main metric you're trying to aim for in customer communications, you're spending way too much money where you don't need to.
Speaker 1:I think to put that in real context, if you're, say, a telecommunications company and you have a customer who's visiting their website and you detected at that moment that there's a really high propensity for you to sell them an upgraded service or you to get them to upgrade that mobile phone, right, you've got to be able to both detect that propensity and then turn that propensity into a personalized conversation in that moment, right? And so much of what happens sometimes, I think, in the MarTech space they talk about it being real-time, but what really is happening is actually it's not doing it in the real-time, it's figuring out in batch and sending somebody an SMS message 24 hours later and guess what? The buying moment, the opportunity, as you say, has decayed, it's gone. So we've really focused on how do you make that happen so that the instant you know that a bit of propensity exists, if the company wants to, you have the opportunity to connect an outreach right in that moment.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned yesterday, it was kind of a fire hose for me, just taking it all in and still going through notes here and trying to digest and really understand what I saw there there. But one of the things that became clear by the end of the day and I mentioned this sort of a moment ago is how much Pega is investing in just helping your current client base to understand what you could do here. And I think a lot of that was driven by some research that I think you commissioned that had to do with how much tech debt is out there, the value of it in terms of dollars, but also just how much it stops up an otherwise optimized system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and I think the thing that we're seeing right and that some of the data that we collected show there's lots of people who, who, who've looked at, sort of like, the estimated costs of technical debt. You know, I, I think the number that we cite is, you know, it's around $2.4 trillion annually, like in terms of, you know, it costs out to out to organizations, but that's, that's purely the the IT and maintenance cost. What we're not seeing is the impact on consumers in that number right. So the other thing that we discovered because we didn't just talk to companies, we talked to consumers about this and what we hear from consumers is that like 50%.
Speaker 1:6% of them feel that, despite all our investments in technology, the customer service experience is actually getting worse.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Right. So, and to me, that's the other side of this tech debt equation, which is we're building up this technology that, in some cases, is actually preventing us from delivering the best possible experience we want to deliver to our customers.
Speaker 2:It'd be a good moment to just take a breath, look up around the landscape and see. You know what's going right and what's going wrong here. I mean, you know there's. So there's the missed opportunities, there's the antagonizing customers, which isn't just a neutral, that's, you know, a negative, and you can't really put a dollar figure on that. Like, as you say, if the research points to 2.41 trilliona year just in IT costs, can you even imagine, if you were able to? I don't even know how you could estimate the effect on the consumers, the loyalty and the transactions that you're probably screwing up as a result of this. It's a much bigger number.
Speaker 1:Well, and what we've really been focused on is given that I think technology debt acts as what I would call a boat anchor on innovation, Because I think one of the other things we see is like 70% of CIOs feel like Tech Dad is hampering their ability to innovate, which I think is also.
Speaker 1:you know, I have a lot of conversations with CIOs and CTOs and leaders that are clients and they're being sort of hidden from both sides, which is we have all this exciting stuff happening with Gen AI and everybody's using chat, GPT, and isn't this incredible and super powerful? Well, but how do I actually make that work when I'm still like running my back end on a bunch of mainframe and Lotus Notes apps right that you know. I don't even have developers who understand anymore, and so one of the things you know, Pega, as a platform.
Speaker 1:We're really focused in two big areas how do we help companies improve their decisioning Right which is what you saw down in New York how do we make those real time decisions to engage customers? And then, once you've made the decision, how do we make it so the process of getting a new iPhone and returning your old one isn't a pain right?
Speaker 1:It's easy for the customer but also really efficient and automated for the business so they can do it at the best profit margin and best cost profile possible. Um, so we focused a lot of the, the, the capabilities that we've built in the last year or so around how can I use generative AI and some of the power that's coming out of that and agents and automation to look at some of a company?
