 Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation from our beautiful studios here in Palo Alto, California. Another great conversation today. We're here with Leon Truffler, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Success at one of my favorite technology companies over the years, PEGA Systems. Leon, welcome to theCUBE. Well, glad to be here, Peter. Thank you very much for having me. Now Leon, PEGA has had a great track record over a number of years of helping customers build relatively complex applications in domains like CRM, et cetera. But where is PEGA today? What have you guys been up to most recently? Well, I think that 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 happens to be the space that I think is most exciting 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 of concepts so you agree where you think this might end up. So we believe pretty strongly that there is a difference between a business and a digital business and that difference is how a business uses its data, how it formulates its data into assets. And that has significant implications because it suggests that the process of digitally transforming is in fact the process of re-institutionalizing 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 involved? Well, I'm going to throw a level of context around that. Absolutely, the data's essential. It's essential to understand your customer. But that is the point. 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 success. So yeah, we would agree. And by the way, so we would say that it is about applying data to the processes of creating and sustaining your customer. But you're absolutely right. We're not just doing digital transformation on our operations, 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 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 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 trying 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 sell them lots of stuff. But if they're on your webpage around how to cancel their service with you, offering them a cross-sell opportunity is inappropriate. It's 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. And so context matters. So let me run another concept by you then. So as for a number of years, I've talked about the difference between what we call offer response fulfill marketing where the business is projecting an offer and expecting someone to 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 customer's outcome is and hopefully find a way to match to their journey, their success parameters and engage them to help them achieve their success. Is that kind of what we're talking about? Is this the match engage orientation? It is, except that our perspective is, is that especially in digital channels, 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 going to be quick but it's also going to be value added to them. Otherwise, they'll just assume 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 customer's need but also provide visibility into their future, how to get to the outcome and whatnot. 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 going to tell you the three biggest mistakes that people make and how Peggy 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 the context of a transaction. Just doing a 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 with the customer. 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 are the three problems. So if we 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 have to think about? Not quite, 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 they go through the journey. As they go through the journey. Like if I wanted to open a checking account with a digital bank, I'd start with my mobile device. Don't have enough time to finish it, get into the office, want to continue the application on your website. 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 end to end fluid seamless experience. So let me put that in very specific terms. If the context of the engagement is bound inside a particular channel, then you can't track what the customer's doing. If the state, you can't track what the customer's doing across different channels. Yes, exactly. So it's 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 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 attribute 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 at different points along that journey, then you want to break down those silos so that you can provide a richer experience to the customer wherever they are on the journey. Have I got that right? Yeah, absolutely. So another big mistake when I talk about silos, people think about what am I going to push to the customer, push to the customer. And internally, as you think away, a lot of 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. And what if 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? And whether or not it achieves the outcome or whether or not it facilitates and provides a fidelity to the outcome that they seek. Yeah, so just imagine how terrible it would be if through your segmentation, you've decided that, Peter, you're a high value customer. I want to sell you lots of stuff and 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 a cross sell ad, that's not going to go over very well. That's not going to make you more inclined to stay with me. However. You may annoy the hell out of me, quite frankly. If I understood the context and knew that 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 improved success with the customer. I mean, we're having our user conference in a couple of days, June 36th is Pegaworld. And we've got some great main state speakers and one of the fabulous stories from last year was around how 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 had a friend who's a business school professor and I was discussing the adoption of very complex high value transaction operation oriented applications like SAP. And as we were having this conversation, he kind of stopped and he said, so you're telling me your customers are actually willing to pour concrete in their business? So PEGA systems 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 PEGA systems? Well, a lot of it has to deal 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 are able to actually take control of their applications, make changes, of course, working with IT to ensure that they're well integrated with the systems 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 user's keystrokes as they're engaging. Okay, with those- This is robotic process automation. Can you say robots? No, robotic process automation is a different type of robot. This particular robot we call workforce intelligence. And workforce intelligence captures the metadata of your user's keystrokes, throws it up to the cloud where our AI engine understands the customer journeys that are happening. Oh, this particular user is opening a new account. 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 here, next one's here. So it actually prioritizes for you. It gives you a report to prioritize for you. The area is 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 corner. No, I won't go. You won't go? Well, let me take you anyway. What's around the corner is the ability for us to generate self-optimizing applications. So today, okay, we'll give you a report telling you where 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? Maybe a little BPM automation here? That's around the corner. And it's actually real today in some of our applications. Where 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 are 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 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 just to be clear, the whole notion of low-code as you said, the citizen programmer means we're not working down in primitives. We're working very, very close to the way that business thinks about problems, right? 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 CADCAM. 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 Pegasolution, you are doing it wrong. So the citizen developer, the technically savvy business person is able to very, very quickly master the capabilities of how to use a Pegasystem and honestly how to build and maintain their own applications. So that's how we make it easy to implement change. 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 walkthrough, then 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 that's what our platform is really focused on driving, that better way. Excellent, all right. We have to stop there, Liam. Oh, thank you, Peter. It's been a great conversation, very, very fast. All right, so Leon Treffler, global customer success SVP at Pegasystems. I'm Peter Burris. This has been another CUBE Conversation. Leon, great. Thanks very much. Thank you, Peter.