Pegasystems Executive Discusses Leadership in RTIM

Many brands have come to understand that interacting with customers throughout their journeys has positive consequences: reduced churn, improved sales, greater advocacy. The reason is clear. Customers want to be recognized as individuals, and when brands can reach out to customers with relevant messages, those customers feel a deeper emotional connection.    
 
To get a closer look at the work Pegasystems has been doing in this area, Loyalty360 spoke with Vince Jeffs, Senior Director of Product Strategy for the company. A veteran of the customer relationship industry, his background is in martech, the intersection of marketing and technology. He draws on this expertise to lead Pegasystems in directions that are at once tech-savvy and attuned to the wants and needs of today’s consumer.
 
Jeffs provided an overview of his organization. He said, “We are about digital process automation and one-to-one customer engagement, and we put those two together very often in areas like customer service, customer experience management, and marketing technology. On the digital process automation side, we’re helping organizations get work done, often through case management. On the one-to-one engagement side, we’re helping them make decisions.”
 
Pegasystems recently received the top score in the Strategy and Current Offering categories in “The Forrester Wave: Real-Time Interaction Management” report. Asked about this, Jeffs replied, “We’re pushing the envelope away from functions and more to the customer journey. When consumers (or if you’re B2B, the companies) that you’re in contact with are interacting with you, they’re getting a meaningful, coherent experience in that interaction, regardless of the channel.”
 
Jeffs emphasized that this holistic approach takes into account the complexities of the customer journey. Brands need to ensure that their interactions with a consumer are appropriate to the particular stage that consumer finds herself in the customer journey (e.g., just becoming aware of a brand, making a first-time purchase, etc.).
 
The Pegasystems approach accounts for the less-than-favorable situations brands might find themselves in with regard to customer interaction. Jeffs said, “When you’re in a scenario where attrition is likely (or it seems to be likely) that you’re able to jump on top of those, figure it out before it happens, mitigate it as its happening, come up with great propositions to keep that customer loyal.”
 
Asked what accounts for Pegasystems’ high rankings by Forrester Wave and others, Jeffs replied, “First and foremost, it’s that we really do have one brain that does the arbitration across all these interactions that I talked about, that come in from service or marketing, throughout the journey. We don’t have multiple products. We didn’t acquire multiple products and try to put them together. We built a brain that was designed as a real-time brain, from the get-go.”
 
Loyalty360 asked what plans Pegasystems has in store for 2019 and beyond. Jeffs indicated that the immediate future will see the brand sharing and spreading its RTIM solution. “We knew we had a product that was leading,” Jeffs said, “but we needed to have this type of validation, and [The Forrester Wave recognition] really provides it. This is clear validation that we’ve got something here that’s worth sharing.” 
 
Clearly, if the company has been recognized by Forrester, then Pegasystems is doing something right. We recommend paying attention to what it does going forward. We expect that brands that do so will have an excellent benchmark by which they can gauge themselves.
 

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