Pega accelerates Customer Service with expanded AI and Virtual Assistant Enhancements

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – October 25, 2017 – Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company empowering customer engagement at the world’s leading enterprises, today announced new artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual assistant capabilities in Pega solutions to enable faster and more effective responses to customer service requests across channels. These features instantly analyze incoming chat messages, emails, and phone calls in real time so organizations can immediately understand their customers’ needs and more quickly connect them to the right information. This helps shorten time to resolution, eliminate errors, and improve customer satisfaction while reducing the burden on service agents.

Consumers have increasing channel options to connect with customer service to resolve an issue, check on an order, or request information. With the latest version of Pega® Customer Service application and Pega® Platform, Pega delivers additional intelligence and robotics functionality for its market-leading AI-powered customer engagement solutions to ensure businesses deliver consistently superior experiences across their highest volume channels. New capabilities include:

• Pega AI-Augmented Agent assists live agents with AI-powered responses to speed up online chat conversations. The feature contextually analyzes each message in real time using natural language processing (NLP) and then suggests the most relevant responses. Part of Pega Customer Service, the Pega AI-Augmented Agent capability saves agents from spending critical moments researching requested information – such as product information or service procedures – that would slow down the conversation. As agents select and deliver the most appropriate response, machine learning helps the software understand the nuances of online chat and become smarter over time.
• Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Email automatically triages incoming emails instead of relying on human agents to manually read and process each message. Available in Pega Platform and Pega Customer Service, this AI-driven bot uses NLP to understand the request and sentiment of each email. It then automatically opens a new service case and routes the work to the right resource – either a live agent or another bot – best positioned to respond quickly and accurately. New service cases are pre-populated with customer information relevant to the case to save agents additional time.
• Pega Intelligent Interactive Voice Response (IVR) bypasses irrelevant phone menu options that famously frustrate customers by adding intelligence to existing IVR systems to personalize the call-in experience. Pega IVR uses AI to understand the most likely reason for an inbound call by analyzing the customer’s previous brand interactions and account information. Using these insights, Pega cues up the most relevant assistance options based on the customer’s needs and real-time context – either by dynamically reconfiguring their menu options, offering the appropriate self-service option, or connecting customers immediately with an agent for escalated cases.

Part of Pega’s suite of customer engagement software, Pega Customer Service enables organizations to predict and manage the complexities of today’s customer journeys on a global scale. It anticipates customer needs, connects customers to the right people and systems, and automates or intelligently guides each step of each interaction. The application is built on Pega Platform, an industry-leading model-driven application development environment that simplifies and automates operations so organizations can reduce costs and improve business agility. The solutions are powered by AI through the Pega Customer Decision Hub, which enables businesses to continually adapt their customer engagement strategies using historic and contextual data throughout the customer journey.

These new capabilities will be available to customers by the end of October with the release of the latest versions of Pega Customer Service and Pega Platform.

Quotes & Commentary

“When it comes to satisfying your customers, every second counts in the digital world. This is why many of our clients turn to our AI-powered solutions to help bring fast and accurate resolution to service cases coming in from any channel,” said Don Schuerman, CTO and VP product marketing, Pegasystems. “These latest features reinforce Pega’s vision on the role of AI in augmenting the workforce – giving agents access to insights and knowledge that elevates their performance. This, in turn, will allow organizations to deliver unprecedented experiences in the most demanding and competitive environments.”

Supporting Resources

• Product background: Pega Customer Service
• Product background: Pega Platform
• Product background: Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Email
• Analyst report: Pega named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Digital Process Automation Software, Q3 2017 report (1)
• Analyst report: Pega named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q2 2017 report (2)