The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the landscape of the enterprise workforce. Particularly hit hard is your customer service team and its ability to deliver service at scale. Greater numbers of staff are being required to work remotely at home or are dispersed at offices across regions, creating significant challenges in providing timely and accurate responses to customer service inquiries.
Fortunately, Pega Customer Service™ is built to be adaptable and can be configured to support agents working from home or alternate locations. In an effort to support our clients as they shift to a new way of working, we have created a practical guide for deploying Pega Customer Service for a highly-distributed workforce.
In this overview, we outline some factors that businesses should consider for remote customer service operations.
Hardware and Connectivity
Pega is a thin client – it runs on central server instead of a localized hard drive, giving you flexibility of deployment. You will need to ensure, however, that your remote employees have sufficient bandwidth to process the applications essential to your business functions.
Pega’s graphical CSR desktop is designed to present the most relevant information to an agent. Therefore, we recommend a monitor display size between 1280 and 1920 horizontal pixels for the best experience. Pega Community members may refer to this platform sizing knowledgebase article for additional details on browsers and bandwidth.
Telephony
While it’s easy to send an agent home with a laptop, it may be more difficult to move a hard phone. In such situations, a soft phone can be configured. Ideally, the soft phone should support incoming calls, mobile phone redirects, plus call monitoring and quality assurance activities. Pega applications are designed to integrate with a range of telephony systems. For businesses that don’t yet have a soft phone vendor, we recommend cloud-based providers like Amazon Connect for Five9 for quick deployment alongside a Pega application.
Cloud and Security
Cloud deployments can be provisioned quickly to help businesses get up and running. Pega’s Cloud Choice Guarantee doesn’t lock you in to an inflexible situation of running your system in either a cloud environment or an on-premise environment. Instead, you can migrate to or from on-premise to any supported cloud environment (e.g., ours or another vendor’s) as your business needs require.
Just as for on-premise work, it is essential to secure data on a remote laptop or other device and monitor access to it. As a JEE and web-based platform, Pega allows customized configuration of authentication and authorization mechanisms, including VPN access, multi-factor authentication, and SSO; extending your existing log-in requirements to your remote workforce.
For apps that are not accessible over VPN remotely, consider using robotic process automation (RPA) to manage requests in the back office and provide agents with the screens or information essential to work.
Collaboration, Coaching, and Support
Communication and collaboration capabilities are more important now than ever. When working remotely, your agents do not have the advantage of tapping their co-worker on the shoulder or walking over to the supervisor’s desk for help with an issue. Pega clients can take advantage of the built-in Pulse collaboration tool, which provides real-time, one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many interactions. This can be used to set up communications between workgroups, tag individuals as subject matter experts, share links to knowledge content, or check in with staff.
Pega Customer Service manager tools and dashboards are available to monitor, chat, report on, and coach agents, and will function in your remote implementations. Meanwhile, functions liked role-specific alerts and notifications can help you make sure remote workers are up-to-date with the latest messaging. Of course, clients running Pega Customer Service Enterprise Edition and above will also have the advantage of agent guidance.
Additional Considerations to Streamline Operations
- Updating your processes for increase in escalations
As current circumstances may result in a range of unique customer concerns, customer service agents may encounter an increase in escalation requests. If your specialists are not available to take the request, we recommend agents record information and details in an “general service request” case that can be routed to specialists for eventual review. This approach helps provide service to the customer, captures critical customer information, and keeps processes moving.
- RDA and RPA
In some environments, remote workers may not be able to leverage their robotic desktop automation (RDA) tools. In such cases, we recommend you consider creating and assigning work to employee workbaskets downstream or use an unattended RPA robot.
Dealing with Increased Volume, Reducing Wait Times, and Providing First-Class Service
- Expand digital messaging support
To deal with the influx of contact volume, consider extending your support of digital messaging channels, where agents can handle multiple interactions concurrently. Clients that run Pega’s Digital Customer Engagement Edition (version 8.4 and higher) also have the capability to augment service offerings with integrated digital channels, like web chat, mobile chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, Apple Messages for Business, and email.
- Email Bots
Use email bots to automate the processing of incoming mail. Pega uses Natural Language Processing capabilities to read, classify, and route messages, saving time for agents and customers. - Self-Service and IVAs
Use self-service chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) to help on-hold times by tackling common service actions or providing contextual content on-demand. For more complex needs, bots and IVAs can automatically route customers to the correct agent for help. Depending on the specifics of the business environment, these tools can be implemented and go live in a matter of weeks.
The “new normal” is anything but business as usual. Pega can help you adapt and maintain continuity as the markets and your business needs change.
Learn more:
- Download this document for more details on how to transition your Pega Customer Service solution to a work-from-home model.
- Download this document for details on deploying your other Pega applications for a work-from-home model.
- Learn how Pega Customer Service can help you quickly respond to and resolve customer service needs.
- Watch a video demonstration of intelligent virtual assistants in action.
- Join us at PegaWorld iNspire and learn how customers around the world are using Pega to Build for Change®.