Today’s interview is with Kerim Akgonul who is Senior Vice President of Products at Pega and is responsible for the company’s suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. I had a chat with Kerim at their annual customer event: Pegaworld 2016to find out more about what they are up to, what makes them different and how they are fast becoming the big, new challenger in the CRM space.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Your people know the best ways to improve your organisation – Interview with Cathy Brown of Engage For Success – and is number 182 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Disclaimer: I was invited along to attend Pega’s annual customer event: Pegaworld 2016 as part of their influencer outreach programme. They paid my travel and accommodation expenses but I was not paid to attend. Also, I was under no obligation to write anything about or interview anyone at the event. This podcast interview and another coming up in a few weeks came about only as a result of some of the interesting things that I saw at the event that I thought would be worth sharing. Disclaimer over. Enjoy.

Here’s the highlights of my interview with Kerim:

• Most CRM vendors started from the bottom up, i.e. their first customers tend to be smaller businesses. However, Pega startedfrom the top down i.e. their first clients were large organisations due to their history and background in rules-based Business Process Management.
• In simple terms, they have spent years working in the back-offices of large companies using technology to help automate processes that have traditionally been manually-handled i.e. converting ‘tribal’ knowledge in an organisation into an automated system/process.
• Kerim cites the example of Cisco that has used Pega’s technology to the extent that 93% of their support cases are now handled with zero touch. This has removed 2 million hours in wait time per year and has reduced their order resolution time to 6 hours.
• Systems and computers should do the work and should not be a place where you park the work for humans to do.
• Pega realised that through their automation of back-office processes and tasks, all of the work they were doing was to make the life of the end customer easier. Therefore, they decided that they should evolve and do end to end customer service. Thus, Pega evolved into the CRM space.
• They started off developing CRM apps in the customer service space and then moved into the sales automation space.
• However, their acquisition of Chordiant about five years ago jump started their analytics journey and marketing journey.
• There are two distinct ways that makes Pega’s approach to CRM stand out and they are their Customer Decision Hub and their Next Best Action strategies.
• In essence what Pega have done is add intelligent analytic and decisioning capabilities to their automation capabilities.
• Automation gives you great artificial efficiency whereas intelligent capabilities gives the user and organisation the ability to change, adapt, flex, innovate and/or try out new stuff.
• Pega is combining predictive analytics with real-time and historic big data to calculate likely customer behaviour. Then, their decisioning technology offers up a set of Next Best Actions that are not necessarily revenue based but are based on the customer’s behaviour and what is the next best action for them and the organisation. This delivers higher engagement, improves the customer experience, enables more effective retention and also achieves higher offer response rates.
• Their system is set up to recommend one action/decision.
• But, some of their customers say that their agents don’t like this and want to be presented with a series of options. They will then present them with the top three-five recommendations with a propensity to succeed number alongside each.
• In Pega’s experience whilst people/agents may prefer discretion their data shows that people often make the wrong choice.
• For example, it turns out that the least valuable variable in determining whether a financial loan is at risk or not is a person’s credit rating score. The most valuable predictor of risk is the Loan to Value (LTV).
• Recently Pega acquired OpenSpan, a robotic automation software provider, and their capabilities are helping them to build on their automation work and combine robotics, analytics, and case management together to eliminate mundane and laborious tasks (i.e. automating desktop processes like moving data between applications or reducing repetitive tasks), making employees more productive, efficient and able to deliver a better customer experience.
• Kerim did produce a great slide during his keynote of a typical customer service agent’s desktop (see above).
• The downside of this set up is that it takes too much time, it’s very error prone and it’s very expensive to train people to work in this way.
• Also, and more importantly, the experience for the customer and the employee sucks!
• In addition, the workforce automation capability they acquired from OpenSpan can sit in the background and ‘listen’ to employees doing their work and identify workflow inefficiencies i.e. hidden workflow hotspots/inefficiencies/constraints that are causing disruption in the customer experience. The technology can also identify what systems are getting used by who and what systems are not being used. This data and visibility can help pinpoint processes that could be prime candidates for robotic intervention or could help identify which systems should be invested in, digitised, transformed or abandoned.
• One could suggest that this is all a bit Big Brother and used in the wrong way it could be. But, used in the right way it could offer great insights into how and where the experience for the employee and the customer can be improved.
• Kerim cites a number of examples of firms that they have helped transform their customer experience using their technology including American Express, Sprint and Cisco. Find out more here.
• Using Pega’s technology it poses questions about how sales, marketing and customer service teams interact and collaborate and whether or not they should be separate teams at all.

About Kerim (taken from his Pega bio)

Kerim Akgonul is Senior Vice President of Products and Pega and is responsible for the company’s suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, including Pega Customer Service, Pega Marketing and Pega Sales Automation, as well as our Case Management, Decisioning, Mobile, and BPM software.

Kerim began his career at Pega developing applications for customers in financial services and insurance, and he put his customer-centric perspective to work in establishing the company’s product management function. Early in the company’s history, Kerim recognized the power of connecting back-end operations to front-end, customer-facing applications and has focused the product management team on applications that allow business visionaries to innovate how their organizations interact with customers.

Kerim is focused on leveraging technologies such as mobile, cloud, social, IOT and analytics to support business users. He is an advocate for building software that makes the underlying technology transparent and serves the needs of the business. This focus on business impact has contributed significantly to the company being recognized as leaders in CRM, Case Management and BPM.

In addition to leading the Product Management function, Kerim also established the company’s eLearning Platform, PegaAcademy.com, which provides the courses and training necessary to become a Pega Certified Professional. To date, Pega Academy has delivered more than 1.5 million lessons to more than 36,000 students around the world.

Kerim holds a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

You can find out more about Pega at www.pega.com. Say Hi to Pega and Kerim on Twitter @pega and @pegakerim and connect with Kerim on LinkedIn here.