PegaWorld iNspire 2023: The Future of Customer Service is Autonomous Service

The world of customer service transformation is now being fueled by the increasing power of AI and workflow automation. Join this session to learn more about how Pega Autonomous Customer Service is about far more than merely boosting efficiency and accelerating service resolutions. Centered completely around the customer journey, autonomous service progressively automates work across service interactions.

Transcript:

So my name is Christopher Patterson, VP of Product Strategy for our Customer Service and Sales Automation Solutions. And I am honored to be joined today by Geeta Wilson and Jenn Wade from Elevance Health. Stand up for a second. And everyone. I hope you're also congratulating them for this, the Innovation Award, a really big deal for the great work that they have done on voice activated workflows. And you'll hear more about that in the second half when I ask them to come on stage with me. So here's the agenda, I'll kick things off talking about the future of customer service. We'll then talk about where does Pega deliver that today, provide a little guidance. Where do you start? How do you evolve? Then we'll show a quick demo of how voice AI dramatically changes that agent experience. Then Elevance's Health comes up and we talk about their journey with Pega and their latest project implementing much of what you would've just seen in that generic demo. Hopefully we have time for questions at the end. If we don't, we'll step over there. Please come up, we'd love to talk to you. So the rise of autonomous. it's happening everywhere, right? Cars, factories, even surgery. All right, you gotta wonder about that, but it's coming sometime, right? But what about customer service? Clearly there's been a lot of great progress, but there's still so much headroom to grow, to overcome manual processes, to streamline silos, to better understand your customers. What if you could truly understand your customers, everything they said and did, able to predict and act on those unique needs? What if every agent was your best agent with a co-pilot on their shoulder, guiding them through any complexity, automating that manual work so they can focus on your customer? Your customer. What if your customer could do the impossible, effortlessly completing online what today can only be done in your contact center or maybe your back office? What if silos didn't exist? You work in an autonomous enterprise, seamlessly connected front to back office with intelligent automation. I know, it's a lot to imagine, but imagine one more thing. Imagine you didn't need to forklift your existing systems and could pursue this vision incrementally, accelerating time to value. So autonomous customer service is all about intelligently guiding, seamlessly automating, every customer service journey from wherever it starts to wherever it finishes. Now, I can go back to my car analogy here, and we could have a lot of fun talking about the stages of autonomy between driving a car and your customers engaging your brand. But the point isn't when are you fully autonomous or not, it's the incremental value that you deliver on each step on this continuum, delivering to your customer a faster, more enjoyable ride. And we believe it's Pega's heritage that enables us to lead you down this path at whatever pace you choose to go. So Pega was built to do workflow automation, AI powered decisioning on a low code platform. And it's because of these core capabilities that we actually got the highest product score in Forrester's latest CRM Wave. But autonomous service requires more than just CRM, and it's this trifecta of these top rated capabilities that we can bring to you from Pega, that again, we hope to lead you down this path towards this vision that I think we're all trying to get to. So what do we do today? Back to my chorus line, I might repeat this a couple times. Intelligently guide, seamlessly automate every customer service journey wherever it starts to wherever it finishes. So let's start with that customer journey. And the customer journey you could think about it from proactive service before your customer knows they even have a need. Self-service, engaging your digital brand. Assisted service, having conversations with your agents. And everything we do is driven by the underlying workflow automation paired with AI, which we surface through these core capabilities that we give you to engage your customer at any point along those journeys that they're engaging your brand. Now, the challenge is more of these customer journeys are actually ending up in your contact center than your customers or you would prefer. Now, there's a lot of things we can do to radically improve this experience. We can make every agent your best agent with a copilot that's always listening to your customer, guiding your agents, automating that manual work so you can deliver a faster, more personalized experience. But it's more than just making your agents more effective in what they do today. You essentially can use this to start to scale the silos that you have in your organization. Think about how many different teams do you route work to? How many completely different contact centers do you have? How many of you have acquisitions still setting off the side that you haven't fully incorporated together, each with their own hiring, training, scheduling needs, and all that infrastructure? If you could just simplify a little, think about the opportunity to both reduce costs and increase agility to respond to your customer's needs. Think about what John said in the keynote today about Virgin Media. 20% improvement in first contact resolution. This is what that agility gives you. Now this is great, we can and should do this, but remember where we started. Some of these customer journeys started off with a failed self-service journey. We can automate that work outta the contact center through any web or mobile portal or conversational channel, sometimes delivering a better experience, always at less cost, and we can deliver a more complete self-service experience 'cause we're reusing that workflow automation container across all those channels, which means we can choose to automate more of that work through self-service, then simple FAQs, simple inquiries, logging a ticket for some other human being to spend time on it, and automate that work away. And when you think about as you engage in this more sophisticated work that you push towards self-service, your customer, at some point in time, they may need to pause. They can come back and resume at another time in another channel with another user. Look at this example here. Looks like they escalated to an