Discover the secret to achieving customer engagement excellence

The Pega Discover event series delivers insights on the topics and technologies that power today’s business solutions and solve tomorrow’s challenges. Our recent, interactive One-to-one Customer Engagement Summit brought together industry leaders from Nexxworks, Vodafone, Accenture, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ernst & Young, Infosys, Cognizant, and Capgemini for collaborative discussions on how enterprises are connecting with customers and transforming their business in ways never before thought possible.

Using AI and real-time decisioning as central drivers, businesses are personalizing inbound, outbound, and paid interactions in new and unexpected ways that are delighting customers and building long-term value. As Alan Trefler, Pega’s Founder and CEO, explained, “It’s a radical rethinking of customer engagement.”

The New Digital Experience: Driven by Real-Time, Responsible AI

Digital customer engagement channels are more essential than ever. As Steven Van Belleghem from Nexxworks points out in this keynote presentation, businesses now are operating in a hybrid world, with digital channels incorporated into every interaction. “If I look through what happened in 2020,” says Steven, “I tend to call this the biggest digital training course the world has ever seen.” Digital technologies are enabling new, real-time and faster-than-real-time, customer-led experiences that are hyper-personalized, convenient, and always connected. And AI is helping optimize that customer experience.

A click, swipe, or even lack of signal helps AI and decisioning tools understand the context of a customer’s current situation and how to respond in the most relevant way. It’s a type of two-way conversation in this new, hybrid world – a data-based conversation that your business could have tens of millions of times each day across all channels and all customers. And it’s why a centralized decisioning authority is key to helping businesses personalize each engagement, learn from every channel, and provide transparency in how decisions are made.

The Empathy Evolution at Vodafone

AI and centralized decisioning capabilities allow businesses to constantly pivot in real-time between selling, serving, and retaining customers. That sounds complicated, but global companies like Vodafone are successfully supporting more than 400 million customers and billions of interactions every year with this approach. How do they do it and do it well? “Firstly, having empathy for our customers sits right at the heart of what our brand stands for,” explains Simon Esland, Senior Manager for Marketing Platforms at Vodafone Group. “And to understand customer intent requires that you listen to what your customers are telling you.”

That intent could be explicit (information your customer tells you directly) or implicit (what you can infer from data). In either case, data is at the center of the decisioning process, informing analytical models and triggering the most relevant action for each individual customer within a matter of milliseconds. It’s an approach that centers around understanding the context of each customer, during each interaction, and responding in a hyper-personalized way. As Simon puts it, “…that in-the-moment decisioning, based on this 360-degree view of the customer, isn't the future of marketing it's, instead, the now.”

Learn more and get detailed insights on how to integrate hyper-personalized engagement capabilities into your marketing stack to drive topline growth.

Watch replays of all the event keynotes and sessions:

Want even more insights? See content from our Discover Events on customer service and intelligent automation, plus join us and connect with brands from around the world on the latest tech, ideas, and success stories at our largest virtual event, PegaWorld iNspire!