Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman who is the CTO & Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing at Pegasystems. Don joins me today to talk about Pegaworld iNspire, Center-Out™, Process Fabric™, Ethical Bias Testing and what it is going to take to succeed and thrive, particularly when it comes to delivering an outstanding customer experience, in this changing world we live in.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Up to 90% of digital data is not used. What sort of society accepts 90% waste? – Interview with Gerry McGovern – and is number 346 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

While PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems took place earlier this month (June 2nd) you can still view the sessions on-demand so do head over to www.pegaworld.com to check them out.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Don:

• Don Mc’ed the recent Pegaworld iNspire virtual event and here are his big takeaways
  • Alan Trefler, Pega’s CEO, kicked off by talking about how the state of the world that we’re in right now demands us both to move really, really fast and also to respond to some pretty immediate challenges and opportunities that exist.
  • But, at the same time, it has proven to be an instigator for leaders and organizations to think pretty deeply about their technology, their business architecture and what they need to put in place to ensure that when we come out of this into a very different looking world that organizations are set up to be stronger, faster and more empathetic to their customers.
  • Alan then talked about a way to do that with a business architecture that we call Center-Out™, which talks about the need to capture the customer journey, or micro journey, that are tied to a key outcome and allow those be the driver of how you think about your technology. Start with what the customer is trying to achieve and then you can think about how do you make that journey easy, efficient, personalized, and then connect that to your channels, systems and data that you need.
  • The trick is how do you put customer centric thinking into the way that you architecture systems and the way you think about your business logic so that you are building it, starting with the customer and customer outcomes and then you can work backwards from that to what the systems and the processes and the channels need to look like.
  • When you start the other way around, you end up with these weird experiences that I think customers can sense the in-authenticity of it all. And, it also leads to some pretty bad and frustrating moments.
• 62% of C-suite leaders at organizations across the US and in Europe said that the COVID pandemic is leading them to increase the priority of digital transformation efforts within business.
• Pega’s Process Fabric™ is designed to streamline the customer experience and improve employee productivity and is a way to connect distributed work together so that it can be aligned and understood in terms of outcomes for the customer and for the business.
• Siemens, who have 45,000 users, are pioneering this approach (Check out their story here). It is allowing them to work at 10 times the speed for 1/10 the cost.
• Ethical Bias Testing is a new feature in Pega’s platform which allows organizations to avoid AI adversity by proactively detecting bias in their next best action strategies. It then can adjust the offending algorithm or business rule accordingly – ensuring a fair and more balanced outcome for everyone.
• Empathy is good business.
• AI powered decisioning technology can drive incredible revenue impacts for organizations and it can be done in a way that is ethical, transparent and empathetic.
• Don’s best advice for anyone who wants to improve their customer experience: Start with a micro journey because a lot of times we talk about the customer journey and that can become very overwhelming. A customer journey is big and unpredictable and changing all the time.
• But, with micro journeys you just need to think about the outcomes that customers are trying to achieve. So, start with a micro journey. Make it better and then repeat with another micro-journey etc etc.
• If you start with the small enough chunk, with a micro journey, you could make a real impact, real fast.
• When it comes to the future of service, I don’t believe that we are going to get to a point where everything goes completely autonomous. No, I think there’s always gonna be a human in the loop for some interactions. I think there will be interactions where people want to talk to people. And, you know, the empathy that a human being can show is going to be absolutely essential.
• Service needs to become more proactive and pre-emptive.
• Organizations need to develop an empathetic musculature.
• From a technology perspective that will take the form of business rules that are encoded into your technology.
• We will develop a symbiotic relationship with technology where we set the standards and intent but we also be able to learn from it, particularly around spotting patterns and highlighting problems.
• Don’s Punk CX words: Quick, Empowering, Low-Code
• Don’s Punk CX brand: The Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

About Don

Don holds a BS in Physics and Philosophy from Boston College.

After graduating from college more than 20 years ago Don took a customer support job at Pega and has never left. He worked his way up from delivery to engineering to pre-sales until he became CTO.

Today, he’s responsible for setting the vision for Pega’s industry-leading low-code application development platform and customer engagement solutions. He collaborates with global clients such as American Express, JP Morgan Chase, and Citibank, and he focuses on product strategy, market insights, and communicating the power of Pega’s technology.

Don’s deep experience helps him design solutions that leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence, Digital Process Automation, robotics, mobility, analytics, cloud, and CRM software to streamline long and complex business processes.

He’s great at explaining highly technical business terms in everyday language.. Here’s his take on Robotic Automation.

Check out Pega, say Hi to Pega and Don on Twitter @pega and @donpega and check out Don’s LinkedIn profile.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay