Business applications

So, where do the business applications come in?

Once the call arrives at an agent, there are a number of business applications supporting the contact center that come into play. You're all probably familiar with customer relationship management, or CRM. CRM is a generic term for the process of managing customer interactions. CRM is mostly a storage location for relevant customer data. Things like name, address, account number, balances, etcetera. It can do much more than this, but at its core, it's a storage location for data. Of course, Pega can provide this functionality, or we can leverage a third-party CRM. And then there's call recording, or what's sometimes referred to as quality assurance, which allows for capture of all of those voice calls from all the interactions with customers.

Those recordings can also include a screen capture of the agent desktop to not only hear the audio conversation with customers but also see what agents are doing as well. These recordings are stored digitally as they happen and then retrieved later to be used for quality assurance. Most medium-sized contact centers and larger have a whole group of people dedicated to ensuring that agents provide appropriate and consistent responses to customer inquiries. This allows for benchmarking of different interactions so that they can ensure that each agent is providing a consistent quality experience on every interaction with a customer. Next up is workforce management, which is frequently referred to as WFM software that is used to properly staff a contact center.

WFM is not necessarily part of the communication stack but is one of the many behind-the-scenes platforms needed to manage a contact center. Frequently you'll hear WFM and quality assurance bundled together as workforce optimization or sometimes referred to as WFO. Contact centers are run very efficiently not only to contain expenses but also to ensure that agents are available to answer customer inquiries at the right time. You've got to have your workforce show up on time, go on their break at the right time or go to lunch break at the correct time. Otherwise, calls will get backed up, and queue times will become unacceptable, leading to poor customer experiences.

As I mentioned, contact centers are one of the most metrics-driven operations you'll ever see in business. Based on past history and trends, they know down to the minute, for the most part, with very good accuracy, exactly when to expect their customers to call, send an e-mail or start a chat session on an hour-by-hour basis.

Workforce management allows them to schedule agents' start and finish times as well as exactly when they should take breaks and lunches, and this is sometimes scheduled down to a 15-minute interval. As an agent, I may start at 8:00 AM one day of the week, then the next day, I may come in at 8:15, and the day after that, start at 9:15, depending on the projected volume trends for that day. Contact centers then take all of this information from all these different platforms and utilize it for data analytics, which provides valuable insights into their business.

And how they're running the operation data analytics platforms have seen tremendous growth in contact centers and business in general in the last number of years, and for a good reason. It allows a business to get deep insights, business insights into their customer service operation. They're looking to ensure that the contact center is providing business value, operating efficiently, and providing the best service possible to their customers.

So what part of all this contact center technology does Pega provide, and what parts are not included in our solution? Well, CRM and analytics components are part of Pega. The customer can choose to utilize the CRM and analytics functionality we provide in our solution, or they can use another.

Workforce management and quality, or, workforce optimization, is a very specialized set of software that frequently comes up in customer requirements in our customer service opportunities. Unfortunately, they are not within our scope. Pega does offer a software solution called Workforce Intelligence or commonly abbreviated as WFI, which is not to be confused with WFM or WFO. This utilizes AI-powered discovery bots, which collect information on an organization's employees, including contact center agents. The WFI results offer our customers valuable insights into understanding what obstacles and distractions are hindering their operation.

But WFI is something completely different than WFM or WFO. WFI can be one of the greatest ways to get a foot in the door when you're selling a Pega customer service opportunity.

And we will address this later on.

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