The 2012 Rising Stars

The Enhancer: Extended Capabilities in Monitoring and Acting on Social Media, Combined with Multichannel Support and Personalized Customer Service, Are Putting Pegasystems Ahead of the Pack

Pegasystems rolled out several new features in its CRM technology and Customer Service Cloud in 2011. In addition to enhancing its solutions for specific industries, such as life sciences, communications, and insurance, Pegasystems announced improvements to its Customer Process Manager (CPM) customer service solution. The new features extend its capabilities in monitoring and acting on social media and offer multichannel support for customer inquiries and interactions.

Using Pegasystems' patented Build for Change BPM platform, Pega CPM enables organizations to provide personalized customer service. The solution now includes the following capabilities:

• New social media capabilities: Users can listen, analyze, and act on communications in social media outlets including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. The solution seamlessly blends social media with traditional channel communications and extends customer profiles to include social information.
• Improved automation: An enhanced case management functionality improves the ability to automate work across legacy systems, driving optimized business configuration and cost savings across the enterprise.
• New productivity tools for managers: An account manager portal maximizes real-time visibility into account relationships across the enterprise, including RSS feeds to provide access to customer news. A My Favorites feature allows users to flag favorites for instant access from a dashboard gadget.

Jeff Cotrupe, global program director of analytics, customer experience, and marketing at Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan, describes Pegasystems' addition of social media monitoring to its CPM platform as the "single most important enhancement in the product's history."

"The social Web is where…all parties with a stake in your business are talking about you every day," Cotrupe says. "Infusing CPM with social monitoring adds the missing link of multichannel communications….Pegasystems customers can capture and respond to social dialogues not in the usual reactive, ad hoc fashion but in a systematic way, through processes and knowledge built into their CRM."

Pegasystems also enhanced its Customer Service Cloud with the Service Case Manager. The solution centrally manages customer inquiries across all channels, geographies, or other user-defined criteria, enabling contact center staff to find the information they need with a complete view of a customer's case history from inception through resolution.

Pegasystems was named a leader in "The Forrester Wave: Dynamic Case Management Q1 2011" report. According to the report, "Pegasystems leads with dynamic "build for change’ capabilities," ranking highly for its "case handling and guidance," as well as its "automation and event management" capabilities.

Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers" also named Pegasystems as a leader. According to the report, the company delivers good customer experiences, templates, advice, and a highly scalable solution.

Pegasystems' product is less ideal for industries outside of the company's specialty areas, warns Michael Maoz, research vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner.

"Outside of areas such as insurance, healthcare, financial services, and some areas of telecommunications (where a rule engine may be required for consistency), the product may not be the ideal choice for a shortlist," Maoz writes in the report. "Pegasystems has a highly flexible BPM tool that can be applied to any sector; however, in those where the company has much experience, it has prebuilt processes that speed deployment and require less work to meet the requirements."

Despite challenges, the company will continue to reach for new goals, promises Alan Trefler, Pegasystems' founder and CEO. "While our business can be lumpy from quarter to quarter, the activity level remains intense and both our direct and partner-sourced pipelines are at record levels," Trefler said in a statement. "We plan to continue to invest in sales capacity and market-leading products, with a goal of breaking through a half-billion dollars in revenue for 2012."

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