Interaction management
Pega provides numerous capabilities for interaction management, starting with customer self-service options, and including capabilities that empower CSRs to deliver compelling and successful service experiences to customers.
Chatbots and other virtual assistants
The following table showcases the chatbot capabilities for different channels.
In the following table, the column values are as follows:
Web Messaging or Legacy Webchat
SMS/MMS
Facebook Messenger
Apple Business Chat
WhatsApp
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Pega Email Bot
Mobile Messaging SDK
Client Channel API
| Feature | | | | | | | | | API |
| Proactive chat / AI-driven offers and suggestions | • | • | |||||||
| Styling and branding configuration | • | ||||||||
| Embedded knowledge | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | |
| Channel switching | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | ||
| Authentication support | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | ||
| Service case execution | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Attachment / image support | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | |
| Button support | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | ||
| Menu support | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | ||
| Usage metrics | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Escalate interaction and open service cases to a CSR | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Asynchronous messaging (support for long running interactions) | • | • | • | • | • | • |
- Personalized IVR is an API that provides the ability to inject Pega content in order to personalize the IVR experiences delivered by your existing IVR vendor.
- Users have the ability to switch from the Web Messaging channel to a different messaging channel, mid-interaction.
- Button support and menus support/equivalents (text inputs) are supported for WhatsApp and SMS.
The following figure shows the user experience for channel switching:
Contextual, digital self-service for web and mobile mashup
With Pega Web mashup and through RESTful web service APIs, you can build powerful digital engagement experiences across all customer touch points, transforming your ability to engage customers where and when they want.
| Web and mobile mashup capabilities | Web mashup | RESTful APIs |
| Dynamic case management for service requests | • | • |
| Real-time, omni-channel AI | • | • |
| Knowledge articles | • | • |
Chat and messaging
The convenience and usability of web and digital messaging have made them the preferred engagement channels for many customers, thanks to their proximity to self-service options such as chatbots, knowledge articles, and web self-service pages. Note that all chat and messaging interactions are served to CSRs working through the Interaction Portal. Pega Customer Service for Insurance does not support the ability to use those channels as stand-alone components or through third-party desktops.
In the following table, the column values are as follows:
- Web Messaging or Legacy Webchat
- SMS/MMS
- Facebook Messenger
- Apple Business Chat
- WhatsApp
- Mobile Messaging SDK
- Client Channel API
| Capabilities | | | | | | | API |
| Pre-chat questions | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Concurrency management (global, queue, or by CSR) | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Initiate a co-browsing session | • | ||||||
| Channel switching | • | • | • | • | • | ||
| Wait time calculations | • | ||||||
| Deferred queuing and routing (when CSRs are not available) | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Post-chat surveys | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Content linking (knowledge article sharing) | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Dynamic common phrases | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Page push (takes the customer to a different web page) | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Transfer to queue or agent | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| CSR availability (presence) management | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| CSR notifications (audio, visual) | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Attachment / image support | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Emoji support | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Share transcript | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Usage reporting | • | • | • | • | • | • | • |
| Skills-based routing | • | • | • | • | • | • | |
| Third-party routing (routing decision made external to Pega) | • | • | • | • | • | • |
Users have the ability to switch from the Web Messaging channel to a different messaging channel, mid-interaction.
The following figure shows a WhatsApp conversation with an embedded image as shared by a CSR:
Pega Call
Pega Customer Service for Insurance provides support for a wide range of telephony use cases, including inbound and outbound calls, through Pega Call. Pega Call comes with a large set of pre-packaged connectors to popular CTI platforms and extensibility to other platforms and custom features through Open CTI APIs.
