Pegasystems Glides Through Social, Mobile Channels

Pegasystems has unveiled a major upgrade to its customer service application, offering new functionality both at its customer-facing end and internally for reps who use it.

Pegasystems seeded the mobile version of Pega Customer Service with new functionality as well, said Steve Kraus, senior director of product marketing for CRM Solutions at Pega.

The end goal of these changes was to assist its users in becoming omnichannel customer service providers, he told CRM Buyer.

“Customers have been asking for functionality to help them better engage with their own customers. They want to be able to better connect with them across multiple channels and to stay with them in real time as they move across these channels without losing the context,” Kraus explained.

Toward that end, Pegasystems has integrated functionality from its recent acquisitions of Mesh Labs and Firefly, allowing them to offer exactly that.

Cobrowsing the Omnichannel

One new feature is cobrowsing functionality — courtesy of Firefly — which is not exactly a new concept, Kraus said — except in this case, the agent is able to cobrowse across mobile and social channels.

This capability lets them offer any number of value-added services, such as helping a customer to fill out a complex form or sharing content without asking the customer to download software.

A ‘Beautiful’ Agent Interface

Much of the new functionality, though, is most apparent to the agent rep, who then parlays the new features into providing better service to the end customer, Kraus said.

The new interface is “beautiful” in terms of its new functionality, he remarked. It is highly intelligent and intuitive, taking the rep through step-by-step recommendations to make personalized suggestions.

The app has new listening and engagement features based on advanced natural language and text analytics capabilities that Pegasystems inherited from Mesh Labs technology, along with its knowledge management functionality.

Using all of these tools, customer service reps can listen to customer conversations on social networks and, if need be, respond to critical issues or route them to teams that can address them.

“What we wanted to achieve was an application that didn’t just interact with customers but deeply understands their sentiment,” Kraus said. “We wanted an app that can see patterns or trends making noise on social channels and then identifies the best way to respond.”

When Pegasystems acquired Mesh Labs it acquired all that intelligence — and then combined it with the traditional capabilities that Pegasystems had around case management.

The Mobile Piece

The new release extends this functionality to the mobile environment as well. “We wanted to be able to offer an improved mobile experience,” Kraus said.

The mobile app was optimized with knowledge management, cobrowsing and mobile chat tools, with the idea of allowing customers to jump from channel to channel with little interruption.

A Flexible Customer Rep

The app also was designed to be as flexible as possible for agents, giving them the option of emphasizing certain features or tools or processes — assuming those controls are enabled by the contact center.

The end goal was to create a simple experience giving agents an array of sophisticated tools for interacting with customers, Kraus said.

It is a welcome offering for agent reps, he said, many of whom are frustrated by clunky internal business apps that compare poortly to the wonderful user experience they get from their personal consumer apps.

“In this release,” noted Kraus, “we have made the business rules, case management, predictive and adaptive analytics far more intuitive and easier to use.”