PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Beyond the Obvious: How Deutsche Telekom Generates Value from Pega Customer Service

Clients buy Pega Customer Service™ for its innovations, AI features, and unmatched automation potential. Sometimes – especially when the business is under pressure – it's for delivering efficiencies fast. Join this session to learn some tips and tricks on how Pega creates continuous value and changes customer service at points that are truly hurting today.

Transcript:

- Thank you everybody for coming to the before lunch session. We're in day two, though Daniel and I have been here a couple days early, so this is day three, four, or five for some of us.

- Yeah.

- We're getting through it. Thanks again for attending. I'm Jeremy Kembel. I work on strategy and go-to-market mostly on the customer service solution. Spending a bunch of time in GenAI lately as well, though that's not what this session is about. Amazingly enough, we're gonna talk about something else here. I'm joined by Daniel, who I think needs no introduction after that smashing keynote presentation in the prior hour. I'm gonna just do the warmup, but this is Daniel's session.

- Oh, it's a joint one, Jeremy.

- All right, so I'm gonna do just a little bit of guidance of where I think this discussion's gonna go. It's day two. It's a friendly audience here. If you've got questions, things to ask along the way, let's just talk through it, right? There are mics here, so if you do have questions either in the middle or at the end, please come up to the mics. We're recording, so we wanna get the questions recorded. But let's, you know, this is informal. Let's talk our way through this stuff. I wanted to tee up a little bit of this sort of autonomous enterprise growth ramp. And some of you probably saw something similar to this last year. It hasn't been around as much in some of the sessions this year, but there's a ton of conversation that's happening around the stuff in the very top right, right? My next session is on GenAI. There's a bunch of AI and intelligence and amazing stuff, 'cause we all want to talk about the future and the most exciting, latest, and greatest stuff in these kind of conferences, right? But, hopefully, the point that we've also been landing and Blueprint's been a big part of this is you really need to do the first parts of this ramp first before you can really get onto the next sections, right? You need to encapsulate your work in structure. You need to be able to figure out and track what you're doing so that you can start to think about automation. So you can start to think about leveraging AI into it, you have to get those basic structures in place in order to get work moving. And when you do that, when you start to think about structuring work, managing work, leveraging workflow for the first time, maybe in previously unmanaged processes, you can start to do really interesting stuff. And this is our wider center out message, right? You can take work that maybe only happened in the back office, maybe approving HR, you know, HR requests that we're only happening in a particular pool of people in the back office. You can start to take that work.

- True.

- This thing is going wild. It's buzzing at me. Does that mean we're outta batteries maybe? We may. We may go to the podium depending on how this goes.

- Go back.

- There, you saw the whole session. There we go. We're done.

- Thanks For coming.

- Hey, that was great. Let's go have lunch. I'm gonna be very delicate as I do this.

- I can click for you here if you want me to.

- All right. Let's go. Let's move a click.

- Yep.

- This thing's dangerous at this moment. So, as you capture and sort of put structure around work, which obviously at Pega, this is what we sort of press for, you can start to move that work and make it portable, right? You can move it maybe from a back office person, maybe into your front office or your contact center. I come from CS, so that's of particular interest to me. And you can continue to move that, one more click please, Daniel. We're gonna figure this out together. You can start to move that work all the way forward into self-service as well, right? Doing things that are maybe not just asking questions or FAQs, but starting to execute real work because you've captured, you've structured it, you've put, you know, sort of guidance around it, you've defined it, you've used Blueprint maybe to define it for the first time or transported it from somewhere else. And now, you can start to make that much more portable, including all the way out to the edge and letting your users or your customers do it for themselves. So, that's just the wider setup I wanted to do. I hope it's a good on ramp for what I believe-

- Absolutely.

- Daniel is talking about today. But otherwise, star the show...

- Jeremy.

- Yeah.

- So, let's stop-

- Do you want me to do your clicking?

- No, I'll do that.

- Okay.