agent. "Oh, hello, Mr. Patterson. Yes, I see you're only halfway done with this application. Can I complete that for you?" Think about it. Context and work preserved, nothing lost, great experience, everyone saves time. Moving further upstream, proactive service to prevent and contain these inbound inquiries. It could be as simple as anticipating and preventing the inquiry. How many of us shop at Amazon? We get those notifications. They're pretty useful, aren't they? Now the whole idea of anticipate, you can get a lot more sophisticated with this around what you wanna be jumping the gun on for them. But also you can use this for a right-channeling strategy. Maybe you have an automated claims process that automatically determines you need more information, that reaches out to that customer and for that customer journey, and for that customer teaches them how best to engage your brand. The picture shows going to customer service. Yes, you want to educate them. A lot of times you want to talk to them in person, too. You decide, it's your strategy. So let's step back for a second. Why do you care? It's all about saving time, and that translates into better experiences and real dollars. Or you can look at other metrics such as improving agent productivity, customer experience, lifetime customer value, total cost of serve. So where do you start? With the customer journey, of course. Pick your top customer journeys that would most benefit from improving them, and then inject more automation and more intelligence into those journeys. And remember, we're reusing that workflow automation container that delivers that consistent experience and persists that context in that work if it needs to traverse those touch points across those customer journeys when they engage your brand. Start with assisted service. You decide how much you want to guide and automate that agent work. Everyone's gonna be starting from a different place. Some of you may have a simple ticketing systems, some of you may have something more sophisticated, either case, there's a continuum for you to further mature and improve that experience for your agent, which translates into a better customer experience. I added another bucket here, digital assisted service. This is for your agents to engage your customers when they're in your digital portals so they can support and give them the confidence to complete those digital journeys. Again, a continuum. Digital self-service. This is your decision to automate more work through self-service, or make it a more touchless experience if you don't need humans piling on and doing all this work in the back office. And again, it's a continuum, whether it's within a website, a mobile app, it's the logic sitting behind a different form of a virtual assistant out there. It's that same automation and experience that you're driving through that channel. And again, proactive service. It's all around preventing and containing in the channels that make sense for your customer, for that customer journey. Kinda a lot of words up here. Let's clean it up a little. I said everyone's starting from a different place. Drop a horizontal plumb line. Let's assume you're starting here, it will vary. Where do you wanna get to? Here's your orange line. Put that there, and use this to start to become your internal roadmap and figure out how within, say a two year timeframe, how do you start knocking these down? You've picked your customer journeys, they traverse all across these touchpoints. Prioritize how you want to improve that journey at each of those touchpoints. And I keep saying it, but I can't emphasize it enough. Case workflow automation, you're all familiar with it. It's the gift that keeps giving. You always continue to add onto that and whittle away more of that automation. And as you do that, it's easier to make it available across any of these channels. So I covered a lot of topics here. We're not gonna have time to go into them in a lot of detail. We will touch on the agent experience thanks to my guests. But please go to the Innovation Hub. We're a little hard to find. You enter in the bottom all the way in the back right corner, Customer Service and Sales Automation. We got a bunch of experts there dying to show you demos of everything I told you and more. They also have our next release that's coming out in a couple months. We have sprinkled generative AI across all these journeys to inject more automation. I know, what a surprise after everything you've heard, but it's not just a shiny object, there's real value here. So let's start to transition to the demo. and again at the conversational AI as you're climbing that maturity curve with your agent, we'll show you a demo of voice AI. By the way, it's worth highlighting, we have have something that we call messaging AI. It's the same thing for your chat and messaging channels. So in five minutes, Elevance's Health is gonna come up and we're gonna talk about their journey and some of the things that they have implemented that you'll see in this generic demo. Essentially how this works is this customer, Beth Miller, she's reaching out to U Plus, she has a bunch of questions. In this figurative co-pilot I keep referring to, you'll see how it helps the agent so the agents focus on the customer and it's guiding and automating in the background. And what that means is there's actually a lot happening just below the surface. So we added some animations or annotations into the demo, but let me highlight a couple things. Pay attention to the top. You'll see that dynamic script telling them what to say. You'll see a little green checkbox when they say it or close to it. Down in the lower left corner, you heard people talk about re-decisioning. We're constantly re-decisioning, based on rules, on AI, what's being said in that conversation. And suggesting case workflow offers knowledge. Top left, we're keeping track of all the activities. What do you do or what are you planning to do when you get to the next part in the call in the middle when you're executing the case workflow? You'll see the agent's not typing in information. We're automatically filling those fields and they're just confirming it, taking away that manual work. And at the end when you think about after call work and wrap up, we're presenting the visual steps of everything they did and the transcript. If I click on any of those steps, I'll see exactly where we are. And as you may have saw in Karim's keynote on Monday, in the next release, we'll use GenAI to summarize it. So in addition to diving down, we'll also raise it up. How much time do each of you spend during wrap up? I've been asking people that. It's actually really hard to find statistics. What an opportunity. It's a low value area.

