Customer engagement platform provider Pegasystems has added artificial intelligence–powered capabilities to its CRM solution, Pega CRM. The new tools are built to improve customer service agent performance by pulling insight from desktop solutions that agents rely on and identifying any processes that slow down daily activities.
"Most organizations have CRM tools that provide just a small window into the overall performance of the customer service team," says Don Schuerman, CTO and vice president of product marketing at Pegasystems. "Companies have insight on how a service rep is driving up customer satisfaction ratings or how they're reaching quotas. The challenge is most of the time they can't see underlying activity that's actually driving the result. It's hard to coach a team when you don't see what's driving actions," Schuerman says.
The added artificial intelligence capabilities provide a detailed view of all the activity taking place across different desktop apps, and link that data to results and insights from the CRM solution. By bringing together Pega Workforce Intelligence within the Pega Customer Service and Pega Sales Automation applications, data is combined to provide customer service managers and agents with real-time guidance on how to improve performance. The data is kept anonymous and is not personally identifiable, but the identified patterns are fed back to ensure there are no blind spots in monitoring.
"Toggling between different tools and apps wastes time and sometimes hurts performance, but it's expensive to replace existing tools," according to Schuerman. Through pattern matching and machine learning, however, Pega's AI tools now identify specific pain points and repeated behaviors that harm efficiency. The data also feeds Pega's Opportunity Finder tool, which uses artificial intelligence to bring up areas where incremental improvements can be tied to revenue gains.
The new capabilities are easy to implement—the software is installed on agents' desktops and connects to the cloud to deliver insight. Though the technology is designed for agent performance monitoring, it can also help the agents themselves. "It provides valuable feedback to the agent. We also see a potential gamification component to it, especially when it comes to identifying the agents that are defining best practices through their actions," Schuerman says.
Though recent conversations surrounding artificial intelligence in customer service often result in questions about whether or not AI will replace agent jobs, but in Pega's case, artificial intelligence is empowering agents. "We're just trying to help agents do their jobs better," Schuerman says.