In my first look at Pegaworld 2019, I reported that customer engagement now forms 50 percent of Pega’s business. I spoke with three international Pega clients who are using elements of the Pega Infinity suite for customer-related decisioning.
VodafoneZiggo is a Netherlands brand created by the merger of mobile telecoms vendor Vodafone with Ziggo, the country’s leading cable services provider. I spoke with Nicole Verburg, director of customer value management, and Bert Hendriks, capability manager.
NV: The decision to choose Pega was already taken before I joined, almost three years ago. I joined the Ziggo side before the merger. The decision was taken by the Vodafone group. We were happy to adopt that as well, even though we don’t have to; we are free to choose whatever we like. We felt Pega was the best central decisioning capability hub in the market. We’re using Pega Marketing only. We launched it October last year at the Ziggo site.
BH: The Pega Marketing capability was positioned from the beginning of the joint venture as one of the projects which was crucial to merge the two companies. From the beginning it was clear that it was to facilitate communicating across the brands.
NV: On the Ziggo side, cross-sell is important — selling Vodafone to Ziggo customers. If the customer already has Ziggo and Vodafone, we try to deep sell [add extra services]. Our objective was to become more data-driven and customer first. We used to have more of a customer acquisition focus, but now it’s more about looking after the base and reducing churn. It’s all about relevancy, because the customer changes. So we needed a tool to help us with 1:1 marketing. That was my expectation of Pega, to support us with our transition towards data-driven 1:1 marketing.
BH: Pega works differently [from other marketing solutions] because it’s a customer-driven application. You build your customer strategy, run your customer base against it, and then you get your next-best-actions which are relevant for every specific customer. With IBM Unica, for example, you can do advanced things, but the marketer has to build the actual flows; it then spits out an SQL statement, which is then propagated to whatever application feeds it to the customer. The real advanced 1:1 marketing, I don’t see it.
NV: From segments to real 1:1, that’s the way we’re moving.
BH: You listen to all your channels, and react to that. It’s a very human way of communicating with customers, and Pega Marketing helps you to do that.
NV: The customer is in the lead. It’s a different way of doing marketing.
FordDirect is a joint venture between Ford Motor Company and Ford and Lincoln dealers to provide digital marketing and advertising services. I spoke with Robert Skinner, VP of digital strategy and marketing technologies, and one of the 2019 DX Heroes.
RS: As we bring Pega into our mix and look at truly omnichannel 1:1 messaging, we have the same issues everybody else does in taking that old direct, known consumer model, and taking the anonymized advertising and paid media models, and trying to center around decisioning and next-best-action so regardless of channel, deliver the right message to the consumer.
As we saw more and more sophistication required to be able to more efficiently spend digital dollars for the dealer, it was clear that we needed to up the game in terms of technology to be able to support the complexity of the messaging. We are data rich, because we’re integrated with Ford in many ways, we have first-party data from the dealers, so we saw Pega as a tool Ford was starting to lean into themselves as part of their decisioning, and for the dealers we saw we needed something at this level.
We probably got ahead of ourselves in building the data lake, without the ability to action the data, so we’re playing catch up with that. It was this next layer of capability to action the data that really drove us towards this. When I looked at all the channels we’re communicating to the consumer in, with all this rich data underneath, I always saw the orchestration engine as being the missing piece.
We’re starting on the acquisition side, so we’re using Pega’s paid media tool and we’re doing some things around audience optimization. Normally with Pega, it’s the BPM, then it’s CRM, then it’s email, and we’re coming the other way around at it; we’re going to literally back into that, because we see ourselves adding those channels to it. Our team’s eyes are opening up to all those other possibilities of business automation. so I think we’ll see us going back into the historical business of Pega.
Historically, British Telecom, now BT Plc, owned landline telecoms in the U.K.. Since 2016, it has owned EE, the largest mobile network operator in the U.K., itself created by a merger of T-Mobile and Orange. S.A. I spoke with Richard Tate, BT’s customer data and decisioning director.
RT: BT is just launching Pega. Historically we’ve used Oracle RTD [Real-Time Decisions], but as part of moving to a single stack across BT and EE, Pega was one of the first combined technology solutions we decided to buy. The EE story starts back in 2007. One of the biggest issues was keeping churn low, we wanted a solution that would help us make the best offer to customers to keep them on the network, so we took Chordiant as it was back then, and Chordiant was bought by Pega in 2010.
There was a beauty contest, but because of the success we’d had with Pega on the EE brand, and the success stories which could be shared with the BT brand, Pega was ultimately selected, and over the past 12 to 18 months we’ve been on the journey of migrating BT from Oracle over to Pega.
What we liked about Pega is the adaptive stuff, where it’s constantly learning, whereas RTD is more business rule driven. We wanted to move from that broad segmentation to a more 1:1 offer.
Pega wouldn’t be in the two brands if we hadn’t seen the success we had with the EE brand over 12 years. The stuff we saw on the main stage yesterday about microjourneys is definitely where we are going. The more granular you can get with the customer journey, the happier the customer will ultimately be. You’re reducing time, you’re reducing the friction, and you’re being more personal and more proactive. We want to be a leader in that, if we can be.
Pega covered DMN’s expenses to attend Pegaworld.
