PegaWorld iNspire 2023: Verizon & Cognizant: Transforming Customer Experience through AI and Automation

Verizon has enhanced customer interactions through personalization across channels and improved the underlying customer journey across touchpoints with reactive and preemptive Next Best Actions and resulting in increased business value. Watch this replay to learn how leveraging case management and AI-based decisioning has provided business value, which in turn resulted in reduced onboarding time and improved customer acquisition.

Transcript:

- I think we're gonna get started. My name is Fred Benton, I'm with PEGA. I'm the Verizon client director and it is my pleasure to introduce our two speakers today, Vinodh and Rahul I'll let them introduce themself, but it's gonna be an interesting discussion about the Verizon journey and I will turn it over to Vinodh.

- Thank you Fred, good afternoon everyone. Great to be here with you at this PEGA World. It feels like almost a crime, not to mention Gen AI or any speaker who shows up here, but at least I can tell you I don't have a piece of paper, there's no Bluetooth in my ear, so it's just human talking. So there's no Gen AI, at least for the speech that you're going to hear. I was talking to Brian Hager just an hour ago and he was asking me, oh, he's sitting right there. So he was asking me what's the best part about the PEGA world that you like? And I was telling him "It's the people that make the difference, the clients, the partners and of course PEGA themselves. It's the ability to learn, share and collaborate." And we are here to share something very similar, an experience that we work together with Verizon under Rahul's leadership and of course with PEGA partnership as well. You typically don't hear a communications company and great customer experience in the same line, that used to be the past and we've been working on, I say, "working," because it's a journey and we've evolved over a period of time on improving that and changing the perspective on hub communications as a company and the industry is changing the way we look at customer experience and how do we engage. So who better than explaining what exactly happened and how did we drive them? Rahul himself was pioneering this at Verizon. Rahul, over to you please.

