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This paper is intended for customer service professionals who are considering the next
CRM application for their enterprises. It compares two popular solutions, Pegasystems
Pega Customer Service and Salesforce.coms Service Cloud, across five areas of
functionality essential to meeting the complex customer service needs of the enterprise.
WHITEPAPER
INTRODUCTION
As a customer service professional, you understand how the industrys landscape is evolving. Consumer
expectations are rising. Customers expect personal, expeditious and trustworthy service, no matter when or
how they contact your organization. Customers who receive consistent and relevant experiences that deliver on
their needs and preferences are more likely to remain loyal.1 If theyre dissatisfied, its easier than ever for them
to take their business elsewhere and to share their negative experience with others via their social networks.
Aging, legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software simply cant keep up with the demands of
this new generation of customers.
Whether youre responsible for delivering the overall customer journey, or specifically focused on overseeing
operations within your customer service organization, you recognize the need to meet your customer demands
while at the same time increasing employee productivity and managing costs. Your organization depends on
strong, enterprise-grade CRM software to strike this critical balance, now and in the future.
To be successful in complex, global enterprises, customer service applications must be able to deliver in
five areas2:
1. Connecting the end-to-end customer journey, seamlessly and consistently across every channel
2. Increasing employee productivity by guiding employees and streamlining systems
3. Anticipating customer needs and delivering real-time personalized service
4. Managing the complexity of a global enterprise to simplify customer and employee experiences
5. Delivering long-term value by effectively keeping up with changing customer needs
The gap between the promise of legacy CRM systems and the value they actually deliver is significant, and that
the gap is growing even larger as the pace of change accelerates. Salesforce.com (Salesforce) pioneered the
use of cloud computing for sales force automation applications.3 Its customer service application, Salesforce
Service Cloud (Service Cloud), is reported to be effective at capturing and tracking contact information and
interaction history. These capabilities have allowed Salesforce to rapidly grow its Service Cloud business,
especially in the small-to-medium business (SMB) market.4
Pegasystems has helped complex, global enterprises deliver better customer experiences. Buyers and
independent analysts suggest, however, that Service Cloud lacks many of the core capabilities required to meet
the customer service needs of these larger enterprises. These include the ability to deliver on-premises or in
cloud deployments. It also includes the ability to connect multiple disparate systems into one platform, and
the ability to provide the sort of real-time analysis and intelligent guidance of back and mid-office processes
that comes from dynamic case management and real-time decisioning. This often results in unexpected
maintenance complexities and a higher-than-predicted total cost of ownership.5
Pegasystems has helped complex, global enterprises deliver better customer experiences.
Choosing the right customer service solution starts with understanding your challenges and goals, and selecting
an application that will best support the complexity and scale of your organization and infrastructure. This can
be an especially difficult task for large, complex organizations where making the wrong choice can have longterm, unwelcome effects.
This paper examines the five areas listed above to compare Pega Customer Service and Service Clouds ability
to deliver world-class service in a complex environment.
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AUTOMATION
Pega Customer Service automates routine tasks to limit unnecessary human intervention. For example,
it updates multiple source systems simultaneously, checks for fraud, retrieves pertinent transactional
information, executes complex calculations, issues automated surveys, initiates processes on external systems,
captures audit history and drives fulfillment requests through the back office. Pega Customer Service makes
real-time decisions based on business rules and analytical models to ensure a conversation can be resolved
expeditiously without the need for a supervisor. It will remove the burden on the service representative to do
such things as determine offer eligibility or recommend a retention or collection plan.
Singapore-based OCBC is ranked by Bloomberg as one of the worlds strongest banks with a global network
of more than 500 branches.15 Using Pega Customer Service, the bank was able to embed and automate its
150 account opening tasks into a seamless onboarding experience that enables OCBC staff to focus on the
customer, and not on filling out forms. As a result, the bank has seen a 40% increase in customer satisfaction
versus its competitors.16
With Pega, the bank has seen a 40% increase in customer satisfaction.
Service Cloud provides some limited support for automation through the use of configurable triggers capable of
handling simple workflows and reminders17 which industry analysts do not, as previously noted, regard as best
of breed for Business Process Management or Dynamic Case Management. When it comes to meeting the less
straightforward requirements of a larger customer service organization, Service Cloud requires either looking
to find an entry-level solution in the app exchange, or manual coding of business logic in Apex. Since process
or logic changes must often be managed by programmers or IT, one can assume that requirements delivery
lags behind business needs resulting in more manual activities and extended agent training. To preserve cloud
resources, Salesforces governors place numerous limits on workflows and process management, many of
which fall well within the range of what large enterprises require to manage their complex needs.18
While sales of Service Cloud have been strong, thanks to industry leading investment in marketing and
sales, some larger enterprises that initially deployed Service Cloud have subsequently asked Pega to replace
or augment19 Salesforces solution after discovering the lack of automation capabilities. In one example, a
European wealth and brokerage firm needed to handle client service requests of high value investors, such
as trade resolutions and trade splits. Despite trying to extend Service Cloud with a team of developers, the
company was still relying upon emails, spreadsheets, other back end systems, and manual work to manage
client incidents. They switched to Pega to better map their processes and ensure each customer inquiry was
routed and owned appropriately by their employees.20
Despite trying to extend Service Cloud with a team of developers, the company was still
relying on manual work.