- I'm good, thank you. So, I would like to start with a brief story and maybe just to introduce the session. It's meant to be especially valuable for people who are starting to set up the infrastructure, the structure in Pega. And I want a bit share how we did it and what I would take as a lessons learned on implementing today more than 500 HR processes in Pega, amongst other stuff we do with Pega as well. And to begin with, I would like to start a little bit off topic with a little story. And it is about a professor who is introducing to his students how to fill a jar. It's a philosophy class. So, he's taking a jar and filling up the jar with rocks. Yeah, he takes all of the rocks. Maybe some of you might know the story already. And he fills the jar with rocks and asks, "Is the glass full?" Everyone's for sure, yeah, no space for additional rocks. So, yeah, it's full. And then he takes smaller rocks in his hand, puts them in, shuffles the jar and fills it up again. Are we good? Is the glass full? And everyone is saying, "Yeah, absolutely, it's full." So, next thing he does is taking sand and fill sand in the jar and fills it up with that. More or less final question, "Is the jar full now?" And his students are saying, "For obvious reasons, yes, it's full." And in the next steps he takes two beers and puts them in at last. What's the real story about it? When you do Pega, it's about priorities. In the original story, the big rocks represent the essential stuff in your life. Yeah, like the real stuff you care, like your family, your happiness, your health. So, these are the big rocks. The tinier rocks are, so the middle-sized one, are also the things that are important in your life, your hobbies, your work and things like that. The sand is the joy and the sadness in between. And to top it off, no matter how busy times are, need to say I'm German, so that relates very much to me there's always space for two beers with friends. Yeah, just to remember that one. But that translates to Pega as well. And things we originally did wrong in the first time is that we just started to implement Pega, with no real plan, well we had a plan, we wanted to migrate HR. It's not like we hadn't an idea of what we did, but we started just to work on the platform and we paid a high price to do that over again to do that in the correct way. And that is a bit what I wanna share in this session. My lessons learned from screwing up a Pega implementation six years ago and turning that one into a really successful platform with solid scalable architecture. And to start about that, we need to talk what value actually is. Yeah? And what shall I say, GenAI, GenAI, GenAI.

- Always.

- I ask ChatGPT and it's maximizing benefits, efficiency, optimization of overall worth and competitiveness and sustainability. So, anything which has a positive effect to our company and for us in particular to our employees. Who are we? I'm working for the branch, Deutsche Telekom Services Europe and we are serving over 120,000 national employees. It says customers here because that's the way how we look at them. We as an HR team are treating our employees in the same way we treat customers. Yeah. Customers defense, bring love to our customers. That resonates with us very well. And it has a certain degree of complexity because on top we have international employees, we have civil servants. Yeah, I think every one of you remembers , which was our reason for the complexity and makes it really tough because additional data security and privacy rules coming up and on top we have 180,000 external customers, engineers, retired people, leavers, which we need to serve, translating into a quarter million HR tickets per month, continuously increasing. And just to share a story, there was a German law put into place last year in June which required us for 100 different process types to in future, print them, sign them, and ship them. Yeah. German understanding of digitalization. So, really paperwork to be done. And it was released in June, active by August. Yeah. And I think if you need to adjust 100 processes, we were able to do that in Pega predominantly because of our internal structure and the reusables that we got. With Hercules, we realized continuously 35% on efficiency, meaning translating into 35% cost reduction. And by that, we also maintain a rating of 8.4 on a scale for customer satisfaction out of 10 points. So, how we are actually doing that? In general, we believe in self service. So, in the nice slides from Jeremy, we saw how we push stuff to the front. And that's a balance because in our business, HR shouldn't play a role because HR is a killer for productive time. For our employees at Deutsche Telekom, we want them to sell mobile phones, to take customer care calls, to put fixed lines in the ground and every minute. And now imagine you are a worker, they are really driving heavy machines and putting cables into the ground. We need to make HR accessible to them. Easy that they can do that on the fly at the edges of a workday when there may be time. Yeah, and therefore this need to be intuitive and easy to understand. Our HR landscape was very much dominated by lawyers describing that. And that's a journey you need to take, take complexity out of language, out of structure, out of processes that resonates end to end. And for our first time we use Pega as a spider in the web to really orchestrate this end-to-end process, from the first contact to the update in SAP or Oracle systems along the whole channel, and therefore, mobile apps, for web interfaces, even on paper, unfortunately still. Automation drives this. I mean, we can all agree that this is one of the major levels for efficiency, but at the end of the day, it's also that we have certain levels of expectation when it comes to HR services. And that's what we experience in the daily life, so that stuff needs to be easy to find, easy to understand. You want to be noticed which steps your HR request takes, when it will be done. You maybe want to update it as we go. So that are just functions that have never been possible before. Yeah, before it was you send an email, which is the worst possible way because it's unstructured communication and at any point you get an answer or no. Yeah, a bit to exaggerate. So, that was our direction, which we're heading for. Intuitive self-service, yeah. Build a system for self-sufficiency, end-to-end optimized processes in a digital way, omnichannel ready with features that delight. And here Jeremy, I think you wanted to say a few words.

- I do, I'd also like to ask a quick question if that's okay. I'm curious how many of you as you're designing your processes in Pega are thinking self-service first? That's a relatively small number. I come from that background. I come from a self-service background. So I'll just make the argument that Daniel's also making on our behalf. I would encourage you to do that.

- I can just tell you, and that may be surprising when we have a hiring process at Deutsche Telekom, 90% of this process are without HR involvement. They approve that there is a position written out and they crosscheck that you don't overpay the person you have selected. Everything in between, who you're hiring, the way of how you reject employees, that's all orchestrated by the systems, by a manager itself. No need to reach out to HR. That streamlines, that gives you freedom to act.