- Thanks Vinodh, good afternoon everyone. So I'm Rahul Venkataraman, I lead our customer experience platforms at Verizon for our consumer group. So we have been on this journey with PEGA and partners like Cognizant now for a few years, and I'll talk to you about that journey, what we've learned along the way, mistakes that we made, how we course corrected and where we are today. Quick on what Verizon is before I jump in, so Verizon's one of the largest telecom providers in the US. We have the largest 5G network in the country. We service over 90 million customers on our consumer side. We have over $120 billion in revenue. So a lot of focus goes into making sure that we can drive an excellent customer experience for each of these customers. And to do that, we a few years ago, took the journey to really take a step back and say, what does it mean to have a customer experience led technology transformation? We broke it out into these four big areas, omni transactions, irrespective of whether a customer engages with us in a digital channel, an assisted channel, they walk into a store, they use our chat, we need to know where they've been, so we, when they engage with us next on their own terms that it's a connected, seamless experience. End-to-end journeys, being a telco, the customer submitting that transaction in the channel, It doesn't end there. We've got a whole bunch of end-to-end journeys throughout to learn by get all the way to serve and support that we gotta manage for our customers and we want to make sure that every one of those journeys is managed effectively end to end, so if a customer comes back with a service inquiry or they want to know what's happening with them, we have that connected thread going. And then all of this is, you've heard about CDH, you heard that on Gen AI, a lot of this is keyed around our ability to personalize our experience for our customers. So next best action, next best offer, next best communication were three foundational fundamentals that we focused on to make sure that across every channel we built the capability for our customers to connect with us in a streamlined manner. And finally, all of this drives us into real time marketing, which is once we have these foundational elements in place, how do we talk to the customer with that right offer, be it a prospect or a new customer coming into the company and are we able to delight them with those right experiences? Getting here required us to take a step back, look at our platforms and make very purposeful decisions on which products we chose, where we put them into our architecture and plumbing them into all of our channels. So that way, be it that journey aspect or be it that personalization aspect, we had the foundational elements in place to get us there. How did we do that? We did that through very purposeful technology transformation. Verizon's been leveraging PEGA for a long time, but when we put this blueprint out for how we want to execute, we actually sat down with the PEGA team in Cambridge. We explained to them our vision of how we wanted to leverage the platform, both from a transactional standpoint as well as from a personalization standpoint. We made sure that the product team and our teams from a technology perspective shared our vision of what we wanted to do and came up with that architecture and guiding principles on how every one of these products would be used within Verizon. PEGA as a platform is very flexible in how you use it and it provides that ability for you to do a lot of different things, but it's important that you figure out what's necessary for you within your context of how you use the product and that was a key focus for us. Every year, we are a retail business, during the retail season, we have huge traffic volumes that come into all our channels and we needed to make sure the platform could scale to handle that. One of the key things that we did along that journey was move to the cloud. So when we move to the cloud, we had those conversations with PEGA of, okay, when we move this into our cloud, how do we structure the platform? How do we build the platform? Also, I mentioned we've had this platform for many years and over the period of time we've tried PEGA in different ways and this is one of the things I mentioned we made mistakes along the way. We did not really have standards in how we implemented the product. So we landed up with a little bit of a sprawl in the different versions of the platform that we had, in terms of the ways that they were implemented. You heard Alan talk about the layer cake. We had different layer cakes and it did not allow us to scale the way in which we leveraged the product. So what we did is we actually did a ground up rewrite of how we were leveraging the platform and that has really helped us now to scale our utilization of PEGA, to enable our business partners to quickly unlock new use cases and to actually drive that speed to market. Also, the other key aspect of this was the best practices. I mentioned working with PEGA, also working with our suppliers like Cognizant and others to make sure that everyone understands these best practices, that they're documented, that they're published. So when we are implementing the next thing, we don't incur the mistakes of the past. So that is another key part of this and all this happened at a time when Verizon was going through a agile transformation as well, so figuring out how we bring the product into that and we integrate into our larger value system was a key piece of this. All of this would not have been possible without changing how we worked as a company. And we structured it into these three big areas from a technology perspective, people and process, the business outcomes and the partnership with the product team. I'll touch on people and process. At Verizon, we have a global delivery model. We have a team across the globe that supports the platform and we really indexed on making sure we had the right talent, both internally as well as with our partners to ensure that we have the right tools in our tool chest to deliver. And when we started this journey with PEGA back in 2018, 2019, I could count the number of people that new PEGA within Verizon on maybe a hand and that was not gonna enable us to scale. So we really invested in our team in India to make sure that we could scale that practice, we could have the right talent, the right engineering talent within our organization to be able to build it out and also partner with the right companies to make sure we bring in that talent and we go through that process. This has enabled us to really enable that speed to market. We started this in the consumer group, we've been able to now replicate that success in our B2B side of our business as well and that's really been the secret sauce for us to be able to leverage PEGA the way we have. None of this would be needed if not for our second pillar, which is the most important part of this. You saw that architecture like picture that I laid out earlier, which talked about transactions and journeys and personalization and real time marketing. You see how well it translates within the PEGA context, in terms of the stuff that we leverage the product for. We leverage the product for our omni transactions. So the case management product helps us drive that positive experience, we know where a customer's been. We are now taking that forward into our end-to-end journeys. This is an area that there's still a lot of work to be done, but this is an area we are leveraging the platform to give us that end-to-end view of where a customer has been and then obviously on the CDH side, you have the next best action engine, which we have plumbed into all of our channels, be it digital, be it our call center, be it our retail, where we are able to provide both the customer and the agent with that right action at the right point in time. And also this engine helps us power our next best offers, both from a retention, as well as from a growth perspective. The key aspect, I'll call out from business outcome perspective was working very closely with our business partners and understanding what are the parts of the product, look, end of the day, PEGA is a low-code, no core platform, it's supposed to enable us to do speed to market to try things differently, it was really important for us to sit down and understand, okay, here are the things that we need to be able to try quickly. We don't need an IT release. We don't need to go through a big process to change. I'm pretty sure a lot of you who are in telcos know that we have tech, we have a lot of legacy, we have other things around, but how do you structure the platform in a