[Agent] Thank you for calling U plus Health. How are you Ms. Miller? Are you calling about an authorization request?

[Customer] Hi, yes I am. I wanted to check to see if my authorization request for my upcoming surgery has been approved.

[Agent] Okay, can you tell me who your doctor is please?

[Customer] Sure, it is Dr. Katz.

[Agent] Okay, yeah, and so I do see that here, outpatient surgical authorization is approved.

[Customer] Oh, that's great, thank you.

[Agent] Are are there any other authorizations you'd like some information on?

[Customer] No, not at this time.

[Agent] Okay, great. Since these procedures tend to require tests and follow ups, we've automatically generated a personalized directory of in-network providers and have emailed it to you. Also, we have notified your care management team.

[Customer] Oh, that is great. Thank you so much, especially for reaching out to my care management team.

[Agent] You're very welcome Ms. Miller. How else can I help you today?

[Customer] Well, I am going to need a ride to and from the hospital. Is that something you can help me with?

[Agent] Okay, so some transportation to the hospital? Looks like your plan does offer transportation to and from medical facilities at no cost to you. Are you interested?

[Customer] Oh, I am definitely interested. Can you tell me how that works?

[Agent] Sure, let's see here. So you will get a ride to and from the hospital, and they can also stop at a pharmacy on the way home if it's needed. Our transportation service will reach out to you in a few days to schedule those rides.

[Customer] Oh, that is perfect. Thank you.

[Agent] You're welcome. Is there anything else I can do?

[Customer] I have another thing. We are moving to be closer to my sister in Salem, Massachusetts so she can help me after my surgery, and I need to get, I'm going to need to get a new cardiologist. Is that something you can help me with?

[Agent] A new cardiologist? So yeah, let me help you find a provider. I just need a couple more pieces of information. Can you tell me the distance that you would like to travel and are you looking for in-network or out of network doctor?

[Customer] Sure, I'd really like to travel no more than 20 miles from my home and I'm looking for somebody in network to help keep costs down.

[Agent] Okay, so in network you said?

[Customer] Yes.

[Agent] Within 20 miles of your home here, that's great. And that was for cardiovascular, correct?

[Customer] That's true, yes.

