The integration was enabled in a recent update of CentrePal's SaaS product for small-scale customer service teams to full-scale contact centres, providing exceptional new possibilities to businesses who work within the Microsoft ecosystem. The new integrations can be deployed within hours.

What the integration means is all agents can handle customer queries with greater efficiency, and collaborate with internal departments, more seamlessly than ever before. Agents will receive screen pops displaying all contact information for the person they are speaking with, in real-time, while being able to access all relevant contact data, notes and tasks.

In practical terms, your customers will experience a new depth of personalised service which means they will never have to repeat themselves. They will experience fewer transfers, experience fewer follow-up calls, and enjoy a higher first-call resolution rate.

Agents will provide a superior customer experience while also reducing after-call work and ensuring high-quality data recording.

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Jude Don, APAC partner manager, CentrePal said the added functionalities delivered by the Microsoft Dynamic 365 integration made this milestone an important one for the company.

“We are excited to be able to deliver this integration to our existing customers and believe this will only better position CentrePal in the market,” he said.

“The integration with Microsoft Dynamic 365 will make CentrePal even more powerful for businesses who work within the Microsoft ecosystem and we believe it will help to reduce average handling times, drive higher rates of first call resolution and unlock greater efficiencies between internal departments.
“All of this creates greater customer experience outcomes, but also far better cost efficiencies for the businesses who roll out CentrePal.”

Businesses often make significant investments in CRM technology, but rarely extract the maximum value from them because of failed or clunky integrations with their contact centre solutions, Don said.

“This integration is easily deployed and seamless,” he said.

“At CentrePal, our team works hard to ensure that all our clients are able to leverage the most from their investment in our product, as well as existing investments they have made in other areas of their business.

“A CRM is one of the most important parts of a modern-day business and we truly believe that CentrePal helps ensure our clients extract maximum value from their systems.

“Those working within the Microsoft ecosystem stand to save time and money with CentrePal, all whilst delivering exceptional customer service.”

Salesforce+ content is designed to help every role, industry, and line of business succeed in the digital-first work anywhere world. In a nutshell, Salesforce+ brings the magic of Dreamforce - prior to COVID-19, the in-person annual Salesforce conference held in Silicon Valley each year.

Now you can receive content anywhere across the globe from luminary speakers, groundbreaking innovators, and Trailblazer success stories.

Salesforce+ includes original series from Salesforce Studios, podcasts, live experiences and other programming.

“Over the last 18 months, we've had to reimagine how to succeed in the new digital-first world. We reimagined our events, shifting them to all-digital brand experiences and introduced new, relevant original content," said Sarah Franklin, President and Chief Marketing Officer, Salesforce. "We’re not going back, we’re creating the future now. Just as brands like Disney, Netflix and Peloton have done with streaming services for consumers, Salesforce+ is providing an always-on, business media platform that builds trusted relationships with customers and a sense of belonging for the business community.”

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The current Salesforce+ lineup features

• “Leading Through Change” launched in March 2020 as a weekly program focusing on how business leaders were dealing with the global pandemic. With more than 60 episodes, the series has had more than 700 million views and won the 2021 Content Marketing Award for Best Content Marketing Program
• “Connections” showcases some of the most innovative marketers from companies like IBM, Levi’s, and GoFundMe. The COVID-19 pandemic flipped marketing on its head and made long-standing playbooks and tactics obsolete. Salesforce President and CMO Sarah Franklin talks with some of the best and brightest marketing minds about how they are connecting with their audiences in a whole new way.
• “The Inflection Point” features CEOs from leading brands sharing how their personal backstories, professional influences and values inform their leadership. Hosted by Salesforce executive vice president Monica Langley, who spent 27 years as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, the series takes an inside look at how the chief executives of companies, including Coca-Cola, PayPal, Ford, and Workday, became who they are today.
• "Boss Talks” is a career advice series hosted by Salesforce’s Chief Philanthropy Officer Ebony Beckwith and designed to inspire professional growth. In conversations with the likes of NFL player Kelvin Beachum Jr. and Mona Monica Kattan of Huda Beauty, Beckwith dives into topics such as dealing with imposter syndrome and unlocking workplace authenticity.
• “Simply Put” is a short-form video series hosted by Emmanuel Acho that makes complex business problems easy to understand, focusing on topics like how to build an e-commerce business and how to grow digital sales.

