In today’s fast-paced, data-driven world, businesses are under pressure to deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences while driving measurable value. But how can organizations achieve this balance and unlock tangible results? Many are turning to smarter, data-powered decision-making to transform customer engagement and boost operational efficiency. A new Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study by Forrester Consulting reveals what's possible when businesses rethink traditional marketing and analytics strategies in favor of AI-powered, one-to-one customer engagement with Pega Customer Decision Hub™. Spoiler alert: It’s an extraordinary 442% return on investment (ROI) over three years. The study shows how organizations are achieving impressive results by putting customer outcomes at the center of their decision-making.
The journey to customer-centric business growth
For many organizations, the path to meaningful customer engagement is hindered by fragmented systems and siloed data. This disconnect between the brand and the customer represents more than just a technical challenge – it's a fundamental barrier to building trust and delivering value. As one marketing executive noted: "Our prior environment was a nightmare for the marketers, and it was really disjointed for the customers. A customer would call and say: 'I just told the teller I'm not interested in that, yet I received direct mail, two splash campaigns, and four emails about it. So, are you not listening to me?'"
The TEI study explores just how Pega Customer Decision Hub bridges this gap with what Forrester calls Real-Time Interaction Management (RTIM). RTIM helps businesses enrich customer experiences by determining – in real time – the next best experience (NBX) that can be delivered at any given moment, on any touchpoint. Per Forrester, “NBX lives at the intersection of consumers’ and businesses’ needs.”
Breaking down the benefits
The most compelling impact comes from Pega's ability to drive incremental profit growth through better identification of cross-sell, upsell, and sales opportunities. Using real-time decisioning, organizations can instantly determine the most suitable action or offer for each customer.
The group product director at a financial services organization described how efficient customer communications led to an impact on revenue: “By efficiently communicating with our customers, we focus on providing them with relevant items of interest to them. We avoid wasting impressions on item A when item B would provide more benefit to the customer.” Having a more complete view of the customer isn’t a new concept, but organizations have struggled to complete the puzzle with incomplete and siloed data. With centralized AI unifying data sources, Customer Decision Hub removes those barriers.
When organizations truly understand and respond to customer needs, loyalty follows naturally. Companies saw customer churn rates drop by 5% initially, progressing to a 15% reduction by year three. This improvement stems not from aggressive retention tactics, but from delivering consistently better experiences that make customers want to stay. One example from the study highlights an insurance company that retained 40% of their churn risk clients by redirecting clients that want to cancel their plans out of the digital channels and into the call center for a hyper-personalized experience that was successful 85% of the time.
The study spotlights the story of a product owner at a financial services organization who described the impact that Pega’s agent-focused tool, Next Best Action Advisor, had on their contact center: “From a channel perspective, our approach is primarily digital with a branch presence, and we also utilize real-time emails. With the addition of an IVR [interactive voice response] system and call center, we aim to achieve complete coverage for marketing, ensuring a comprehensive and seamless customer experience.”
Customer service representatives, armed with relevant data and next-best-action recommendations, are transforming routine interactions into opportunities for deeper engagement. With a 20% reduction in average handle time and more meaningful conversations, both customers and employees benefit from more productive interactions.
Marketing operations, business analysts, and other roles benefit significantly from Pega Customer Decision Hub tools, including Pega 1:1 Operations Manager and Next Best Action Designer. Organizations reported a 25% increase in business user efficiencies by year 3 of implementation.
One senior VP at a communications organization described the impact of more efficient operations with Pega Customer Decision Hub: “I have many, many more people supporting the more manual outbound processes that aren’t integrated into Customer Decision Hub than I do supporting Customer Decision Hub. So it’s much more efficient to manage and deploy those experiences that we’re running through Customer Decision Hub, or in other words, fewer resources to support a much broader scale and a much bigger number of actions and treatments.”
With advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms, organizations can perform faster and more accurate data analysis. That includes enabling organizations to uncover patterns and trends, leading to data-driven decisions that improve customer experiences and outcomes. For most data teams predictive analytics is the prevailing modeling technique, using past data to forecast future events. While predictive models are powerful it’s hard for data scientists to scale them to the use cases needed. Increasingly organizations have turned to adaptive models, which leverage machine learning to constantly update themselves to cover more use cases, channels, and experiences.
One Senior VP of Customer Management highlighted: "We have 600+ automated models running through Adaptive Decisioning; without it, we would have to build and deploy those models manually."
Looking to the future: Gen AI integration
The journey doesn't end here. Organizations are already exploring how Pega's generative AI capabilities will further transform customer engagement. According to a McKinsey study, generative AI has the most potential across customer operations, marketing, sales, software engineering, and R&D in an enterprise context. From creating more dynamic personalized content to enhancing agent productivity and revolutionizing self-service capabilities, the potential for even more personalized and efficient customer experiences is immense.
As one insurance industry manager notes: "We are looking into gen AI functionality that Pega is currently building into the system. It will give us a lot of opportunities to automate processes that can supersede manual, time-consuming work."
The business case for next best experience
The message is clear: Successful customer engagement isn't about bombarding customers with offers or maintaining separate conversations across different channels. It's about creating a unified, intelligent dialogue that recognizes each customer's unique context and delivers consistent value across every interaction.
Pega Customer Decision Hub is helping organizations make this vision a reality, transforming both the customer experience and business outcomes through intelligent, real-time decisioning that puts customer needs first.
Want to learn more about how AI can drive the real-time decisions needed to deliver exceptional experiences? Download the study here.