Speaker 1:say existing systems, existing processes, existing workflows, and not just replatform the old stuff onto the cloud, which basically, yeah, I may shift some of my IT costs, but I'm not actually improving the experience. How can we help you rethink your processes and rethink the way you do customer engagement so that not only are you modernizing, you're truly transforming the experience on the other end? So you're both reducing that $2.4 trillion cost right, we're chipping away at that but we're also trying to make your customers happier and more engaged and better satisfied with the services they're giving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you're looking at something you know, just an entirely different paradigm you're trying to sell here. And just a side note, that you know my experience educating people, educating organizations, is expensive, it's time consuming and it's arduous work that has, you know, a low chance of success. And I got into this conversation a little bit with one of your colleagues yesterday and they said well, here, let me show you this thing over here which we've just built to kind of facilitate those things. And so they were demoing this thing that you've developed, called Blueprint, which is a really neat tool set that you know. Again, I'm still trying to digest what I actually saw there, because once it was demoed, there were just a flurry of questions about what did I just see? How did that just work? What am I really looking at? Is this real? Is this not real? But would you care to kind of just in a nutshell, if there is a way, explain what Blueprint is and does and why it exists?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm going to potentially give you two explanations.
Speaker 1:So the first thing that I would say is, if you're interested in what I'm saying, go to pegacom, slash Blueprint and try it out for yourself. Like the best way to actually see this is to just go experience it. It's free. Just put in your email address. The stuff you put into Blueprint we can't see, so your data stays private to you. But what we've built with Blueprint is a way to design your workflows and your customer engagement and rethink them in, I would say, a more modern digital way.
Speaker 2:So what you, for example, saw in New York was on the customer engagement and the decisioning side. Right.
Speaker 1:So you know we have a product called Customer Decision Hub and it drives these next best actions. You know the banker who you heard in New York, the example of a telecommunications company that I was just sharing earlier. Those are real world clients who use this at pretty massive scale to figure out in real time, every time they have a conversation with a customer, on any channel, what's the right conversation to have that's going to be valuable for the customer and valuable for the business. Right, and that's powered by what I would call statistical or mathematical AI. So AI that has existed, frankly, for decades and we just haven't fully exploited it in all of the tools that we use. So we have that product that to get clients to really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:It's a pretty fundamental shift in the way a lot of people think about marketing, because so much of what we do in marketing is we talk about being customer-centric, but it's not. It's product-centric. We have a product, we have a message we want to get out there. We divide a bunch of customers up into segments and then we spam each segment with whatever message it is we want to talk about on that given day. What we're advocating is truly customer-centric engagement. I'm not pushing products. I'm listening to you as a customer and I'm conversing with you at the thing that is most relevant to you at that moment, and it might be selling you a new product. And it might be selling you a new product. It might be helping you get service or helping you resolve a problem. It might, frankly, oftentimes, the best next best action is nothing.
Speaker 2:It's leave you alone right Like, which is a really good thing to do sometimes with customers which flies in the face of you know marketing 101. You have to do something to justify your job.
Speaker 1:Right, it flies in the face, but oftentimes the best thing we can do is just help a customer deal with the thing they're trying to deal with right now and not encumber them with sales and offers. Often what you'll find is if you can solve their problem for them easily. You then open up that moment to make the offer. But that's a big shift, right? So what we built with this tool that we launched called Customer Engagement Blueprint, and it's actually this version of Blueprint we just announced yesterday so it's pretty we're pretty new here is it actually lets a client experience what that is.
Speaker 1:So what we'll do is you'll go on to Blueprint, you'll describe a little bit about your business, we'll look, you'll put in a link to a section of your website and we'll actually use Gen AI to analyze your website.