way where you are able to deliver new solutions quickly? Can I deploy propositions every day? Can I try new models? Can I do AB testing? Things like that, so establishing that RACI with our partners on the business side was very important and we spent a lot of time maturing that model to a point today where we have a good operating model on when technology changes are needed versus when we can leverage the platform on a day-to-day basis. This takes me into the product partnership. PEGA has been one of these partners who've been very open to feedback and that's one of the things that I share with the PEGA team all the time. And that has really come across in every conversation, even these two days here at PEGA World, meeting with the product team, understanding where the product has really helped us and where there are opportunities and understanding from them how we can better leverage the product or where they could incorporate into their future product roadmap and that's been very critical. I talked about the retail season, working with PEGA, having them part of our processes within the technology organization as we make our platforms ready for holiday seasons, for retail, and making sure it can scale and meet the SLAs that we have, we have millions of transactions going through this platform every day and it was very important for us to make sure that it meets those performance SLAs, it's got high availability and we worked with the product team on what needed to be true for that. Finally, and this is maybe one of the key shifts that we made as we did our re-architecture, we set out a process of how we would keep this platform current, how we would go through our upgrade processes. Eventually, we have a goal of getting to a zero downtime, no touch upgrade, we are not there yet, but we made significant progress and that has really helped us to not incur technical debt over time and I think that's been one of the key unlocks for us as we've gone through this journey. In the past, we had, I think four, five different versions of the platform running in different technologies, different implementations. Today we have one and it's really helped us unlock new capabilities. When one team implements a feature or a new integration with one of our backend systems, it's right there for everybody else to use. When we implement a new journey, we are able to quickly plug it in with our decisioning engine and drive some of those next best actions for our customers. So establishing that platform architecture, that governance, that upgrade lifecycle on an annual basis was very important for our success. What did this all mean, just to bring it all to life? I mean, if you look at every one of our channels today from a CDH perspective, be it digital, be it assisted chat, IVR, our email and SMS platforms, they're all powered through this integration with our next best action engine, we call it as NBX. And this today connects back into our Verizon properties with our native AI technology, with information that we know about our customer to really serve that right action at the right point in time and it gives our business partners the ability to react very quickly to what they need to offer up to the customers in any one of these channels. You build it once, you deploy it across all these channels, you have different content and different channels, but you have that one centralized brain that's helping you drive that consistency across the board. And from an outcome standpoint, when you think about it, it's really changed the way we work, I talked about Omni today. We have a good majority of our transactions, over 30% of our transactions that leverage this pause and resume capability. Customer starts in one place, finishes in another place, they don't need to start all over. We know where they've been. We've built a very rich, reusable library of assets and I think this is one of the keys for us. We've built propositions that we try it in one channel, if it works, then we can quickly scale it across others. We don't need to go rebuild all of our plumbing, we can scale it into other channels, it's been a real game changer. Obviously we've seen good results with our attach rates and our offer targeting through the standardized framework. Again, the way I like to think about it is PEGA has given us that framework that now our AI team, our business partners can try different things and try them quickly and it's helping us to drive that value for our business. An area where we have seen some good initial green shoots, but there's more to do, is our connected journeys. So as a customer goes through their lifecycle with Verizon, there's multiple different things that is happening. So connecting that journey, making sure that you know where you've been, where you're going and you can explain it to a customer or an agent is where we are looking at case management to see how it can scale, we've seen some good initial green shoots in that space. And then finally, the other two at the bottom are also around CDH and how it's helped in our chat and IVR channels and also driving the opt-ins to those propositions that I might show to a customer. But last but not least, it's really reduced our complexity and driving innovation for our business, it's been foundational for that. As we look at other niche products in the market, if you want to try it out here, we have a bedrock framework that we can then plug into and try new things. So it's given us that ability to scale. A lot of benefits, but a lot of lessons learned along the way as well. The key thing I'll say is the work that we did upfront on focusing on the architecture, focusing on the vision or the North star that we had for what we wanted to do was really key. And we spent a lot of time on defining those building blocks. It's not stayed the same, it's been evergreen. We've changed things along the way, but at least having a broader vision of what it is helped us to move forward. I talked about the partnership, honestly, I can say none of this would've been possible without that partnership. And I think for me, that's been one thing that I've taken away. We had very regular cadences on both when things went well and did not go well. Every year we established a retrospective where the entire leadership team would come together and say, "Okay, over the year, how is it done? What's worked, what's not worked?" And it has every aspect of the engagement, be it professional services, be it the product, be it the support model, be it how we were leveraging the capabilities of the product, talked about all aspects of it to make sure that we had that 360 view of the enablement of the platform within the company. Business and technology partnership and alignment, without this, it would've been a platform sitting there for nobody to use. So having those conversations with our business partners, making sure they understood how they want to use the product and working on the technology transformation in parallel to reach those outcomes was very important to us. It really leads into the next one, which is you hear this term, "minimal lovable product," from PEGA very often where we talk about, let's put this one use case out there. Let's try it out, let's see how things work. We took a more balanced approach in that process, which is to say, yeah, we've tried that in the past, we know how the product works, but it was very important for us to balance that with the platform building. So we took our time, we built out the building blocks the right way and then in parallel, we were looking at new use cases that were coming in. We had opportunities with the new services that Verizon was offering or planning to offer, which was relatively greenfield, we brought that in first. Then we worked on bringing in some of our more legacy and integrating that in. So going through that journey was really important for us. And last but not least, measuring the impact, both from a technology perspective as well as from a business outcome perspective. So throughout the way, we worked very hard on establishing the right KPIs to make sure we understood if it is working well or not working well and also built the right instrumentation around it, so we knew what was happening at any point in time. It's been a long journey. we've been on this road for the last four and a half-ish years with PEGA in this new way of working it and I can sincerely say, it's been a very refreshing experience to work with this team in terms of how they show up, how they work with us to enable outcomes for our customers. That's really what I wanted to share with all of you today. I will kind of pause here and I'll open it up for any questions.