In the coming months, Salesforce+ will debut more original content featuring leaders in fields like sales and service, as well as a new series on how Trailblazers from underrepresented communities are re-skilling to find new career opportunities and create generational wealth.

Salesforce+ will be made available to the world at the time the Dreamforce conference arrives in September. Salesforce will use Salesforce+ to help participants around the globe personalise their experience with four broadcast channels, including the best of Dreamforce, Trailblazer channel, customer 360 channel, and Industries channel.

Those who register for Dreamforce will get first access to Salesforce+.

iTWire expects pricing information and more details to be released in the lead up to Dreamforce, running on September 21-23. Registration is free.

According to Gartner, worldwide enterprise application software revenue remains both the largest and the fastest growing enterprise application software category, totalling more than $193.6 billion in 2018, a 12.5% increase from 2017 revenue of $172.1 billion – with CRM making up almost a quarter of that revenue.

Approximately 72.9% of CRM spending was on software as a service in 2018, which Gartner says is expected to grow to 75% of total CRM software spending in 2019, “with agility and flexibility being big drivers, along with the requirement for remote and mobile users”.

“Cloud growth has dropped slightly in 2018 but remains strong at 20% and significantly above the overall growth rate of 15.6% for CRM,” said Julian Poulter, senior director analyst at Gartner.

{loadposition peter}“As an early mover to the cloud, CRM software is probably seeing a gradual reduction in cloud growth rates due to high adoption.”

The Gartner report shows that the top five CRM software vendors accounted for more than 40% of the total market in 2018, while the top five vendors had very little change in ranking compared with 2017, although Microsoft climbed into fifth position, narrowly displacing Genesys.

All sub-segments of the CRM market grew by more than 13.7%, with marketing emerging as the fastest growing segment, increasing by 18.8% and representing more than 25% of the entire CRM market.

And customer service and support retains its No. 1 position, contributing 35.7% of CRM market revenue.

“To exploit the significant market opportunity, product managers in CRM application providers should double down on cloud deployments and consider adding functionality in the fast growing marketing segment,” Poulter said.

The bank's Pega-based customer engagement engine handles inbound and outbound communication with its retail customers through all channels.

It is predominantly about service messaging, he said, such as customers updating their contact details, the bank sending birthday greetings, or ensuring that contact centre agents are aware of special circumstances such as natural disasters affecting particular customers.

The engine is also used to send reminders to help customers avoid bank fees, for example by alerting them to the need to pay the balance owing on their card in the next few days so they don't incur credit fees. This is part of a program that will save customers $400 million in fees this year, said Burton.

{loadposition stephen08}The system "works very well" from the bank's perspective, he said. While Burton was unable to provide any metrics around customer engagement and retention, he did say that it has improved the NPS (net promoter score) in areas including the CBA mobile app, NetBank (internet banking), and branches.

Looking ahead, CBA wants to increase the number of real-time data feeds to the engine, including transactions (iTWire heard a similar story from HSBC Australia). That would allow better engagement and personalisation, for example by preventing reminders being sent just after customers have paid their bills.

Other possible uses include warning customers when their projected account balance is insufficient to pay a predicted bill.

It is important to avoid "creepy" behaviour, but this can be achieved at least in part by ensuring you have the customer's consent as well as rightful purpose. "These rules keep getting stronger and stronger," Burton observed.

The bank also needs to be able to explain any decision by the system, and that includes understanding choosing not to take a particular action is as much as decision as choosing to do it.