Speaker 1:What kind of products are you selling? What kind of brand voice are you using in your product? Who are the personas that you would likely target, like you know, what characteristics of buyers and customer and potential customers do you have? And then we'll map out in Blueprint exactly what are the kinds of offers and conversations that you might have with those customers and allow you to see both those offers but how that would be reflected in a next best action strategy, how we would, how we would look at a universe, say, of two, dozen, three dozen possible conversations and figure out at real time what's the conversation that you should have with this individual right now. So and it and it, it's really powerful because it takes what something you know, as I'm describing. This is pretty theoretical, but I'm but I'm actually doing this in the course of a very, very specific business. So that is one half of the blueprint equation.
Speaker 2:Just to kind of put a fine point on this for a few minutes. I think a traditional marketing approach would be to say, okay, we have to understand our customer and define what that means, because it's been a radically different definition depending on who you talk to, which means that, again, depending on who you talk to, you're going to approach them differently and have different understandings of what they actually want. And then it comes down to the messaging for each one of those personas. If you have multiples, and managing those. And I think I can't remember what I was talking to you yesterday but said look, you know, in the past, in the very recent past, if you had spoken about, uh, matrixing, matrixing out messaging channels, propensity to get to a next best action with I don't know a dozen different personas, the marketer would get wide-eyed and start to sweat.
Speaker 2:And so what happens when you've got a million customers or more than that, and dozens and dozens and dozens of personas that you're going after and all of the different messaging next best, best action activities? I mean, it's it's literally impossible to conceive. You just can't get your head around that as a as a mortal, you know. You just can't do it. And and and whoever was in the demo at that point said here, let me push a button, and literally the matrices just kind of filled the page and here's how they relate, here's how they rely on one another. Here are the kind of theoretical decision trees and this can all happen in real time. And look, you know, here is, here is person a, you know, persona a under these, uh, who's here under these circumstances, in this context? And we can know that and we can respond to it in real time with any one of you know a good billion little permutations.
Speaker 1:And what we've, what we'veueprint, and I think that idea of you just push a button is we've made, and what I think is really powerful is we've taken some pretty sophisticated data science right which you know. In the past, to your point, you had to have some pretty deep statistical understanding to get your head around how all this worked, right. We've now made that very accessible, I think, to a marketer to be able to see like, oh, what you're doing is you're laying out these different kinds of conversations and these different journeys and dynamically selecting across to find for this person what the right one is, and I can see that in a really tangible way. So I don't have to worry about understanding necessarily the data science.
Speaker 1:I'm understanding the impact on the other end Right, and that's what I think is really powerful. I think the you know all of this obsession right now around AI and gen AI and it's all great, but at the end of the day, I'm less interested in whose model is faster, et cetera, because I think all of that stuff starts commoditizing. And the better and more interesting question is how can I apply all these different forms of AI generative AI, statistical AI, machine learning, et cetera to get me to things that really change the game for my business and my customers, and that's what we want to be able to show you Like cut through the data science complexity and get to no. No, this is how it could really impact your customer today.
Speaker 2:Right, right, I mean the demo and I'll just reiterate what Don just said here is free. You go to pegacom slash blueprint and you can play with it, and I think there's a QR code that we'll put here on the podcast page as well. But as your team was demoing this thing, all I could think of is, well, that's a huge amount of power, but the outcome of it and the whole thing took less than 10 minutes, and that was with a lot of talking in between steps of the outcome of it was a pretty intelligent go-to-market plan. Even if you're not using the pay, the Pega platform in its full, intended complex way, it spit out something that look, there are a lot of consultants who get paid a lot of money to do.
Speaker 1:So the thing that's kind of cool is this is our second blueprint, so this is the customer engagement blueprint, right? And as you say it, kind of spits out a pretty comprehensive customer journey map and go-to-market plan. We based that on a blueprint that we've had now in market for about a year. That was focused on workflows.
Speaker 2:Because that's the other half of Pega's business.