[Agent] Okay, great. Let me do that search for you. Okay, It looks like I have two results here. Oh, both for Dr. Cherise Acar, and I see two locations. One is in Salem, and the other is in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Which would you like?

[Customer] Let's go with the Salem location.

[Agent] Okay, great. Let me get that for you here. So you'll be receiving an email from U Plus Health in the next hour with this list of doctors. Please contact us if you do not receive that email.

[Customer] Oh great, thank you.

[Agent] Great, now is there anything else I can help you with?

[Customer] You know, I was just thinking that I need to know what my remaining in-network deductible is. Would you let me know?

[Agent] Yeah, absolutely. We have that information right here. So your in-network deductible, just to give you all the information here is a total of $6,500, and you've paid $1,500 to date with 5,000 remaining.

[Customer] Okay, so $5,000 remaining. Okay, that's great, thanks so much.

[Agent] Great, anything else I could help you with?

[Customer] No, that'll do it.

[Agent] Thank you for contacting U Plus Health, Ms. Miller. Have a very nice day.

[Customer] You too. Thank you.

[Agent] You're welcome.

So this is the visual wrap up just to the end, been in the product for quite some time. New within the 8 7 8 8 release is the voice AI, which show us the transcript. What's not clear is they're clicking on any place that jumped down to that spot. We gloss over some of those annotations in there when offers were being made and other things are happening. So you see in the transcript that an offer was made to the agent, did they accept it or not? So that is it with the demo. Let me welcome Geeta and Jenn, if you can come up and join me. Don't sit down. I think they-

Oh, yes.

I think you said you wanted to stand. They can bring the stools.

That's cool, that's cool.

Excellent. All righty. So I think I need to advance one. Just so we can get going guys, Geeta, why don't we start with you, just quick background, tell us a little bit about your role and what you do.

Sure, so I manage just under 3000 associates in direct and direct across our provider service and clinical platforms, including UM, which is utilization management, disease management, and care management.

Excellent, and Jenn?

Hi everybody, I oversee our member contact center, and you know, we call it contact centers now. They're not call centers anymore because we have so many different ways that our members reach out to us. I've been with the company more than 30 years, and you know, it's a pleasure to be with everybody here today. I was gonna wear my light up dreads from last night. But you know, I got up this morning, I put 'em on, and I thought, okay, some things are best left there are the party.

I don't know about that. And you've been in Elevance Health for a while, before they were Elevance Health. How long you have you been working there?

37 years, and so I'm glad the lights are really bright, because that's usually when I get that look of people thinking, my God, that woman's been there longer than I've been alive.

Yeah, you started at 15, right?

Absolutely.

The kindergarten recruiting class, there we go. Geeta, why don't you tell us a little bit about Elevance Health, and tie it to the mission and strategy of what you're trying to do in the market.

Yeah, so Elevance has been on a journey really moving from a traditional health insurance payer to one that is focused on advancing whole health. Really centering the individual to advance. So our name changed last year. Some of us, you know, as Anthem, and it was a very intentional decision to go from a place where we are just an insurance company to one that is centrally focused on health and advancing health and elevating the importance of health. So advancing health beyond healthcare. And I think part of that was centering the individual and care providers with the solutions and resources and tools that they need, as well as our individuals to connect the dots with their health. That means connecting the dots with behavioral health, physical health, social health, right? And being right in the middle of that. Then that takes work. You know, it's very well saying that and nice saying that, and I think it starts with removing some of the burden that we've seen with some of our members and consumers taking it on their shoulders to navigate care. So one of the first things that I'll ask is what's covered? What is my benefit coverage for X, Y, and Z, and how do I find the right appropriate care? So these are some of the basic questions, is what's the process of a claim, and is it gonna be denied? And so I think individuals, as we think about being a trusted partner, we have to step right up to them and take that burden from their shoulders. What does it mean? It means that we've got to combine the ability to improve the member experience and the associate experience of both our service agents, and we've got about 24,000 of them across the lines of business and our care delivery providers, which is our clinicians, and say how do we position them to be their best selves as they position members to be their best selves? And we've found that if we focus on the associate experience, you've got two times better health promoter scores. It's not why we do it, but I think it's important to ensure. Forrester came out with a study that said it's two times better on your MPS scores when you center the associate experience together with the member experience. And so it's important for us to not look at those in isolation, and to look at them across a cohesive fashion. And I had the privilege of being able to do that with yourselves and with our service operations.

