Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We are thrilled that you're here with us for our conversation about why AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation make Pega the CRM leader. My name is Ismath Mohideen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Pega Customer Service, and I am energized by impactful technology. You know, my career has spanned areas such as IoT, blockchain, and even servers. Believe it or not, they affect us every day. Joining me today is my friend from across the pond, Andy Mutlow, Principal Solutions Architect for Pega Customer Service. Andy, give us an intro. Thank you, Ismath. As you said, I'm a principal solutions consultant, which in layperson's terms means I'm a bit of a geek. I love technology, and I especially love technology doing cool stuff. I am super excited to be here today. Thanks, Andy. This is gonna be an awesome session because Andy and I are going to talk about why Pega was recently positioned as the top CRM offering in the Forrester Wave: Core CRM Solutions for Q3 2022. We will talk about the key areas of our offering in which we are especially well-positioned to deliver success to your customer service organization. Then we'll dive into some background about Pega Foundations, including customer service as well as Customer Decision Hub. Get ready, because we're also gonna show you a sneak peek of a new capability in the 8.8 release of Pega Customer Service, where we're gonna showcase personalized offers that contextually and dynamically change in real-time during conversations that happen directly between your customers and agents. Which not only makes agents' jobs easier and leads to better and more customized service for customers, but it can also drive incremental revenue in your contact center. We're using Pega Customer Service and Customer Decision Hub to bring it to life. Andy, are you ready? I'm ready. Let's get right to it. All right, let's talk about the Forrester Wave results. We are beyond thrilled to talk about how Forrester recently named Pega as the leader with the strongest current offering in the Forrester Wave: Core CRM Solutions for Q3 of 2022. That's right, overall top score. Now, what that means is if anyone is looking to buy CRM software right now, then we have the best available. Now, there are many reasons why we came out top, not least our exceptional AI powered decisioning brain and workflow automation. We'll go into more detail on that in a minute. Now, firstly, I want to talk about one of the great quotes from the report, and that is this one about our vision. They say that, "Our vision is one of autonomous CRM, where automation offloads repetitive work and AI assists users, increasing their efficiency and the delivered customer experience." Now, anything where you're able to remove boring, repetitive work for your employees, increase customers' experience and satisfaction, and use AI to do it, well, that is the kind of stuff that really gets my geek senses tingling. I love that. Totally. You know, they mention how we use real-time customer context and journey data to anticipate customer needs, both proactively and preemptively, and how your users are guided through adaptive workflows, proposing an offer or outcome that is most likely to be acceptable, and adjusting follow-on steps based on customer feedback. Right. Finally, Forrester also recognized our roadmap for the future. Another great quote here, where, "We focus on increasing the breadth of AI and automation and supporting a composable architecture to allow customers to assemble unique desktops." While we're having the strongest offering available right now, I'm expecting more fantastic geek stuff in the not-so-distant future. Andy, that was a wonderful overview of Pega's position in the latest Forrester Wave Core CRM report. Going a little deeper, according to the report, Pega received the highest possible score in several categories, such as CRM user productivity, assistance and guidance, Next-Best-Action, customer success, customer service operations, omnichannel engagement, conversational intelligence, process management, and developer tooling and extensibility. That's right, Ismath. This underscores how well we're positioned to benefit large enterprises across multiple industries that support complex processes, not necessarily contained to just the front office, but across multiple dimensions of contact center operations. Now, make sure to check out the report for more information, and we'll provide a link at the end of our session. Yeah. It's important to mention that Pega is recognized as the leader in digital transformation across multiple dimensions, such as conversational app development, real-time decisioning and AI, and digital process automation. Why is that? What's the secret sauce that's making that happen? Andy, let's talk about Pega Foundation or our DNA, so to speak, and also give our audience more detail about both customer service and Customer Decision Hub. Great idea, Ismath. Our DNA, our foundation at Pega is about three things, really. Firstly, workflow automation. We're getting work done, removing those inefficiencies and really boring tasks that cost businesses a ton of cash. Secondly, we have a fantastic brain that works in real time across all the channels available and is constantly learning and optimizing. Now, if you combine the two of those with the fact that they are all configured using our low-code platform that has consistent business and developer tooling, another quote there, and you can see why we're uniquely suited to automate service, deliver faster resolutions for customers, and ultimately make customers happy. Now, here's how Pega applies these principles into customer service so that you have the power to intelligently engage and automate every customer journey and touch point, including proactive notifications, web self-service, mobile apps, chat, messaging, Twitter, WhatsApp, email, phone, and more. Pega works as