But because these decisions are being made in real time, it is necessary to keep all the data as it was used in the decision process – merely knowing the customer's account balance at the end of the day might not be sufficient.

As the amount of data used in the process increases, the storage needed to meet legislative requirements could become impossibly large, which would mean Australian banks may have to quarantine some of their customer data from AI-based processes.

Notwithstanding that potential problem, Burton suggests CBA customers can expect their communications with the bank to be increasingly personalised based on things they do and don't do, and that this will extend to additional channels through the use of technologies such as voice and natural language recognition.

Disclosure: The writer attended PegaWorld 2019 as a guest of the company.

Part of the problem was that overexposure and irrelevant messages had trained customers to ignore communications from the bank.

Another issue was that HSBC wasn't responding to important clues provided by customer transactions.

"There's no longer a place for these rude 'push' kinds of marketing," he told an audience at Pegasystems' recent conference.

{loadposition stephen08}So the bank set out to get to know its customers as individuals, continuously and dynamically tailor content to their context and preferences, and adapt to and learn from their needs.

The idea was to use Pegasystems' software to interpret on and offline events as indicators of need, identify the next best conversation to have with the customer based on those indicators, and communicate in the best channel.

This approach requires several things, including a single view of the customer (including a unified transaction history), consistent offers, and omnichannel strategies and models.

The Pega Customer Decision Hub was selected due to its AI and omnichannel capabilities, he said.

The project went live in conjunction with internet banking six months after a request for proposal, but could have been done in just three months, Abacum said.

Although the bank had plenty of ideas for deploying the technology in other areas, it chose to use it just with internet banking for a year.

In 2017, Customer Decision Hub was integrated with the branch network, the contact centre, and SMS and email messaging.

The following year brought improvements to the capability to recommend the next best actions, and 2019 has already seen the introduction of adaptive models. Integration with the HSBC mobile app should be delivered by the end of the year.

Plans for 2020 include realtime (rather than just batch) feeds from transactional systems.

The system can provide indications of a customer's propensity to churn, propensity to purchase particular products, and an estimate of their lifetime value, as well as recommending the next best action (ie, of the hundreds of messages that could be delivered to the customer, which one is likely to be the most effective).

For example, based on the available information it might trigger the display of a particular ad when the customer visits the bank's web site, send an outbound lead to their relationship manager, and – in the event they phone the bank – alert the agent to relevant matters.

There are some compliance issues in that personalised messages aren't viewed the same way as generalised messages such as those displayed in branches, but "the response from customers has been good," said Abacum.

"We know it works," he said, because of the incremental growth seen since the system was introduced. It has always been profitable, he added.

However, he noted that managers don't just want to see numbers showing that such a system is working, they want stories about how it works.

Disclosure: The writer attended PegaWorld 2019 as a guest of the company.

The San Francisco-based Salesforce made the announcement today and it will be the largest acquisition in its history, more than twice the $6.5 billion it paid for MuleSoft in 2018. Salesforce says it will officially establish its second headquarters in Seattle.

Salesforce will use the acquisition to double down on business intelligence through powerful new data visualisations. The deal is expected to escalate competition between Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which competes with Tableau through its Power BI data visualisation technology.

Industry experts across data and associated software say the deal makes sense for Salesforce and ultimately provides greater insight and options for customers.

{loadposition david08}Ray Johnson, chief data scientist at SPR, said: “Data provides the ideal mechanism for the summary and distribution of insights. But it can be confusing, and data visualisation provides a quick and concise method for making sense out of chaos. A simple line chart can convey far more information than a large table consisting of hundreds of lines of data. Making data more comprehensible is key to better decision making. The better insights, the better the decision making, increasing the potential for future growth.”

“This acquisition allows Salesforce to ultimately provide an integrated and bundled solution that customers can leverage to drive growth. Existing Tableau users could benefit from easier Salesforce integration and Salesforce users could get a well-established data visualisation platform.”