Excellent, I can't tell you now that we finally get a chance to see people in person in the various meetings I've had, that theme keeps coming up. Like that correlation between an agent experience or associate with your words, and the member experience. And that's what it's all about. So that's great, 24,000.

Yep, we have work to do. And if you've ever seen the gymnastics that our individuals and our associates do within healthcare, it's not like buying a phone, right? You have a question about it, you can point towards people toward their plan and whatnot. It's really difficult and I think it's important to note that that work that you are outlining over here is understanding the importance of everything that our associates shoulder. And Jenn's gonna talk a little bit about that, what they shoulder and you know, Glassdoor, that rate in there shows attrition can be impacted. And some of you know that call centers and contact centers don't necessarily have always the best retention rates. So it means that we've got to be focused and being focused on things like this help us to improve points and scores like say with Glassdoor, that allow us to put associates so that they know that they're important and that we are focusing on removing the burden of complexity from them.

Removing the burden of complexity, love it. Jenn, so you've been at Anthem and Elevance awhile, so has Pega, 20 year journey. So, you know, we don't have hours to go through it, but I think that's really impressive. And if you could just give us a little color about that journey with what you've done with Pega, and some of the key capabilities that has translated into real value of which from talking to you before, associate experience is gonna keep coming up again and again, I imagine, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Back in the old days you had the wheel and there was fire, and that's when we met. So really the journey that we started with Pega actually started with, I was legacy Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia. You guys may know that Anthem started out as 14 individual plants. And so back in the early '90s, Pega came in and they really helped us. It was around workflow. How do we get the right claims to the right people so that then we can make sure that we're processing our claims accuracy? I've watched us go from something that at that time was really not even that simple, but now to automation, we're in the service industry, we're anticipating the needs of our customer. And the reason why that's so important is because healthcare is a journey. We talk about even at our own company, simplifying healthcare. And I get excited about where we're headed now. None of us have completely mastered that yet, but we are so much farther along than where we've been. And it's absolutely critical. I mean, everybody in this room, you are all consumers of healthcare. And I would love if the lights weren't so bright to see a show of hands of people that as soon as you get that ID card, you immediately read that, whether it's a digital manual or a hard copy, cover to cover. I would venture to say there would be very few hands that go up. And what you're looking for is somebody to be there in that journey when you need them most. And that's what Pega is doing with us. We're partnering together so that we can do that.

Awesome. Kind of hits right at the heart there.

It does.

That's great. So Geeta, you've got a CTO title. Let's talk a little bit about customer service technology and how you have been and plan to continue to use that for competitive advantage in delivering that better experience to your associates and members.

I think it's a great question and you know, we're in the compassion business, right? So you think of your last health event, or you think of someone who you loved and their last health event or someone you care for. It would be terrible if I treated them as though I'm a answer in a question just on a phone, right? Or just related to something that was transactional and missed the opportunity. So how do I strive to have empathy, the associates deliver empathy in a way that makes it easy for them by reducing the complexity? The only way that I can do that when it comes to technology is to take the complexity away from them and simplify. And simplify not just in words, like it's okay to have knowledge management. It's okay to have them hunt for information, but not today. Today we need them to be able to dynamically have that information at their fingertips as they're having the conversation. So real time the conversation is taking place, and you saw here that forms were being filled out, right? That is real work, finding information, but having it dynamically repost for them is not. And on the other side, what do you as consumers want as extending of empathy? You want that individual, sorry, to focus on you. You want that individual to focus like they're listening to you. They're not just bypassing and trying to figure out how to move along to the next call workflow, right? And so I think how do I now reduce the wait times for consumers and go to the next level, which is, you know, the after call work or that transcription summary. We're already doing that and we are figuring out how to do it better. We're figuring out how to make it more real time. You see, we're at a very interesting point. We've thought that historically we've been in an interesting point with 2000 with technology. But when, when ChatGPT came out in November last year, between November and January, 100 million plus users adopted that technology. It's the fastest growing technology turn that we've seen in all of history. Absorb that for a minute and how the consumer's mind changed. I as a technologist, can't say ChatGPT is not ready for out there, right? For us to go out there. But internally, having a copilot, internally having it so that, I liked how you said it, or how Don said it this morning, right? An autonomous autopilot or a copilot so that the individual, their autonomy is not taken from them, and they can still be in the books standing there and say, as this information is served up, "Yes, that's correct. Yes, that's correct." And they license it, right? They, they give their approval, but I've taken the burden away from them. So back to my point earlier, let me reduce complexity and let me increase empathy. 'Cause as I remove the transactional conversations around improving or navigating your care, finding care, or what's covered and what's not covered, how do we move to the right hand side where we're really strategically positioned to advance one's health and to elevate their health? And I think that's my position in technology is to continue to simplify with the technologies that we have, and large language models are gonna be important for us to do that next.

