[Music] [Applause] [Music] hobb universe and welcome to another cube conversation from our beautiful Studios here in Palo Alto California another great conversation today we're here with leon truffula senior vice president of global customer success at one of my favorite technology companies over the years pega systems leon welcome to the cube glad to be here Peter thank you very much for having me now leon pegas had a great track record over a number of years of helping customers build relatively complex applications and domains like crm etc but where is pega today what have you guys been up to most recently well I think that was some of the most exciting work we're doing is helping customers through their digital transformation journeys and it's where we're seeing our customers generate some incredible value and so that that happens to be the space that I think is most exciting at the at the particular moment especially in terms of how it affects the way our customers are engaging with their customers so I want to build on that because we're pretty passionate about this notion of digital transformation let me throw out a couple concepts I agree where you think this might end up so we believe pretty strongly that the route there is a difference between a business and initial business and that difference is how a business uses its data how it formulates it's at its data into assets and that has significant implications because it suggests that the process of digitally transforming is in fact the process of reinstitution iliza work organizing work organizing engagement around what your data tells you and what your data can do for your customers how does that comport with the way you guys are well I'm going to throw a level of context around that absolutely the data is essential it's essential to understand your customer but that is the point I think I think the point has to be the customer and what the customer is trying to accomplish and of course you need the data to be able to support it but really focusing on the customer instead of focusing on what it is you're trying to do internally is what's key for digital's success so yeah we would agree and by the way when so we would say that it is about applying data to the processes of creating and sustaining your customer yes but you're absolutely right we're not just doing digital transformation on our operation so that's pretty important we're doing digital transformation on anything that's important to how the business engages its marketplace yes yes and and and one of the things that we think is essential though is yes you can assemble the data but if you don't understand from the customer's perspective how that data is going to apply to them as they go from channel to channel what you miss is the important aspect of understanding the true customer journey I mean what is it the what is the outcome the customer is trying to accomplish okay in terms of their interaction with you how do you apply that data so that you ensure that they're getting the right next best action in terms of guiding them through that process and how do you make that next best action contextual with what the customer is a cop trying to try to do so for example you may have an engagement with the customer and through your segmentation have decided wow this is a high net worth customer I want to I want to sell them lots of stuff but if they're on your web page around how to cancel their service with you offering them a cross-sell opportunities inappropriate its leveraging that data as well as the context as well as what is the customer trying to accomplish to ensure that that next best action actually drives to the outcome that you're looking for oh it's in so context matters so let me only run another concept by you then so as for number of years I talked about the difference between what we call offer response for fill marketing where the business is projecting an offer and expecting someone who's respond and then they'll fulfill to need match engage where increasingly you're trying to capture information or insight about again as you said what the customers outcome is and then hopefully find a way to match to their journey there are six their success parameters and then engage them to help them achieve their success is that kind of what we're talking about it is it not to engage where in turn it is except that except that our perspective is is that especially in digital channels you you don't necessarily have to be responsive but actually be proactive be proactive in terms of okay I know this is the outcome the customer is trying to achieve what value can I provide to them as they're going through my process so that they get the most out of my experience one it's going to be simple okay it's got to be quick but it's also going to be value-added to them otherwise they'll fail just as doing that you know you're not really relevant to them and they'll find somebody that is but it speeds important so this so I would say that's part of the matching is the ability to understand the customers need but also provide visibility into their future what how to get to the outcome and what not but that's going to require a new way of thinking about building systems and how those systems get applied to engagement what types of things are your customers doing along those lines to improve the hit rate of matching but also sustaining that throughout a customer's journey so I'm gonna tell you the three biggest mistakes that people make and how pega tries to guide them to avoid it so the first mistake that people make in their digital journeys okay is they think in terms of channels and not the customer journey the second biggest mistake they make okay is that they think in this context of a transaction I'm just doing the transaction but not in terms of the outcome that we're trying to accomplish and then honestly the third biggest mistake is they think in silos instead of the end-to-end relationship that you want to have at the customer so so too often what happens is is that companies take an internal view of what they're trying to accomplish rather than the external view of what's the customer trying to accomplish with me so channel transaction silo those that those those three problems so if we can turn that around what we're basically saying let's start with channel we're focusing first and foremost on the context of the customer and where they are in relation to a journey to an outcome is that the first thing that they're not quite so when you think about channels you almost have to think of this as being a channel agnostic point of view because your customer is going to move from channel to channel to channel as we go through the journey as they go through the journey like if I wanted to open a checking account on a with a digital Bank you know I might start with my mobile device don't have enough time to finish it get into the office want to continue the application on my on your website okay run into a problem want to call you the customer expects that they never have to tell you anything that they've already told you and if you actually end up building the logic for how you open something like a checking account in the channels you will never be able to have that and and fluid seamless experience so let me put that in very specific terms if the context of the engagement is bound inside a particularly then you can't track what the customers doing it's a state you can't track what the customers doing across different channels yes exactly so this is why you've got to think of the customer journey okay this is what a customer has to do to open a checking account with me how do you nuance that experience per channel but essentially okay you end up having to reuse that journey to effectively drive in a successful customer experience and that also leads to this question of silo right because sometimes silos are product silos other times they're channel silos or other times they're customer attributes silos and what you're basically