- I know you're not that bad.

- Oh no, this one.

- [Phone Voice] I don't have an answer for that.

- That's the AI talking!

- That's Verizon.

- [Phone Voice] I don't have an answer for that.

- [Participant] So Rahul, you talked a little bit about scale, the amount of people that were using PEGA, we could count on one hand. Can you talk about how you scaled up the organization, your organization, scaled up your partners and how you thought about the roles on each, that were right for your organization versus the partners when you started scaling up the implementation?

- Yeah, so I'll add a little more color to that. So I think one of the key things that we did is we looked at all of the different roles that we had within the team. When we started, we had maybe, like I said, less than 10 PEGA certified folks in our team. Today, we have close to 200 Verizon folks that know how to use PEGA across US and India. The key thing for us was making sure we had that right balance between the architects, the developers, the analysts, et cetera, who could do that work. And then honestly, we looked at very similar roles on the partner side. We worked with the partners to also make sure that they were able to bring in a similar structure where they were able to provide that thought leadership to us to drive those outcomes. I don't even know if you wanna add anything to that.

- Sure, so as Rahul mentioned before, when they first started it, there was very little PEGA experience overall on the team and it was a well thought out plan, in terms of building that capability, both internally within Verizon, as well as bringing in the experts from partners. I'm not here to say it's just Cognizant that is doing everything, it's more about bringing the ecosystem together and the ability to build that capability in-house within the project teams side. The project teams come on board, deliver a project and then move on to the next project, but the product knowledge stays with the team as a cohesive unit. So when the next business case that comes up, you leverage in the product experience and be able to implement and bring the business outcomes that the customer's looking for.

- One other thing I'll add is the PEGA Professional Services team. I over the last few years have really looked at them as an expert services engagement, both in US and India, in terms of how they have partnered with us. It's not a large team, it's actually a very small team, but they are the experts who are the closest to the product. They have been able to guide us in the right way when we are making some large decisions on how things work and also when things go bad, they're the ones that know how to fix it, more often than not, the right way. So having that engagement with the professional services team has also been very important to us.

- [Participant 2] Sorry, it's a linked question. So when you discuss outcomes with your partners and how do you structure that? Do you have Cognizant and PEGA separate in terms of that? You do, okay.

- We do. So you contract them both in separately?

- So we have more than just Cognizant, we have a few suppliers, but I think the key aspect for us has been to make sure that each partner knows what they're responsible for. And at a working level, the teams actually work very well together. We do have joint reviews on the outcomes of projects and things of that nature, but yes, they're separate engagements.

- So one thing, if I may add, earlier, it's more about give me these bodies, I'll work with the team, now it's more about focusing on the outcomes. A team comes on board, what's the outcomes the team is signing up for? Are we able to deliver that outcome? It requires a mix of skillset, it's a product knowledge, it's a domain knowledge, it's the ability to work together as a team that focused on one goal, that's the business outcome. That's what made the difference.

- [Participant 3] How did you measure your progress or success during this four year transformation?