a service orchestration layer that puts the customer journey at the center of everything. It connects to your existing systems and orchestrates your front office and back-office processes all in one central hub, saving customers and agents time and your company a lot of money. Yeah, that's right. You'll see where we've called out three categories of service. Proactive service to reach customers before they reach out to your contact center. Self-service with tools such as the intelligent virtual assistant and chat and email bot, and assisted service with agents. For many companies, these service categories are disconnected, and they cause a huge amount of frustration for your customers and agents alike. For example, when a customer starts a conversation with a chatbot, only to hit a dead end and reaches the contact center, only to start the conversation all over again because all of that context was lost. Pega lets you bring these service categories and channels together into one application. If your customers want to speak to a live person, all of their previous interaction history and context is surfaced. The agent has a full understanding of the customer's situation and their progress to date, reducing the need for customers to repeat themselves. Andy, since you just mentioned talking to a live person and having that full context, this is a perfect opportunity to talk about Voice AI. We introduced Voice AI starting with the 8.6 release, and we continue to invest in this amazing capability. Voice AI is part of Pega's conversational AI tool, and they serve as a co-pilot for every agent on every call. We're connecting customers to agents using AI as the guide in between. An AI tool that listens to customers and automates data entries such as address changes or adding new people to insurance policies. It's all conducted automatically on the agent desktop. It also helps surface things like case suggestions and knowledge articles automatically and directly to agents at the right time. The ability to allow agents to serve as knowledge workers and dive into these complex interactions resulting in happier customers and productivity gains is something that really interests me. Every contact center I've visited in the past five years or more would benefit from these capabilities. Agents not having to spend much time on manual tasks, not having to search for knowledge and instead it finding them. Automated form filler and data entry, case suggestions. Ultimately letting agents focus on the customer experience, resulting in reduced average handle time, increased first contact resolution, and ultimately much better customer satisfaction. Exactly. You know, keep this in mind because you're gonna see this in action in our demo. Before we do that, let's shift gears a little and talk about Pega's Customer Decision Hub or the brain that I've been mentioning. This brain is a personalized offer engine that delivers real-time recommendations and continuously adapts to customer behavior regardless of the channel. It can look at what a customer is doing on the website. Why did they call in? Did they tweet somebody? Did they open an email? Any indicator that we think is relevant and useful, and then combines this to give an insight into that customer at a unique moment. We determine the context of the customer, the situation they are in, and consider what is it that we can do best to meet their service need. We call it the Next-Best-Action, and that might be a personalized sales offer, a retention plan, a service task, or a nurture effort where we say nothing at all. Whatever it is, Pega figures it out in real-time using AI, that brain, adaptive models and machine learning, and then delivers it back out across any channel, inbound or outbound, owned, paid, or even agent-assisted in real-time. At Pega, that brain that we just saw is exactly what we provide with the Pega Customer Decision Hub. It sits at the center of your marketing technology stack and unifies all your data, analytics, and channels into a single connected experience. Pega Customer Decision Hub determines the Next-Best-Action for every customer and then delivers it in their preferred channel precisely during their moment of need. Now, a group head of marketing technology with Vodafone has said that they have relevant one-to-one conversations that are personalized to the individual customer based on what happened a half a second ago. Now, that is true personalization. It absolutely is, Andy, and you set the stage perfectly because I am thrilled to introduce and preview a new capability that brings the outstanding qualities of Pega Customer Service and Customer Decision Hub together. We've combined automation, AI, and re-decisioning to provide real-time contextual offers to customers based on their conversations with agents. We've combined voice AI to listen to customers as they're talking, and we're driving offers in the direction that conversation is headed. That's right. The brilliant part is that the agent and our AI-powered decisioning are both listening to the customer, understanding their needs and context in real time. What the customer is saying and what they're trying to achieve, and trying to determine the next best actions or recommendations for what makes sense for that customer and your business in that moment of time. Our solution is able to dynamically change offers if the direction of the conversation happens to change, and we know they do, proposing offers and solutions that are most likely to be accepted. The automation capability or that muscle can determine whether the next best course of action is a service-related offer, or if the opportunity arises, to offer the customer a sales offer that suits their needs. This means your business can handle customer nurturing as well as cross-sell and upsell opportunities to expand potential revenue generation directly into your contact center. Since offers and script appears directly on the desktop, you can do this without