| Capabilities | Avaya AAC | Avaya AES Jtapi | Genesys PureEngage | Cisco ICM/UCC | Cisco Finesse / Webex CCE |
| Login | • | • | • | • | • |
| Ready/available and other availability state management | • | • | • | • | • |
| Ready/available with work mode | • | • | • | ||
| Not Ready/unavailable with reason code | • | • | • | • | • |
| Logout | • | • | • | • | • |
| Logout with reason code | • | • | • | • | • |
| Screen pop | • | • | • | • | • |
| ANI lookup / search | • | • | • | • | • |
| After call work | • | • | • | • | • |
| Make/place call | • | • | • | • | • |
| Hold/pause | • | • | • | • | • |
| Consultation call | • | • | • | • | • |
| Hang up/release | • | • | • | • | • |
| Drop party | • | • | • | • | • |
| Retrieve/resume | • | • | • | • | • |
| Merge/conference | • | • | • | • | • |
| Send DTMF (Digits/Tones) | • | • | • | • | • |
| Warm transfer | • | • | • | • | • |
| Blind transfer | • | • | • | • | |
| Phonebooks | • | • | • | • | • |
| Click to call | • | • | • | • | • |
| Callback (on disconnect) | • | • | • | • |
In addition, Pega Customer Service for Healthcare also supports leading embeddable cloud CTI technologies and embedding native web call controls into the Pega Customer Service for Insurance Interaction Portal.
| Capabilities | Genesys Cloud CX | Five9 | Amazon Connect |
| Login | • | • | • |
| Logout | • | • | • |
| Screen pop | • | • | • |
| ANI lookup / search | • | • | • |
| Warm transfer / blind transfer, voice and Data transfer (illustrated in the figure after this table) | • | • | • |
| Click to call | • | • | • |
| Callback (on disconnect) | • | • | • |
The following figure shows a transfer of voice and data through a Pega feature used alongside the Genesys Cloud CX embedded call control:
Real-time co-browsing
Share the same web page with just a single click. Pega Co-Browse lets customers share their web browser with a CSR, enabling the CSR to provide instruction, coaching, and guidance to address customer needs.
| Capabilities | Chat | Phone |
| Selecting and highlighting information on the page | • | • |
| Cursor and role visibility | • | • |
| Off-the-screen pointers to information | • | • |
| Scribble (lets the CSR draw and write on the screen) | • | • |
| Recording and timelines | • | • |
| Control mode (the CSR controls the browser window) | • | • |
| Permission granting (the customer gives the CSR visibility or control) | • | • |
| Masking or hiding information from the CSR | • | • |
| iFrame / subdomain navigation | • | • |
Email management
Email continues to be an important customer engagement channel for businesses. Pega Customer Service for Insurance supports a wide range of functionality for both inbound and outbound email use-cases, allowing multi-party conversational email interactions for interaction management and notifications. AI capabilities, such as entity detection, training and learning models, as well as straight-through processing, are covered in a later part of this document.
| Capabilities | |
| Multi-party email support (*illustrated in the figures after this table) | • |
| Forward emails to third parties | • |
| Attachment support | • |
| Undelivered email notifications (*illustrated in the figures after this table) | • |
| Email templates and signatures | • |
| Save as draft | • |
| Associate/disassociate a case from an email thread | • |
| Automated routing and case creation | • |
| Routing based on topic, sentiment, language or rule | • |
| Automated replies | • |
| Suggested cases/tasks | • |
| Inbound or outbound email | • |
| Email notifications | • |
| Workbaskets / Get next email | • |
| Common phrases | • |
The following figures shows the CSR email experience:
Real-time omni-channel AI with guided interactions
Pega Customer Service for Insurance provides the ability to deliver consistent and personalized customer service experiences across phone, web, email, chat, and messaging, without losing the context of the conversation. Voice AI capabilities are highlighted separately, in the next section.
| Capabilities | Pega Email Bot | Agent Email | Web | Phone / IVR | Chat and messaging | Chatbots |
| Intent detection / categorization | • | • | • | |||
| Auto-response notifications | • | • | • | |||
| Straight-through processing | • | |||||
| Entity recognition and extraction (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • | • | • | • | ||
| Sentiment detection | • | • | • | • | ||
| Text detection within images (OCR) | • | • | • | |||
| Suggested responses | • | • | ||||
| Augmented Agent Assistant / Messaging AI (prompts the customer to populate field entries during a chat or messaging interaction) | • | |||||
| Knowledge suggestions (including suggested replies and next best article) (*illustrated in the figure after the Voice AI table) | • | |||||
| Proactive inquiry responses / suggested and selected cases (*illustrated in the figure after the Voice AI table) | • | |||||
| Intelligent guidance, next best action | • | • | • | • | • | |
| Dynamic scripting (per agent, sentiment, channel) | • | • | • | • | ||
| Personalized offers, proactive offers | • | • | • |
Voice AI
Pega Voice AI is a separately licensed feature that assists CSRs during live phone interactions by providing contextually relevant real-time suggestions, such as case and knowledge suggestions, form autofill suggestions, and script adherence notifications, in order to reduce average handle time, reduce callbacks, improve compliance, boost agent productivity, and accelerate new CSR onboarding. Voice AI is powered by real-time speech-to-text transcription and natural language processing (NLP).