Dustin Grosse, chief marketing and strategy officer at Nintex, said: “As a Seattle-area firm, Nintex is excited to see Salesforce making an investment of this size in a strong local company and Marc Benioff announcing Seattle as Salesforce’s HQ2. This move further validates the strength of our region's technology and business talent.”

“Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau raises the bar on data analytics and visualisation for the entire CRM industry.  Microsoft has a strong Power Platform that includes Power BI, but eventually having analytics/visualisation more natively embedded within Salesforce CRM offers tremendous potential value and convenience to sellers, marketers, and general managers.”

The initial AI services supported by Pegasystems' Real-Time AI Connectors are Google DialogFlow Text Analyzer (available immediately), Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine (scheduled for 3Q19), and Amazon SageMaker (4Q19).

While Pega Customer Decision Hub already provides machine learning, decisioning, and natural language processing, Real-Time AI Connectors provide the ability to complement Pega AI with additional capabilities including new deep learning and machine vision capabilities and alternative machine learning and NLP services.

The connectors join existing APIs for OCR and speech-to-text processing that bring other capabilities into the Pega environment.

{loadposition stephen08}"We want to make it easy to plug that [capability] in," said Pegasystems vice-president of decisioning and analytics Rob Walker. While Pegasystems makes the best AI engine it can, other vendors' engines are sometimes more suitable for particular purposes.

"It's such an amazing time to be part of the global AI ecosystem that’s continually testing the limits of what great customer experience looks like," he said.

"With an open approach to our architecture, Real-Time AI Connectors help bring these advancements to our clients so they can infuse the latest AI algorithms into their proven Pega AI engine."

Pegasystems director of strategy and product marketing Vince Jeffs told iTWire that in some cases customers' data scientists could have built their models using Pega AI, but for various reasons they selected other platforms and so Pegasystems needs to accommodate that choice.

But there are some techniques such as gradient boosting and deep learning that are not part of Pega AI, and therefore interoperability with other platforms is required.

For example, deep learning can determine timing-related matters, such as how quickly customer intent decays and therefore how often the company needs to interact with the customer to keep them engaged (hopefully without alienating them).

However, deep learning requires a lot of data, and even a big bank might not have sufficient data that is relevant to a particular situation.

Commonwealth Bank head of data and decisioning strategy, retail bank, Alex Burton welcomed the announcement, telling iTWire "we're trying to put as much intelligence into Pega as possible."

"Pega will always be the central brain that coordinates everything," he added.

The financial services sector accounts for around 45-50% of Pegasystems' business in the region, vice president for APAC Luke McCormack told iTWire. In Australia, all of the Big Four banks are Pegasystems customers, along with several second-tier banks including Me Bank.

Disclosure: The writer attended PegaWorld 2019 as a guest of the company.

A Pegasystems' survey of 5000 consumers in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan found many people aren't sold on the benefits of AI, but the company is aiming to address one of their main objections

There is widespread cynicism about companies, judging by the survey results. 68% of respondents said organisations have an obligation to do what is morally right for the customer, beyond what is legally required. But 65% don’t trust that companies have their best interests at heart. Consumers do not believe businesses actually care about them or show enough empathy for their individual situations.

Just 40% of respondents agreed that AI has the potential to improve the customer service of businesses they interact with, and only 30% felt comfortable with businesses using AI to interact with them. A mere 9% said they were ‘very comfortable’ with the idea. There was also concern about machines taking peoples jobs (mentioned a third of respondents), and 27% also cited the ‘rise of the robots and enslavement of humanity’ as a concern.

{loadposition stephen08}53% of respondents thought AI can be biased (and there's a case for saying the other 47% were wrong!), and 53% felt that AI will always make decisions based on the biases of the person who created its initial instructions.

70% prefer to speak to a human than an AI system or a chatbot for customer service, and 69% are more inclined to tell the truth to a human than to an AI system. For life and death decisions, an overwhelming (if surprisingly small) 86% said they trust humans more than AI.

