Channels and Pega Customer Service

Let's fast forward to today's customer service world. What exactly is included in Pega Customer Service?

Pega provides all of the digital media channels surrounding the voice-centric communications stack that we just reviewed: e-mail, live, agent, chat chatbot, social media, and business messaging. We also provide self-service options through chatbots and via IVR voice self-service. Even though voice is the oldest of the contact center media channels, it is still king with the lion's share of the volume even today. If you look at the breakdown of customer interactions, voice has been slowly shifting away from 100% of the volume to a smaller and smaller share, but it is still very much the dominant media channel.

Now, let's look at some of the digital media channels that are included in Pega Customer Service. E-mail is one of the earliest digital channel options. A customer can email their concerns from either their own client or from a web form filled out on an organization's website. The email is then classified and routed to a queue where agents work on responding back to the customer's inquiry. Soon after that, live agent chat options were offered where a customer is browsing on an organization's web page or mobile app and could get immediate assistance from an agent through a messaging interface.

You may have seen or done this before. You're on a website browsing for something, and you need some help, and either there is a chat with us option on the page or a chat box pops up saying, "Would you like to chat with an agent?" If you accept the offer, a chat session would be launched, would queue you up for an agent, and route you there once one became available, much like a phone call was routed by an ACD. Business messaging and social media is one of the newest customer interaction channels and ones that have seen tremendous growth lately. This is where a customer can choose from a number of platforms, primarily Facebook, Twitter, Apple business chat, WhatsApp, or even direct SMS text messaging to have chat interactions with agents either in real time or asynchronously. On social media, these can either be a direct message, such as with Facebook Messenger or Twitter direct messaging, or an organization can monitor public forums and respond to messages posted by individuals.

In addition to all these live agent interactions offered, Pega also provides some powerful self-service channel options. Organizations love self-service because it is far less expensive than live agent interactions, but only if it's properly implemented, as a poor self-service interaction can cause customer frustrations. I'm sure we've all experienced poor customer self-service in the past. Chatbot allows for an automated chat experience between a customer and a bot which can respond to simple customer requests and escalate to a live agent once they reach their limits. Their sophistication is growing every day through the use of artificial intelligence, and they're able to handle increasingly complex interactions.

For IVR Self-service, although Pega does not directly provide a voice channel or IVR platform, our customer service solution has a feature, which allows us to deeply integrate and extend our capabilities into an organization's existing voice channel and self-service IVR. So, in looking at these Pega digital channel capabilities, keep in mind that it all started with voice in the call center, and over time, organizations have added all of these digital channels, which are growing in volume.

As mentioned earlier, the share of voice interactions have been slowly declining, but keep in mind that it is still king in the contact center. It's still important to acknowledge that voice is still typically the channel of choice for customer exceptions, and contact centers have become more focused on handling exceptions. They used to be more transactional, whereas now customers usually only reach out when there's a problem because most organizations offer web-based options to resolve problems online. Once someone picks up the phone and calls an organization, it's usually a complex problem that needs to be solved, and as such, a lot of focus is still paid to the voice channel.

The takeaway here is that organizations are always trying to make their customer interactions more efficient to both delight their customers as well as save operating costs. Pega Customer Service provides all the tools to do both of those things.

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