Speaker 1:We drive this decisioning and customer engagement side, but we also drive a lot of the workflow automation of the customer operations. And the other side of Blueprint, which you can also see at pegacom, slash Blueprint does the same thing but does it for workflows. So it looks at and says, hey, I'm a wealth management portion of a bank. I need to onboard new customers. What's the optimal workflow for onboarding a new customer? That still gets me through all of the regulatory hurdles I need to satisfy in order to make that happen and we can again in minutes, if not seconds, lay that out for you and whether or not you end up implementing that in Pega.
Speaker 1:we'd love you to implement in Pega and we've made it really, really fast so you can take your blueprint and import it and we'll just build it all for you. But even if you don't implement it in Pega, it's a really useful view into. Oh, this is what the optimal workflow for onboarding a wealth management customer might look like.
Speaker 1:As you say it's weeks of design thinking, which you can pay people a lot of money to do that. We've now taken some AI tools, we've combined that with some of our own expertise in different areas and we've now made that available to you instantly and again for anybody to try out at Pegacom.
Speaker 2:It's pretty interesting. It's pretty interesting stuff, and I think-.
Speaker 1:And where I'm really excited and we talk about this tech debt we recently added to the workflow side of Blueprint the ability to take a document, say like the manual for one of those old legacy applications you have, and upload it to Blueprint and Blueprint will suggest a modern design version of that application, will suggest a modern design version of that application.
Speaker 2:So we'll discover all the workflows that are in that application, discover all the data model and say well in a modern world, you could make that application look like this.
Speaker 1:So imagine now being able to have a little bit of an engine that is blueprinting your legacy transformation, that's, taking some of your existing systems and quickly getting you to a design and a very implementable design, of what that system could look like. I think the possibility here for driving an accelerated pace of transformation in a lot of our clients, you know, is pretty massive, and that's one of the reasons why we're so excited to talk to them about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, pretty remarkable stuff. Um. I honestly I think this conversation could could keep going because there's there are so many different ways of using this Um. But I wonder if I wonder if the better use of your time frankly is would be to reconnect and say another six to nine months or so after you know, after Blueprint's been in market, after you've seen how people are using it, after the learnings from those experiences have kind of flowed your way and you know what you're going to do with it next and see where that goes. You know what you're going to do with it next and see where that goes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we've already got a number of clients using and driving this. On the workflow side, we've done close to 100,000 of these blueprints already. The customer engagement one just launched yesterday, so it's getting going. But I'd love to reconnect in a couple months because I think we're going to have some pretty exciting innovations to share as well. So it's definitely an exciting time in the technology space.
Speaker 2:Really, it's a great time to be here. If it was ever boring, I don't know what you're thinking, but it is certainly not now.
Speaker 1:It's certainly not boring now.
Speaker 2:No, but one thing that occurred to me I think somebody brought this up in one of the presentations yesterday it's like, hey, can this thing spit out an ROI? Can it tell me what the dollars and cents benefits are? And I think whoever was presenting at the time said, not yet, but soon. Yes, even to take that theoretical ROI number to your CTO or to your CFO and say, look, look, what I'm about to do here, if you'll just check this box is it's got to make anyone who's selling these platforms their life a lot easier, cause that's always been. You know kind of. How do I get there?
Speaker 1:Well and selling the platform a lot easier. But I also think you know, I also think helping our clients figure out.
Speaker 1:I only want to sell this stuff to our clients where it's going to actually add value to them and helping us identify with our clients where are the places that we can really add value and where is the stuff that might be less of a priority, and the more we can quickly get to that answer and have us invest less time on the sales side and clients less time on the buying side to figure out where the value lies. That's a win on both sides of the equation. So my advice to anybody listening is again peggacom slash blueprint, Try it out, Send us a message, Let us know what you think. We think it's pretty exciting, whether you're on the workflow side or the marketing and customer engagement side. We think there's some pretty game-changing stuff happening in the world right now that we're excited to be a part of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, clearly I can second that. I've seen it and it's pretty spectacular and eye-opening. Well, Don, thanks a million for your time. I really appreciate this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great to talk with you, Mike.