Only 12% agreed that AI can tell the difference between good and evil, and 56% customers don’t believe it is possible to develop machines that behave morally. Only 12% believe they have ever interacted with a machine that has shown empathy.

"Our study found that only 25% of consumers would trust a decision made by an AI system over that of a person regarding their qualification for a bank loan," said Pegasystems vice president of decisioning and analytics Rob Walker.

"Consumers likely prefer speaking to people because they have a greater degree of trust in them and believe it's possible to influence the decision, when that's far from the case. What's needed is the ability for AI systems to help companies make ethical decisions. To use the same example, in addition to a bank following regulatory processes before making an offer of a loan to an individual, it should also be able to determine whether or not it’s the right thing to do ethically.

"An important part of the evolution of artificial intelligence will be the addition of guidelines that put ethical considerations on top of machine learning. This will allow decisions to be made by AI systems within the context of customer engagement that would be seen as empathetic if made by a person.

"AI shouldn’t be the sole arbiter of empathy in any organisation and it’s not going to help customers to trust organizations overnight. However, by building a culture of empathy within a business, AI can be used as a powerful tool to help differentiate companies from their competition.”

So Pegasystems is introducing its Customer Empathy Advisor to help its customers do just that.

This new capability of Pega Customer Decision Hub is intended to help companies use AI to build more sustainable customer relationships. Increasing the level of empathy in AI-assisted conversations is expected to build more trust, loyalty, and value with each customer.

Most AI just adds more spam to people’s lives, sacrificing long-term loyalty for a few short-term sales, the company believes. For example, just because AI could likely sell a high-interest loan to a low-income family doesn’t mean it should. Customer Empathy Advisor helps operationalise empathy at scale for the mutual benefit of both parties.

Pega Customer Decision Hub analyses customer data to guide customer-facing agents and virtual assistants to take the next best action with each customer. The new Customer Empathy Advisor feature takes this analysis one step deeper by examining how empathic these recommendations are and offers a more compassionate approach – which, contrary to popular belief, is often the most profitable strategy as well, the company asserted.

This is a three-step approach.

The first step is to analyse current strategies in terms of relevance, suitability, value, context, intent, mood, etc, all from the customer's perspective. Then engagement analysts can pinpoint which actions engender the most trust from customers and which repel them farther away from the brand. A simple intuitive slider lets stakeholders adjust empathy levels andS see the impact the change has on relevant KPIs.

Step two is predicting the return on empathy – for example, is the action, offer, or suggestion likely to increase the customer’s lifetime value? Will it likely cause customer churn or increase exposure to risk? Is it deliberately misselling a product or unable to explain it?

Finally, businesses can automatically deploy these strategies through Pega Infinity, applying empathy in all marketing, sales, and customer service interactions, both on and offline, even if that means taking no action. This works at the level of individual customers, not just segmented groups.

"Most businesses are conditioned to try and squeeze every last drop of profit from each customer. But this predatory mentality distorts the fact that practicing a little empathy is not only good for the customer, it's good for business," said Pegasystems vice president, decisioning and analytics Rob Walker.

"We've always believed that the only way to win a customer's heart is to first walk a mile in their shoes. Today we're taking a step closer in this pursuit by instilling empathy in customer interactions – which is ultimately the right way to do business for everyone."

Commonwealth Bank head of data and decisioning strategy, retail bank, Alex Burton told iTWire he found the idea interesting, and one that it "aligns well with the 'should we?' language going through CBA at the moment."

Not surprisingly, the bank has no specific plans at this stage for using the newly announced product.

The Customer Empathy Advisor will be available to all Pega Customer Decision Hub clients near the end of 2019.

Disclosure: The writer attended PegaWorld 2019 as a guest of the company.

Customer service is increasingly being delivered through chat and messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, Twitter direct messaging, Apple Business Chat, and Google RCS.

But it is practically impossible to predict what will be the next big channel, especially as individuals favour particular messaging services for different purposes. And it is possible a yet to be created channel will have a major impact.