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INTELLIGENT GUIDANCE
Pega Customer Service automates customer service flows, but also intelligently guides work that requires
flexibility and human judgment. It leverages its industry-leading business rules and next-best-action analytics
to anticipate what each customer needs, based on the context. For example, leveraging data delivered through
integration with a telephony system and merged with data from core transaction systems, Pega Customer
Service will queue up relevant tasks, screens, knowledge, scripts and data for the service representative to
leverage on a particular call. This capability has helped UnitedHealth Group reduce training time of more than
5000 agents by 75%.21
At Kaiser Permanente, a top U.S. healthcare provider recognized for its customer service excellence22, customer
service reps were spending 60% of their time navigating between eleven backend systems. Pega Customer
Service drove its First Contact Resolution up to over 90%, and drove down Average Handle Times by 20%.23
Pega drove First Contact Resolution up to over 90%, and drove down Average Handle
Times by 20%.
During a customer interaction, Pega Customer Service continually suggests the proper actions to take,
guiding agents step-by-step to deliver a personalized experience. Recognizing that not all customers merit
equal treatment, Pega Customer Service can dynamically adjust service levels and recommend offers based
on customer lifetime value. Pega Customer Service can lead service representatives through complicated
inquiries that require multiple steps and may require multiple departments to work together. At Royal Bank of
Canada, Pega Customer Service enabled the bank to reduce average request resolution times from 5 days to 30
minutes, and dropped most of its staffs training time to zero.24
Like Pega, Service Cloud is able to suggest and guide agents to relevant knowledge articles and content.
However, its documentation does not describe how Service Cloud can suggest tasks or recommend actions
continually throughout the customer interaction.
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Salesforce has capabilities for predictive intelligence, but those capabilities are native to the Salesforce
Marketing Clouds messaging platform25 built from a separately acquired technology stack designed originally
for web recommendations.26 This capability is currently lacking in Service Cloud.27 Like Pega Customer Service,
Service Cloud has capabilities for agent collaboration, mobile and knowledge management, but there seems
to be no public case studies or documentation of inline real-time predictive analytics guidance within Service
Cloud.28 While the promise of Salesforces Analytics Cloud may address that gap in time, Service Cloud currently
lacks sophisticated predictive analytics. Customers seeking data warehousing, data mining, online analytical
processing or predictive analytics need to procure third-party solutions from AppExchange or elsewhere.29
MANAGE COMPLEXITY
In large service organizations even the simplest request requires the orchestration of complex processes and
decisions. Service representatives must handle multiple products, access numerous systems and keep current
on a large volume of policies and procedures that change on a continuous basis. Enterprise-grade customer
service applications must scale to handle millions of transactions per month. It must take into account regional
variances and exceptions. And it must integrate into an already burgeoning technology ecosystem with multiple
vendors and legacy systems.
The core Pega platform contains the capabilities and architecture to help businesses manage this complexity.
It is the platform on which our applicationsincluding Pega Customer Serviceare built. Pega emphasized the
importance of business rules processing, direct model-driven development, and predictive analytics well before
competitors.30 Our platform and applications support a wide range of business behaviors, from orchestrating
prescriptive and controlled processes to managing very dynamic and ad hoc knowledge work.31
Pegas patented architecture32 is designed to enable the re-use and specialization of common policies and
procedures into multiple business units, channels, geographies, and customer segments. Pegasystems and its
clients call this a Situational Layer Cake.33 At insurer AIG, Pega manages the global complexities of end-to-end
claim processes in a single application, enabling more than 100,000 claims professionals across 250+ contact
centers in 80 countries. Despite handling more than 40 million claims each year, theyve achieved a 20-30%
reduction in cycle times for higher frequency claims since implementing Pega applications.34
This focus on managing the complexity of global organizations reflects Pegasystems well-publicized
commitment to exclusive support of large enterprises.35 Pega offers cloud and on-premises deployments, and
provides customers a mix of licensing models including term, perpetual and subscription-based models. Pega
lets clients extract business logic and proprietary data from their deployments at any time, whether in the cloud
or on-premises.
Since implementing Pega, the company achieved a 20-30% reduction in cycle times.