- Good question, we have a large scorecard of things that we measure, but I'll start from a platform perspective. A lot of the platform specific KPIs were on, can we handle the load? Do we have the right set of capabilities enabled on the platform? So we had certain qualitative scores like response time through poor performance, things of that nature. We also had coverage as one of our metrics, which is not quantitative, it's a little more qualitative. But we did build that KPI to say, hey, am I able to figure out what is my channel coverage? What is my coverage of the different flows that the customer goes through? Do I have visibility into that in my architecture and I'm able to service it up? I won't say we're done by any means on that second KPI, it's something that we are continuing to work on, but that platform has been laid out over the last couple of years to make sure that we've enabled all of those transactions in the platform and we are able to measure it. On a business outcomes perspective, especially when you look at something like a CDH, A lot of the things that we do, we use treat versus control or champion challenger type ways to measure it. Again, on the CDH side, one of the other key measures that we used on this journey was have we enabled NBX across all of our platforms? Have we got it in the right placements and the right assets in the different channels? One of the things I didn't maybe touch on is as we went through this journey, we established a certain set of guiding principles on how we would do our transactions, on how we would do our journeys and how we do our personalization. We basically establish frameworks with our channel partners, with our backend teams to say, "Look, this is how I do an integration." So we also go back and measure against that. From a developer experience perspective, we obviously look at the PEGA best practices like our guardrail scores and things like that and the team actually goes through like processes like alertathons which is another fancy word for a hackathon to say, "Hey, which are the things are we not doing so well?" And really keeping that COE culture to make sure that we are measuring what we build and keeping it up to spec has been a piece of it. Again, I touched upon things at a very high level, there's a lot of different KPIs that we are measuring.

- And all the follow up to that is the NPS. Stretch is an understatement, it's an audacious goal that you picked up personally. so if you can share on the NPS.

- Yeah, again, from a customer experience standpoint, I mean we talked about, we started this, we have a very aggressive goal within the company on where we want to be from an NPS perspective. And a lot of our KPIs around treat versus control and things like that, we know how it ladders up towards a journey NPS in a specific flow or in a specific transaction and we do measure that. The other area we talked about, offers, from an office perspective, we look at how it's driving down our churn. Again, we use very specific measurements on how we do that. Not all of it is through PEGA, but given that PEGA is that framework for us, it all goes through that measurement and one of the key things that we did in our architecture is we actually defined something called feedback loop into our architecture, which meant that anything I served up had a feedback loop going back into my data science organization, so everything could be measured and that was foundational to how we built this.

- [Participant 4] Rahul excellent presentation. So I know you have launched the, myPlan with Verizon putting the customer in the center. So how has PEGA helped you in driving new offers and new products to customers? So just one here.

- Yeah, so we recently launched myPlan, which is a very different way of offering the plans and services in the wireless industry where we give the customers complete choice. And as part of that, if you think about where PEGA plays in that, I talked about the omni transaction, a lot of that is orchestrated through that PEGA journey, but also when we talk about that customer choice, explaining to a customer why an offer is the right offer for them, or explaining, why this bundle versus that bundle. We use CDH in some of those flows. We also leverage the overall decisioning capability to cross sell you later. We talked about the app, the feed, how all of that is integrated, happens through the platform.

- One of the question on Verizon, as big as the company is, we started off, you spoke about a lot of consumer, but the lessons learned from consumer but also applied to the enterprise world, which is very different than what consumer was. But how was that experience, sharing across business units in Verizon?

- Thanks, by the way, everything I talked about today was very focused on our consumer unit. Our B2B unit also uses PEGA extensively, now they started out on the CDH journey, they had a presentation at PEGA last year when it was virtual. And for them, the challenges are very different when you're looking at a small and medium business customer or a enterprise customer. But a lot of the best practices that we established from platform perspective, from governance perspective, translated very seamlessly over. The biggest translation for us was the team. We actually have the same team as a PEGA COE, that services both our BUs, so we were able to leverage the talent across the board. There are other functions within the company that are also exploring the use of the product, so that scaling really helped. Also in conversations with product, when we talked about those joint reviews, they are joint reviews across the enterprise. So we were able to understand challenges that one business unit is having and how it would apply to the other business unit. Could we take some of those best practices across without actually hampering the day-to-day operation? So a lot of it comes down to human connection, but it was a important piece.