So Pega Customer Service's digital messaging capability has been designed to help future-proof customer communication regardless of channel.

{loadposition stephen08}All messaging channels are centrally managed within the application, eliminating the need to build out separate integrations with each new messaging service. Connecting all channels to a common process or service case ensures that context and data follow customers regardless of channel in order to achieve optimal customer engagement.

"Given today's pace of innovation, it’s impossible to predict every channel of communication in which consumers find value, leaving many brands overwhelmed as to how to rapidly adapt to these preference shifts," said Pegasystems senior vice-president of products Kerim Akgonul.

"That's why we start with the customer journey first. With these new messaging capabilities in Pega Customer Service, Pega clients can seamlessly deliver streamlined service processes across messaging channels and easily incorporate new channels as they emerge."

The new messaging capabilities are based on technology from In The Chat, a company that Pegasystems recently acquired. Pegasystems CTO Don Schuerman said all of the channels actually supported by In The Chat will be incorporated by the second half of 2019, and those such as WhatsApp that the company was working on at the time of acquisition will be subsequently delivered.

Pega Customer Service is part of the Pega Infinity cloud-based digital transformation suite for customer engagement and operational efficiency.

Schuerman pointed out that while Customer Service was the primary use for the new messaging capabilities, they will be part of the Pega's core platform.

In related news, two Australian companies featured in Pegasystem's 2019 customer awards.

Optus won a Business Impact award, and NAB won a Build for Change award.

Disclosure: The writer attended PegaWorld 2019 as a guest of the company, and he holds NAB shares.

There's a lot to be said for tapping the skills and enthusiasm of non-IT employees by allowing them to create the special-purpose apps they need to get their jobs done efficiently.

But experience shows that while these efforts can be very successful in the short to medium term, issues can arise. This can get worse if the apps are used by people other than the individuals who created them (and their immediate co-workers).

These issues can include security concerns, shortfalls in updating the apps, work duplication, and organisational silos.

{loadposition stephen08}So digital transformation software vendor Pegasystems has announced Enterprise Low-Code Factory to help any employee to quickly create enterprise software that complies with corporate standards.

The company says this will help organisations cultivate and scale their own home-grown community of citizen developers without sacrificing software quality, consistency, or governance.

"We have always been focused on model-driven [software]," said Pegasystems founder and chief executive Alan Trefler. "The model has become so complete that people are able to do amazing things."

Enterprise Low-Code Factory provides users with pre-defined templates that can be turned into custom apps, plus 'guardrails' that let users produce their own apps while giving IT control over their broader use.

It is already in use at certain customers, said Trefler.

"Low code" doesn't mean "no skill", so Pegasystems will provide educational resources including Pega Academy courses, video tutorials, help documents, and Pega Community articles.

The Factory's dashboard gives users quick access to the apps they use most, the apps they are building, and the ecosystem of approved apps built by others to enable better software reuse, plus links to those education resources.

As part of the Pega Infinity digital transformation suite, the Pega Platform low-code app development environment takes advantage of digital process automation, including AI and robotics. These back-end processes with Pega's customer engagement applications to enable superior customer experiences regardless of channel.

"Enterprise Low-Code Factory encompasses three decades of learning from model-driven application development so businesses can immediately roll out low code organisation-wide," said Pegasystems CTO and vice president of product marketing Don Schuerman.

"Whether you’re a businessperson, developer, or designer, you now have the potential to become a maker within your own organisation to create applications that innovate. At the same time, IT managers can rest easy knowing they can balance control and collaboration through repeatable governance processes."

Schuerman added "We provide a low-code environment for enterprises to deploy at scale" as Enterprise Low-Code Factory is easily adopted by people on the business side of the organisation while providing IT with strong governance and controls.

Enterprise Low-Code Factory is scheduled to be available by the end of Q3 2019 for Pega Platform customers with current support contracts.

Disclosure: The writer attended PegaWorld 2019 as a guest of the company.