describing is if you're going to truly track where the customer is relative to their outcome and acknowledge that different channels provide different ways of engaging and providing value to the customer different points along that journey then you want to break down those silos so that you can be provide a richer experience to the customer wherever they are on the journey I got that right yeah absolutely so it's another big mistake when I talk about silos people think about what am I gonna push to the customer push to the customer and internally as you think away a lot of you know companies are organized they're organized around products so of course those silos within companies want to push whatever they think the customer should have however the customer is the one that's really in charge and the customer doesn't care about your silos they care about the relationship they have with you all right so and whether achieves the outcome rather than uh facilitates and provides a fidelity or to the outcome that they seek yeah so just imagine how terrible would be if through your segmentation you've decided that you know Peter you're a high-value customer I want to sell you lots of stuff and I want to I want to cross sell you something but if in the context of you being on my page around how you cancel my service with me okay flashing you across that lad that's not going to go over very well that's not going to make you more inclined to stay with me now however you may annoy the hell out of me quite frankly if I understood the context and knew that's the right message for you is a retention proposal well then all of a sudden you start to drive improved relevance to the customer which will in turn drive improve success with the customer I mean we you know we're having our user conference in a couple of days June 36 there's pega world and you know we've got some great mainstage speakers and one of the one of the fabulous stories from last year was around house sprint okay was able to across channels drive improved retention okay why because they actually took that journey approach they understood where their customers were the context of what was happening when a customer might be at risk of leaving okay and be able to provide with the right next best action an offer to ensure that that customer stayed with the organization and they've achieved tremendous success as a result of that and this year we're excited about other customers like anthem telling the story around how they're going to drive customer improvement and customer engagement once again by understanding the customer journey the outcomes the customers are trying to achieve and bringing the right message driven by the data in the right time through the right next action so many years ago I was I have a friend who's a Business School professor and I was discussing the adoption of very complex high-value transaction operational and applications like si P and then as we were having this conversation he kind of stopped and he said so you're telling me your customers were actually willing to pour concrete in their business so hagit none of ecosystems nonetheless provides applications provides a platform provides development tools how are you ensuring that your customers aren't pouring concrete on their business when they adopt peg systems well a lot of it has to deal with with a confluence of a bunch of technologies one core to our product is the ability to build for change so all of our products all of our products are built on a no code platform okay so citizen developers were able to actually take control of their applications make changes of course working with IT ok to ensure that they're well integrated with the systems and and things are well designed but we make it very very easy to build an application and then change that application however what's also critically important is to recognize where it is you need to change so pega has invested very heavily in robotics okay and one of the robots that we bring to market is one that captures the metadata of your users keystrokes as they're engaging okay so this is robotic process automation music no robotic process automation is is is a different type of organism this particular robot we call workforce intelligence and Workforce Intelligence captures the metadata of you users keystrokes throws it up to the cloud where AI engine understands the customer journeys that are happening oh this particular user is opening a new account oh now they're changing an address so on and so forth it sees how your users are engaging with technology and honestly how your technology is engaging with users now today what happens is is that the system will generate report that will show you oh we see this is an area for improved automation because we know what your people learn we can tell you that the ROI from implementing this automation will be X the next one is Sierra next one so we've actually prioritizes for you it gives you a report to prioritize for you the areas where you should change to be able to improve the overall experience now as I turn that into practical things that might be for example suggesting what the next sprint is yes very much so that is what's real today let me take you on a journey of the art of the possible now let me tell you what's around the call no I won't go you won't go well let me take you anyway what's net what's around the corner is the ability for us to generate self optimizing applications so today ok will give you a report telling you what your low-hanging fruit is how about if I also asked you hey do you want us to build test it and deploy it for you do you want us to put an RPA bot here a robotic desktop automation there may be a little DPM automation here that's around the corner and it's actually real today in some of our applications it's real today in our applications around retention upsell cross-sell and end-to-end collections and we're driving it more and more into more of our solutions so this is an incredibly exciting time because not only we able to help customers achieve their digital journey but we're also helping them achieve the incremental improvements that frankly you always have to have to implement because we live in a world with no status quo so you always have to be ready for change no that's very true and the just super clear the whole notion of as you said the citizen programmer means we're not working down in primitives we're working very very close to the way the business thinks about problems right yeah so as we think about building an application it's kind of like the manufacturing of software well the manufacturing of software is the only type of manufacturing yet to benefit from CAD cam so our development environment which we call directly capturing objectives is actually incredibly business friendly using metaphors that are familiar to the business you do not write code in fact if you're writing code when you're delivering a Pegasus you are doing it wrong so the citizen developer the the technically savvy business person is able to very very quickly master the capabilities of how to use a pega system and honestly how to build and maintain their own applications so that's how we make it easy to implement change you we're trying to break out of this paradigm where whenever you want to implement something that's a change you've got to go and hire somebody to come in and do a walk through that write a requirement document okay and then throw it over the fence to IT to translate something in Microsoft Word into a language computers can understand I mean that's been the paradigm for the last 60 years we think there's a better way and and that's what our platform is really focused on driving that better way excellent all right we have to stop there William oh thank you Peter it's been a great conversation went very very very fast all right so Leon trifler global customer success SVP pega systems on Peter Burris this has been another cube conversation Leon great thanks very much thank you Peter [Music]