- Even the scale of it, you spoke about all the transition, but for the audience to understand the scale of, or the volume of transaction that the consumer does impact, Freddy, you can even answer that, just so they get a perspective of what are we dealing with.

- Yeah, so we have in a given day, put it in a larger scheme of things, in a month, we have over a billion transactions that go through the platform and we have 90 different journeys that go through this platform. We have over 4,000 different propositions across our different flows, from express action, express offer. So it is a large implementation that we have built over time. The ability that it's given us is it's given us the ability to control and modify things very fast and that's the unlock for us.

- Thank you.

- [Participant 5] Thanks, Rahul. Just in terms of a channel adoption, what was the key approach that you guys took to ensure that the channel were taking and following the recommendations provided by the ACDH?

- So I give a lot of credit to our business partners here who actually worked very closely with each of the channels to kind of identify placements where it made sense. We looked at existing placements where we had next best action happening from maybe a different engine, and then we swapped it out, so it became more seamless for the agents. Initially, like in some of our channels, like our digital channels, for example, we did a one-to-one replacement with what we had before, with what we brought in with PEGA and then we slowly started changing out the rules, trying out different things. So it happened relatively over time. The good thing is we've had PEGA in the ecosystem for a while, so it took its time to mature. But one of the key things is the feedback loop, like I mentioned. So when things don't work, we take that feedback, we iterate, we try different things as well, so it's that constant line of communication. And I won't say it's perfect, it's an evolving process, different channels have different levels of adoption, but we do see across pretty much all our channels, there is some level of adoption of the CDH recommendations.

- [Participant 6] So it might not be terribly relevant to the more impressive parts that you've talked about, but I'm very curious, you mentioned at one point, in the process of scalability, there became a lot more people at your company that became familiar and could use PEGA. Were those mostly external hires that you hired in, people who already knew how to use PEGA or was there some training program? And if there was some type of training program, what was something that you found successful?

- Sure, so we did all of the above. There wasn't one thing that worked, I don't know if I can maybe invite Conner who leads our India team to talk about it as well. One of the big things that we did was we worked to look at colleges that were actually training people in PEGA and we brought in some new hires through that channel. We obviously trained some of our own resources in the initial days on PEGA. We worked with PEGA to create kind of a Verizon custom curriculum, for lack of a better word. We took them through a 12 week bootcamp and obviously external hires was a big part of it and it did not happen overnight, it took some amount of time. I think in the first year after we started this, we were at about 50 people and then it slowly scaled from there.

- See, I can tell you there are folks from Verizon here in this room. All of them did not have the PEGA background, but now they run the show and you can see the results. It's made a lot of difference. So any questions? Wrap it up. Oh, sorry.

- [Participant 7] Vinodh and Raul, thank you. The relationship's been awesome, on behalf of PEGA, thank you. As a fun maybe closing comment for everybody, so we've had Alan, Corinne, Don, Rob Walker, talking about the future, what's next, man? Where are we going?

- That's a good question. And that's been my theme of the conversation with PEGA over the last two days, to be very honest with you. Like, "Hey, where's the platform going?" With Shaw, with Steve earlier today, talking about what's next and I was really intrigued by a lot of the things that PEGA announced with generative AI, with process fabric, with process mining, more to definitely dig into there. But look, from a Verizon perspective, I'll say we've had a lot of our fundamentals put in place a few years ago and for us it's really continuing to execute on that. So I talked about our end-to-end journeys, continue to bring all of our end-to-end journeys. So we have that connected view of a customer across every single transaction, continuing to scale out our integrations of PEGA with some of our other partner products that we have there so we can truly get that omnichannel CDH experiences as well. And also looking at how we continue to drive our next best action to leverage more AI outcomes and scale it for the future.

- So I think calm communications as a industry is continuously evolving, fierce competition, hyper-personalization. And when I started, I said, "It's a journey," because there's a lot more to happen. This is not the end of it. There's a lot more that's coming up. And new business opportunities as well, it's not just about the challenges alone, it's about new opportunities that Verizon's 5G creates, new products that could be on offer. How do we bring all of this together? And leveraging the latest and greatest of what PEGA has to offer. There's more work to be done, I'm looking forward to that.

- Well I think we're at time, but feel free to reach out to any of us if you see us and wanna talk further.

- Thank you so much.

- [Rahul] Thank you.