Excellent, well I I love that I set you up to talk about technology, and you didn't use any complicated words or anything. We're still keeping it at the human level, which I think is what it's all about. So let's remember to advance this, sorry, Jenn. So everyone saw a generic demo, right? They could go to the Innovation Hub and see it too. You guys have lived it for a while. Put a little color behind this. You know, let's talk a little bit about what you were trying to achieve, how it worked, and what your associates are actually saying. Did you threaten to take it away from them? Did they grab it or did they say give it back to you? Like, you know, give us some more color.

Well, you know, we've talked about the fact that simplifying the journey for our associates is so important, and it really is because we wanna make sure, we were those charts by the way that everybody showed the complexity, the legacy systems, that's us.

No one in here is like that, don't worry.

Yeah, well. But really it's around when we think about making sure that our associates, it takes that stress off of them. I talked about this is about a healthcare journey. Completely honest, we were doing some reviews for when we were implementing this and we were just monitoring the live calls, and we had an associate that picked up a call and they started it and the person expressed an interest that they thought they had suicidal thoughts. You talk about making it real, that's where the rubber hits the road. Those are the types of calls that our associates are hearing. And immediately everything started popping. They had their workflows. Long story short, the person was okay, we were able to send help to their home. But those are the types of calls that we're dealing with. We're at about a 42% digital footprint. So between chat and between our chat bots, we've got a really sizable digital layer there. So what's left are truly the most complex calls. We're trying to meet our members where they want us most. So we've gotta arm our associates. Gone on the days where you have 10 easy calls and then one tough one. These are all complex calls. And so we're trying to make sure that our associates feel like they've got everything there for them so that they can be there for that member. So when we think about this, our attrition is really looking strong. We all had a little bit of a challenge during the Great Resignation, but I am so excited to say not only are our transactional metrics, our customers telling us we're doing a better job, our associates are telling us that. And so when we look at and we say, why do you like this? We got a lot of good feedback. We had a lot of partnership with Pega to say, can we tweak this? Can we update that? You know, here's the live sessions and the feedback. We actually have a office here in Vegas, we're headed over there tomorrow to do the next feedback session. And so by letting them have a voice, our associates were part of the process. This wasn't done to them, they helped. And so, you know, that's the real meaning here. And when the gentleman said it earlier today, nobody's looking at average handle time anymore. Yes, you track it, you have to be able to staff your centers, but it's really around resolving that issue the first time. What are the unasked questions? What are the next best steps? What is the person not thinking about? And so we give that to them all, so that we can do the best job possible. Are we completely finished yet? No, no, we're just scratching the surface. But it really is an amazing step forward to be the best we can be.

That's great. It's a fantastic story. So question, I'm not sure if it's for both of you, but you know, people in the audience have been thinking about this. I went to the first session yesterday, it was a generic customer experience CRM, and we had tons for questions. The first, the second, the third, the 10th question, they were all about this technology.

You bet.