In contrast, Salesforce splits its focus between the enterprise and SMB markets36 and is a cloud-only offering
licensed via subscription-based pricing. Salesforce lacks some of the architecture capabilities that are essential
to managing the complexity of a global enterprise. Extracting business logic and customer data from Service
Cloud requires additional services and fees. As such, while Salesforce has steadily taken market share away
from legacy CRM vendors, it has not always been successful in large, complex contact center deployments.37
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A major European Communications provider was forced to abandon a planned implementation of Service
Cloud, once they realized that Service Cloud could not deliver the level of support they needed for complex
inquiries such as customer moves. This resulted in roughly 15 million in unrealized cost-cutting measures.38
In another case, a customer-service outsourcer serving the Life Sciences industry licensed and implemented
Pega Customer Service to augment their Salesforce.com solution. Service Cloud alone could not manage
complex processes such as sending out samples to physicians, handling adverse events case processing,
providing patient assistance programs, and patient adherence.39
Service Cloud could not deliver the level of support needed for complex inquiries.
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CONCLUSION
This comparison presented five areas critical to any decision-maker who must choose CRM software to power
the customer service within their large organization.
To remain competitive, organizations need to move at the speed of customers, and they need systems and
software to support that flexibility. Pega has proven itself capable of delivering the business agility required
to evolve your CRM. Meanwhile, as industry observers have noted: Salesforce.com was founded by an Oracle
sales guy who set out to fix the ills of expensive, inflexible corporate software and is now becoming the very
thing that it battled.43
If youre a large enterprise considering your next CRM application for your customer service
organization, make sure you ask these questions:
How does the application help connect customers to the back-office operations needed to get things done on
their behalf?
What is the specific improvement in employee productivity that you would estimate being able to deliver
by automating repetitive manual tasks, integrating with other systems and suggesting actions to take for
customers?
How does the application help predict and adapt to customer needs, even before they contact us?
To what extent does the application manage frequently changing, complex service inquiries and cases across
products and geographies? Can you demonstrate this in a proof of concept?
How will you orchestrate your existing infrastructure, while evolving to meet the needs of your customers
tomorrow?
May we speak to a customer reference who can talk about how your application has connected multiple,
disparate systems, across multiple countries and geographies, and created a seamless integration?
Visit pega.com/service to learn more about how Pega Customer Service can help you keep service at the heart
of your organization.
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END NOTES
1
These criteria were assembled from over 200 publicly released Request For Proposal documents submitted by Global 2000
organizations to Pegasystems in 2014.
Why Salesforce.com Has Passed Its Prime, Peter Cohan; Forbes, Feb 2015.
Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, Michael Maoz; Gartner, 2014.
Channel Management: Core to Your Customer Service Strategy, Kate Leggett, Fraser Tibbetts, Forrester.
The Forrester WaveTM: Dynamic Case Management, Q1 2014, Craig Le Clair, Derek Miers; Forrester.
Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms, Ray Valdes, Van L. Baker, Richard Marshall, Jason Wong;
Gartner, 2014.
10
Critical Capabilities for Case Management Frameworks, Janelle B. Hill, Kenneth Chin, Rob Dunie; Gartner, 2014.
11
12
Choose The Right Customer Service Solution For Your Business, Ian Jacobs, Kate Leggett; Forrester, 2014.
13
Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites, 2014, Gartner, and The Forrester WaveTM: Dynamic
Case Management, Q1 2014, Forrester.
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Kaiser Permanente Again Ranks Highest In J.D. Power Member Satisfaction Survey, March 2014.
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites, Teresa Jones, W. Roy Schulte, Michele Cantara;
Gartner, 2014.
31
Critical Capabilities for Case Management Frameworks, Janelle B. Hill, Kenneth Chin, Rob Dunie; Gartner, 2014,
32
Method and apparatus for digital data processing with mutable inheritance, Justia Patents.
33
34
35
36
37
Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, Michael Maoz; Gartner, 2014.
38
39
Taken from customer interviews and win-loss analyses conducted by Pega in November, 2014
40
The Forrester Wave: Customer Service Solutions For Enterprise Organizations, Q2 2014, Kate Leggett; Forrester.
41
A Productivity Comparison of Pegasystems Pega 7 versus Java Enterprise Edition Custom Build, Cap Gemini, 2014.
42
43
Why Salesforce.com Has Passed Its Prime, Peter Cohan; Forbes, Feb 2015.
Salesforce.com, SalesforceExactTarget and Social Marketing Cloud are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.
com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Pega and Pegasystems are registered trademarks of Pegasystems Inc. and
Pegasystems owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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ABOUT PEGASYSTEMS
Pegasystems develops strategic applications for sales, marketing, service
and operations. Pegas applications streamline critical business operations,
connect enterprises to their customers seamlessly in real-time across
channels, and adapt to meet rapidly changing requirements. Pegas
Global 500 customers include the worlds largest and most sophisticated
enterprises. Pegas applications, available in the cloud or on-premises, are
built on its unified Pega 7 platform, which uses visual tools to easily extend
and change applications to meet clients strategic business needs. Pegas
clients report that Pega gives them the fastest time to value, extremely rapid
deployment, efficient re-use and global scale. For more information, please
visit us at www.pega.com.