Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Rebecca Miller, Senior Product Strategy Manager in the customer service and sales automation division at Pega. Rebecca joined me on the podcast recently to talk about the recently announced Pega Self-Service Agent, the problem with the current solutions in the market, why Pega is taking a fundamentally different approach to self-service and why it’s critical that these types of solutions leverage enterprise workflows.

This podcast is sponsored by Pega.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Overcome incrementality by reimagining customer and agent experience – Interview with NiCE’s CEO and Staysure’s COO – and is number 550 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Rebecca:

• Pega has just launched a new “self-service agent” that embeds enterprise workflows into various service channels (digital, voice, messaging).
• This new offering combines Pega Blueprint (for building enterprise workflows) with predictable AI and generative AI to create robust self-service experiences.
• Their solution aims to overcome the limitations of traditional chatbots (which they believe are simplistic) and current AI agents (which they believe tend to be siloed, disconnected, unpredictable, and risky for enterprises).
• Pega’s approach focuses on fusing workflow automation with agentic AI to eliminate unpredictability and risk, ensuring adherence to policies and governance, unlike “black box” AI.
• These self-service agents can manage complex interactions typically handled by human customer service representatives (CSRs), such as intricate billing inquiries. They can also adapt to customer responses.
• Pega’s approach leverages it’s “center-out business architecture,” so the solution provides consistent and scalable service across all channels and dynamically switches to different languages for global support.
• With respect to the future of customer service, Rebecca believes we will see significant front-office transformation and consolidation, with contact centers becoming smaller and more focused on dealing with complex or sensitive issues, while the majority of customer interactions will be handle proactively or via self-service.
• While automation will increase, human roles will shift to monitoring, managing systems, curating knowledge, and handling the evolving complexity and variety of customer needs, with AI augmenting human tasks rather than fully replacing them.
• Rebecca’s best advice: Start by picking one or two workflows that have the potential to be automated. Maybe it’s part of a claims process and begin infusing AI and automation into it. But don’t wait. Get started now.
• Rebecca’s Punk CX brand: IKEA

About Rebecca

Rebecca Miller is a Senior Product Strategy Manager in the customer service and sales automation division at Pega. She has been at Pega for 7 years and has served in various product marketing & strategy roles. Rebecca is passionate about helping clients discover how they can use workflow automation to improve operations and foster more meaningful customer engagement.

Check out Pega’s new Self-Service Agent, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @Pega, and feel free to connect with Rebecca on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Vardan Papikyan on Unsplash