| Capabilities | Voice AI |
| Entity recognition and extraction (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • |
| Knowledge suggestions (including suggested replies or next best article) (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • |
| Suggested cases (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • |
| Dialog adherence (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • |
The following figure illustrates Voice AI guiding a CSR through an interaction:
Engagement on public channels (Facebook)
Some service interactions start on social channels. Pega provides a variety of capabilities for responding to requests originating on your company pages or directed to customer service handles.
| Capabilities | |
| Content linking | • |
| Dynamic common phrases | • |
| Character counter | |
| Transfer to queue or agent | • |
| CSR availability, presence management | • |
| Image support | • |
| Attachment support | • |
| Skills-based routing | • |
| Third-party routing (routing decision made external to Pega) | • |
Dynamic case management
Connect people, contact center systems, and processes for end-to-end visibility and resolution through Pega case management.
| Capabilities | Case management |
| Out-of-the-box case libraries | • |
| Case designer and out-of-the-box case type templates (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • |
| Scripted dialog | • |
| Persona definition | • |
| Data sources, integration | • |
| Auditing | • |
| Workbaskets, assignment routing (service cases) | • |
| Application integration (interact with a case from external applications) | • |
| CSR collaboration (Pulse) | • |
| Templated layouts per channel of delivery | • |
| Self-service delivery | • |
| Notifications, SLAs, priority escalations | • |
| Attachments | • |
| Access permissions | • |
| Search and reporting | • |
| Goals and deadlines | • |
| Center-Out™ Business Architecture | • |
| Remote case support (ability to run a case built in a separate Pega application) | • |
| Process Fabric support (ability to run cases built on Pega and non-Pega platforms). | • |
The following figure shows an example of the Make payment case type:
Contact and identity management
Not every service engagement is with a known customer. CSRs have interactions with new and unknown customers, or deal with a simple question being asked that doesn’t warrant creating a new customer record. Pega supports the ability to create interactions for anonymous users, if required, as well as supporting the ability to authenticate and validate known customers and to recognize customers with a business affiliation. Pega Customer Service for Insurance makes it easy for CSRs to provide high-quality service for all these scenarios.
| Capabilities | Interaction Portal |
| Anonymous interactions | • |
| Customer verification (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • |
| Customer identifiers (phone, email, messaging, social handles, and more) | • |
| B2B, B2B2X, and child interactions | • |
| Customer search | • |
| Contact types and roles, for example, customer, representative, business owner | • |
| Organizational hierarchies | • |
The following figure shows a sample customer verification question that a CSR uses to establish the customer identify:
Productivity tools
Every customer interaction, especially those that go through the contact center, require time to address. To help reduce the time and cost required to support customers, Pega applications include tools that CSRs use to get ready for work, accept incoming work, get a clear picture of the customer and their needs, balance and organize the desired outcomes, personalize the treatment of every contact, and complete work assignments.
| Capabilities | Interaction Portal | Back Office Portal |
| Robotic Desktop Automation - Start My Day | • | • |
| Customer composites (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • | • |
| Cross-channel history | • | • |
| Customer timelines | • | • |
| Intelligent guidance, next best action suggestions | • | • |
| Offer Advisor | • | |
| Retention negotiation | • | |
| Suggested service cases | • | • |
| Interaction driver, case selection | • | • |
| Customer inquiry mode (share data from the screen with a customer, and audit the share action) | • | |
| Knowledge search | • | • |
| Customer sales activity | • | • |
| Community activity | • | • |
| Marketing activity | • | • |
| Visual wrap up (*illustrated in the figure after this table) | • | • |
| Pulse collaboration | • | • |
| Messages and coaching | • | • |
| Suggested articles | • | • |
The following figure shows an example of a customer composite highlighting customer contact details, policy information, claim, and recent interaction history:
The following figure shows an example of the visual wrap up process:
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