Pegasystems continues to expand its Pega 7 platform with the launch of Pega Field Service CRM, an app for field service agents; it provides on-the-go CRM functionality to professionals who deliver service on site and unifies customer service across the customer journey, from initial call to service delivery.
For Pegasystems, the timing of the launch was significant for a number of reasons, but mostly the tool was developed to fill a gap. Though Pega 7 offered a number of marketing, sales, and service solutions, "In some ways, [field service] was the one part of customer service that Pega had not been addressing up to this point in time. Now with Pega Field Service, we are addressing," Steve O'Brien, senior director of product marketing at Pegasystems, says.
The Field Service CRM app is built entirely on the Pega 7 platform, and though the technology was inspired by Pegasystems' acquisition of field service technology provider Antenna, there are no remnants of the Antenna technology in the tool. "The Antenna technology has been completely integrated into Pega 7, and we're taking advantage of the new mobile capabilities of Pega 7 to deliver Pega Field Service," O'Brien says.
Thanks to the deep integration, the technology extends from the desktop that the customer service rep sits in front of to create work orders, to the mobile app that runs on the devices carried by the technicians out in the field.
There are a number of use cases for the field service app, but the most common one is among repair technicians. "Xerox, Canon, and Bose are all customers, and they have repair technicians that go out and service office equipment. Safelite has technicians that ride around in vans and they fix car windshields. [It's useful] for anyone that has a remote workforce that drives around and fixes things," according to O'Brien.
There are other applications for the field service app as well—a medical company that works with Pegasystems, for example, rents dialysis machines to labs that do blood testing, and the field service app helps facilitate the delivery and set-up process on site. "There are a lot more applications across industries than most people think about immediately," O'Brien adds.
While competitors such as Click Software and Oracle have similar solutions, O'Brien concedes, what makes Pegasystems' offering different is that it's built for change. "If you're using a brittle, out-of-the-box package that does one thing really well, it's hard to change it. It's hard to make it do more or do less or do something different than what it already does. And when an application is built on top of Pega 7, that's not the case," O'Brien says.
Pega 7, on the other hand, uses the model-driven design paradigm, which means application developers can go in and change the way the workflow works. There's drag-and-drop functionality built it, so making modifications is intuitive. "It's very easy to change and maintain the application over time, and that's something that has really been missing from this space," O'Brien says.