Published Release Notes

Conversation flow and smart shapes for the Digital Messaging chatbots

When creating Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Digital Messaging, chatbot developers can now use new conversation smart shapes in a dedicated flow, making the design process simpler, more robust, and intuitive. With the new smart shapes, the chatbot displays text messages or asks questions to users in one of several ways. In addition, developers do not have to create additional rules, switch tabs, or perform manual validation. You can associate the conversation flow that you create for your IVA with a business case, use the flow on its own, or reuse it in another conversation flow, improving the overall chatbot design process.

For more information, see Adding a stand-alone conversation process for a conversational channel, Adding a case type conversation process for a conversational channel, Editing the conversation smart shapes and Flow shapes.

Ability to forward emails in triage cases

When working on customer emails in the Email Manager or Case Manager portal, customer service representatives (CSRs) can now forward emails to additional stakeholders, for example, third-party vendors or sellers. As a result, CSRs that work with Pega Email Bot™ save time, improve responsiveness to customer inquiries, and make email triaging more efficient. The email bot keeps each forwarded email conversation in a separate email thread from the customer conversation, making the system more consistent and secure.

For more information, see Communicate with stakeholders on a customer query by forwarding emails and Forwarding emails to other stakeholders for an email bot.

Outbound email templates for email bots

Pega Email Bot™ now provides built-in templates for outbound email and an option to create your own, custom templates. You can use this feature to standardize branding for your applications and the company through your communication channels. For example, customer service representatives (CSRs), who use the Email Manager or Case Manager portals, can apply these templates to strengthen your brand's presence in every email that they send or that the email bot automatically sends as an acknowledgment for a user email.

You select an outbound email template when you configure the Email channel. The system provides you with three built-in outbound email templates that you can select or modify to fit the requirements of your organization.

For more information, see Creating an Email channel and Creating outbound email templates.

Association of incoming emails with triage cases

Customer service representatives (CSRs) can now associate an email triage case with existing business cases or service requests. As a result, CSRs can respond more quickly to information about the same issue reported by customers several times. The system displays a list of related service cases for the same customer that CSRs can then associate or disassociate from the open email triage case in the Email Manager or Case Manager portal.

For more information, see Associating service requests with a triage case and Keep related incoming emails together for a triage case.

Secure email threading mechanism in email bots

Pega Email Bot™ now uses a secure built-in threading mechanism to ensure that all email communication between customer service representatives (CSRs), customers, and other stakeholders is secure and organized in separate threads for a triage case. For this purpose, the system embeds a unique encrypted security code in the body of outbound emails that identifies related triage cases, service requests, and forwarded emails.

For more information, see Understanding email triage process and Use a secure threading mechanism for emails.

Ability to handle responses to automatic email notifications in email bots

Pega Email Bot™ can now handle email responses to automatic email notifications that a Pega Platform™ application sends for a related case. As a result, customer service representatives (CSRs) can save time because all relevant emails from customers and other stakeholders are available from a single triage case in the system. To use this feature, ensure that you add the same email account to the email bot that you use to send case notifications in your application.

For more information, see Handle customer responses to automatic email notifications.

Update to Intelligent Virtual Assistant official names

To use better and more consistent names for conversational channels in Pega Platform™ and to help distinguish conversational channels from Pega Unified Messaging Edition™, Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Unified Messaging is now called IVA for Digital Messaging. Furthermore, the IVA for Web Chatbot is now officially called IVA for Legacy Webchat.

For more information, see Creating a Digital Messaging channel and Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant features.

Ability to train the text analytics model based on email attachments

You can now train the text analytics model for Pega Email Bot™ based on training data from email attachments. As a result, you improve the natural language processing (NLP) analysis for your email bot so that your system detects the correct language, sentiment, topics, and entities from both the body of emails and their attachments. By default, you train the text analytics model based only on training data from the body of emails.

For more information, see Enabling training the model based on email attachments.

Upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x requires downtime during upgrades to Pega Infinity 8.6

Upgrade impact statement

On-premises upgrades of Pega Infinity release 8.4.2 and later to version 8.5.1 or later on Tomcat and PostgreSQL are completed with near-zero downtime. However, upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x requires that you shut down and restart your application server.

What is required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

Hazelcast 3.x is enabled by default. For near-zero downtime upgrades, you do not need to perform any action.

For instructions about upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x, see one of the following topics:

• For near-zero downtime upgrades from Pega Infinity release 8.4.2 or later on Tomcat and PostgreSQL, see "Optional: upgrading to Pega Platform version 8.6: Upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x" in Near-zero downtime Upgrade Guide for Pega Platform version 8.4.2 and later for Tomcat and PostgreSQL.
• For all other upgrades, see "Optional: upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x" in the appropriate upgrade guide.

Improved indexing of StringList and StringGroup property types

Search and Reporting Service in Pega Platform™ 8.5 may improperly index StringList and StringGroup property types. As a result, the data model does not include the affected properties.

Upgrade impact

After upgrading to Pega Platform version 8.6, the system requires that the classes with the StringList or StringGroup type are reindexed. 

What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

On the Search Landing Page, manually reindex all the classes that include properties with the StringList or StringGroup types to ensure that all your data is present in the data model. Alternatively, if finding specific instances of classes is difficult, you can reindex all classes in your application.

For more information, see Indexing class data.