needing to train agents as they are intelligently guided throughout. That's exactly right. You know, our objective is to present offers for agents to talk to customers about in a way that differentiates them from service requests, yet also feels consistent with the rest of the experience. With this integration between Pega Customer Service and Customer Decision Hub, you know, these are better than the sum of their parts that you won't get anywhere else. We're bringing together optimized offers, a seamless experience for agents and customers, and meaningful results for your business. Now let's show you how it's done. Here, we're gonna see a demo of how this combined solution works in a financial services environment. Yeah, that's right. In this demo, you'll hear Phil, the customer service rep, and the customer, Shay Parker. In this scenario, Shay is a good longtime customer of U+ Bank. Last month, she opened a teen checking account with her daughter, and they've been charged an overdraft fee. Shay calls to inquire and hopefully have it waived. As the call takes place, you'll hear how Voice AI analyzes conversation. It provides a script at the top of the screen for agents to read from. You'll also see how Customer Decision Hub offers real-time recommendations that re-decision and change based on the context of the conversation. An incoming call arrives from customer, Shay Parker. Customer Service Agent, Phil, accepts the call. Thanks for calling U+ Bank. My name is Phil. I see you have already verified your account information. Can you confirm your first and last name, please? Of course. Shay Parker. How can I help you today, Miss Parker? Well, I opened a teen checking account with my daughter last month, and she's already been charged an overdraft fee. Could you explain that to me? Sure, I can help you with that. Can you please tell me which fee you are looking at? Is it the $35 overdraft fee charged on August twenty-third? Yes, exactly that one. Okay, give me a second to look at that charge. It looks like the overdraft fee was assessed because of an $80 transaction on August 23rd at Master Park Taekwondo. The account had $35 in it at the time, and that $80 charge pushed it into a negative balance. I see. Right. She's just getting used to the timing and how all of that works. Could you please waive the fee just this time? Okay, let's see what I can do. We certainly understand these things happen, and we value you as a customer. I've gone ahead and waived the fee for you this time, Miss Parker. You should see that reflected on your next statement. Oh, great. Thank you so much. At this point, Phil clicks on an offer in the left-hand panel. This is where Customer Decision Hub is recommending a real-time offer based on information analyzed by Voice AI in this conversation. Shay mentioned that her daughter is learning about timing of transactions and how it all works. A Teen Money Financial Literacy Program is offered. Let's listen in. You know, we do have a program aimed at teenagers that can help teach them financial literacy. Would you be interested in enrolling your daughter in this program so that she learns to manage her money well? Wow, that sounds great. No, she's pretty good about money. Like I said, this was a timing issue. She usually has more money than me. Seems like I'm always tapped since I started working on my own business, and I have been putting all of my savings into it. Wow, that's really exciting. What kind of business is it? Oh, it's a yoga and personal training studio. Notice that a new suggestion for the Money Manager service has appeared on the agent desktop. Shay mentioned that her daughter is pretty good about handling her money, but Shay also mentioned that she's starting a new business. Pega Voice AI has picked up and analyzed this shift in the conversation, and Pega Customer Decision Hub is re-decisioning in real time and proposing a new offer based on the new context in the conversation. This offer was deemed to be the most relevant offer based on what Shay mentioned to Phil at that moment in time. Now, let's wrap up our conversation. Oh, wonderful. I wish you good luck with that. We actually offer a long-term wealth management service called Money Manager, targeted specifically entrepreneurs and small businesses like yours. Would you like to know more about it? Yes, I would love to know more. Excellent. I will put in a request for a specialist to discuss the program with you and sign you up if you'd like. Done. A specialist will contact you within two business days via your email on file to schedule an appointment. There, they will explain the program and benefits. That's great. Thanks. How else can I help you today? I think we're all set. Thank you for waiving that fee. Oh, well, thank you for banking with U+ Bank. Have a nice day. Bye now. That was a great demo. I always love seeing our capabilities in action, especially when we bring AI, automation, and decisioning together in real time to engage with customers and drive additional revenue streams. Well, that's all from us. Before we depart, be on the lookout when we announce additional information about the 8.8 release of Pega Customer Service. For more information, check out the Forrester Wave: Core CRM Solutions Report that we talked about at the beginning of the session, and also make sure to check out our Customer Service product page and watch our video about EE, a telco provider in the U.K., who is using next-best actions in the contact center to drive real-time personalized offers for their customers. Andy, thanks for joining me today. I had a lot of fun. Thank you, Ismath. I really enjoyed our conversation, and we hope you all did too. Now, make sure you come by the breakout room right after this webinar. We will answer any questions you might have about the demo or the Forrester report, and our Senior Director of Product Strategy, Jeremy Kembel, will join, as well as a member of our product management team. Hope to see you there.