So tell us a little bit about your decision to pursue it. You know what you were trying, you can mix in a little bit of what you're trying to achieve. It's not something that one individual makes, right? We all work in these large complicated organizations that you socialize things with different people, et cetera. You learn from the other people to properly plan so it can be successful. And I love how you were adding in there that you made your associates, it wasn't pushed on them. They were part of the people creating that. So, sorry, that just distracted me. We still have eight minutes and 19 seconds. So you guys might even have a couple questions. So start to think about them. But you know, you guys can tag team, and tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, you bet. And I love, like Jenn and I and our teams are great partners, right? And so imagine building technology in a vacuum and then like the session that we've got tomorrow, and this week with our call centers, it's real like shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. And I just wanna ask Naga, who heads up all of our contact center operations and Ishva, and your teams to stand up and just acknowledge, I just wanna acknowledge this group.

[Christopher] I should've done that in the beginning.

That I'm not by any means, these are the real stars who do the work. Thanks guys. So it's shoulder to shoulder that we work together. There's not a bit that we do. Like that lion picture, is it yesterday? It's real, you know, that we've seen. And in order for us to have that harmony between us, I think it's important. Like for instance, our scale plan, we started small, we said 200 agents that will go forward first with a crossfire contact centers, one of them being in Las Vegas. And then we looked at the results, and obviously we went through legal and compliance and got our responsible AI. You've gotta have that. If you don't have that, they've gotta do, it's to save us all, right? So they went through responsible AI area and they gave the sign off, our legal gave the sign off. Took a little bit time. Actually, we actually were quite surprised. It took a little less time than we thought because we'd been doing work in the background to get to this point. So what was good is working with yourselves as Pega, is that you were here, and we were here, and our operations were here. We were ready, right? So this was not something that slipped up on us. We needed to know that there is something that we've gotta do very quickly. So we rolled out to those 200, we saw that when we rolled out the next best action, our script adherence, and our ability to have auto case creation. And I love the opportunity to have form filling for a minute. 35 fields need to be filled out, right? And you know, there's some complexity there. Let's just put it that way. And we reduce that complexity. And I would love to say the seconds that we saved, but I'll leave that out, and know that we saved some substantial amount of seconds here. So there was everything pointing towards yes, yes, yes. But I will say that, and Jenn can talk about like what it really took as individuals, so if we have this great technology, we've been building it with yourselves, and now we're ready to scale, we've got like a another 300, 500 we're gonna do in the next few weeks. And then by Q3 we'll have 1600, and by end of next year, all of our guys are gonna be on, that's the plan. We're crossing our fingers that we continue to get the funding to do this. But I will tell you that there's nothing more important. When it comes to simplifying the experience and the pressures that are on us. It's really important. And again, if we just did this in a vacuum, it would just die an early death, because training and the fear that Jenn spoke about with individuals, I mean this is Big Brother watching them, right? That's what they thought. But it was actually not. It was for them to ease up the work that we are doing. So I think for me it was layering in the technology, working at a very important part where we both aligned to the use cases that needed to be that we are gonna say, okay, joint outcomes, these are the impacts that we're gonna have. And then very quickly move. And I think relying on my service operations partners and Jenn and her leadership to say what have we gotta do, how we've gotta do it and be there, I think that's accelerated our scale as we go forward.

Yeah, I love how all that comes together. It's funny you talked about like the form field and like the number of fields. Jenn, what's the field that had the most choices, that it was-

Oh my gosh. So when we looked, we had a dropdown box and it goes into searching for benefits, and it was like this long, and we rely on our associates to scroll up and down. So now we've simplified a lot of that. And I will say part of what's made this success is we don't go quietly. Our operations team, it's not a question of if we are heard, it is we are heard. And so Geeta's right, we keep each other on speed dial because it's gonna take that partnership. I said, you know, it can't be done to you. You have to jump in, roll up your sleeves, because process matters, and you wanna get it right the first time around. Yes we've had some rework, yes, we've had some things that we've optimized, but we went in with our best efforts because of that partnership. So this is not something that tech goes into a closet and they come back and say look what we've done for you. I mean, you've gotta have that voice there with your partners.

Excellent, so we actually, I didn't think this was gonna happen. We have a chance for you to ask some questions. We have some mics, please, we can probably hear you, but step up. It'd be easier if you have any questions. But before we do, let's give a hand for Jenn and Geeta and the entire Elevance Health team. That was awesome to hear the inside story. So we do have a couple minutes. Does anyone have any questions?

Not that we could see you, if you do.

Yes, we'll just hear it.

[Spectator] Yes, so obviously the contact center CCAS solution big part that, right? How did you make sure you found the right of integrating the CRM with the CCAS solution.

Yeah, I think that's something that's fundamental and we're continuing to advance our journey through that as well. So CCAS solution, are you saying?

[Spectator] Contact center.

Contact center, yep, that's what I thought. So we have, Naga here is responsible for our contact center technologies as well, and we work hand in hand. And so what was good is that we decided to start the journey anyway even when we were on-prem, right? And we are moving people into our cloud as well, like as we speak. We have a goal by the end of July that the lion's share of our contact centers are on, right? And that takes an awful lot of, I believe in making sure that you're juxtaposing your technology and your CRM responsibly, right? And so what was really good is that as we were putting ourselves and thinking about our cloud, Pega approached us with this solution, and we were already looking at it and talking about it and they approached us and it was within the CRM already, right? And so the idea that we take our core recordings, pass it over to Pega, Pega then passes it over to us, the great thing about that right now is that the legal and compliance journey, that was smoother because as a result of us still housing our own data, right? And I think it's important that in this instance that you find a healthy balance between moving fast in your current system, and knowing that it's legacy and that it's not gonna stop you from moving ahead as you've gotta go in your cloud journey. And so for us, we are doing both simultaneously knowing that Pega had a solution for us that we could use and that we can continue to use as we go forward. I think it was a great, I don't know if it was like, if you are Star Trek fans, just a great Spock transmission there going on. But it was good, right? And I think you can't do things in a vacuum. Our job is to make sure that we connect the dots from a technology standpoint with our partners and we make it easy for them to traverse through that. Does that answer your question?

Question from the white light, right?

Yes.

We have time for one more question and then afterwards we'll step aside. Anyone else have anything to ask? Please do. You can yell it out or come up to a mic.

[Spectator] So this is a a quick question. How important was change management? How much time does it go, both of you together working business and technology together? Because it's a large scale transformation, and you have a very ambitious role.

Yeah, so I'll jump in first here. Change management, it's massive. I mean really when we think about like the adoption from our own associates, our more tenured associates, it took awhile. They felt like they knew our systems better than this new help did. So there's a piece of that. But also too, one of the challenges because we had so many fragmented systems, our knowledge management, everything that you've heard described here, that was us, getting everything lined up to make sure we didn't break anything in the process. That took a ton of coordination. So absolutely, I think you've gotta watch that every step of the way and we're still doing it, so.

No, I think you said it well, Jenn. Either you can't go into this sort of work with a blindfold. You can't just think tech and hey, push it on people and push it on your operations teams to go ahead and do it. You need to be equally accountable. I have a product organization as well that make sure that they work hand in hand with our operations team too, and daily, like exchanging like where is she? Leslie, Leslie represents our product area, right? And so I think the combination-

And Leslie started on my side. So I think that's something as well.

Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, like all you pure technologists, some of you, right? You gotta have a healthy blend of product folks on your teams too, right? So you, you know how to do change management with your partners as well. How to make sure that that roadmap continues forward. How to make sure that your stakeholders are engaged not after the fact, but we are being proactive. And I will tell you we learn. So I'm not gonna stand here with Jenn and say, you know what? We came at the door, we were ready with our checklist and everything, right? We learned through this process, 'cause let's, let's face it, this technology has not been deployed ever before. We're about to go into a realm, we're in the middle of a technology revolution. We're about to go into the realm of what you have right now is just gonna be amplified in terms of your practices with change management training and operational connectivity with your partners.

I love that last statement, and that's a good one to end it on. Geeta, Jenn, thank you so much for sharing your story. Everyone, thanks for joining us.