- So, I would encourage you particularly 'cause self-service is often the simplified version of the process, stripping complexity out. Start there, layer in additional pieces that might be the exception cases when something gets to someone who might need to do work, right, in a back office or a contact center scenario. So, just as a strategy around thinking about as you're blueprinting, as you're thinking about process design, start simple and layer on the complexity. And if you've got that simple core, it makes it easier to sort of externalize that work, right?

- And one of the first cornerstones I recommend to take, and it's unfortunately early in your journey with Pega, is to have a robust thinking about your enterprise class structure. That's something we invested strongly because it defines which rule set you bundle as reusable item and where you make that accessible. We started just off with one branch with HR, yeah. But at this point in time, we already got aware that there are functions that are valuable, we come to the point value, for other units as well. Single sign on, connecting single sign on for a new system, I don't know how it's for you. For us, it's really, really painful to get there. I mean, it's a standard process. It's not that you screw it, but it takes lead time. You need to reprioritize, it's costly, la, di, la, di, la. So, that is stuff where we say, "Let's create a building block that manages that, which we can just drag and plug and play, make accessible for everyone who needs authentication." I mean, we are talking internal business. Yeah. So it's not that we have unknown customers. If it's employees, we know them, we pay them. Yeah, so that's good. And then we went in two dimensions. We are an international company. We are serving more than 25 countries with employees. So, we say, "Okay, let's do a localization layer," on which we say, "There we bundle all databases that are related to one country," which is country specific. Yeah, on the other hand side, we are doing HR. So, let's do the HR basics connectors, for example, and other stuff and bundle them in there. We split that in half and bundled all the processes that we get in the so-called HR shared services framework, everything on top of the Pega platform and on Pega customer service. On the first things would say, "Okay, yeah, what is it good for?" This enables us now and we are rolling out Pega in the area of ESG, we are on an international track now, we have other things where we are discussing, for example, in the area of compliance, and that allows us to plug and play new countries, new processes and have a variation there by making sure that these functionalities are available and make that ready for scale and for growth. And also, we stay in control of the governance because we can clearly define who inherits what. The unfortunate thing is, and we did this effort very strongly, refactoring an enterprise class structure is not an easy task. It's really painful, but if you build a platform to scale, it's essential that you get the right structure and it will evolve as you go because you don't know at day one where to put everything. But the more you roll out, the more specific you will get. Always happy to take questions in between because with the next chapter, we talk about how to spend our money.

- [Jeremy] Can I interject for a second?

- [Daniel] Absolutely.

- I wanna ask another question, which is another design question. As you're all engaging in building and designing, do you build in that componentized way, leveraging what we call the layer cake where you're sort of, you know, leveraging the country specific stuff against a set of common components? Is that how you build when you build in Pega? Is that the way you think when you're designing? Or does that feel provocative and new or is it impossible for some reason? Yeah. Could you step to a mic so we can hear you please.

- [Audience] Hi, so as an employee of Sun Life, which is also a global company, we are looking on the verge of expanding our operations beyond Canada and some of the realities, it was great to hear you say rule set because that's actually the bread and butter stuff, right? But the way we define layer cakes sometimes over the period of time there is obviously a upkeep required to keep it in sync.

- Absolutely.

- [Audience] With new layers coming in, new complexities coming in. With Pega, what we have also seen is when you instantiate Pega into multiple chunks, multiple stacks, that is where the complexity arises. Where it kind of is subjective. People can do their own things and you know, dive away from, and I know we can tie them all together using CICD pipelines, but what level of governance do you guys have to keep to make sure that it's still kind of that same well-oiled machine?

- That's the perfect question for me, to be honest.

- Great, great question.

- Because I'm taking care of an area which is called design authority. And as such, I'm responsible for all finance and all HR systems within Deutsche Telekom with regards to IT and process governance. So, even if that may sound painful, we check every epic. There's stuff where you can say, "Okay, that's a walk off." You know, new eye or something which is straightforward but still four-eyes principle, somebody checks it, and if it's a fast track, we kick it off. But we have a weekly meeting of one and a half hours. We are also our top IT architects, like SIF in the first row are participating and making judgment calls. And we check that those implementations are good and we also force teams, if it's in a different stack, to reallocate their item to make sure that if they invent something that is reusable and valuable for others, to have it there. It may sound not agile, I would contradict because on the track you are at from defining to delivering, let's say you're fast, let's say you do a two-week sprint. So, at any of those times, and we jump in, if it's really urgent, you have the chance to discuss it once. And the payoff is really good because you force people to stay in standard, to measure the guidelines, and it's not a convenient meeting if you're not prepared. Yeah, and that is one of the main levels to say, "Be prepared, it's gonna be easy, be not prepared, gonna be tough." And second part that we got is we measure guardrails and so-called standardization quota. So, we have a monthly report for every application, guardrail for every application. Something we call standard quota that we count the number of rules that are overwritten and we check warnings and people need to report on warnings. And you're not listening, right? The worst thing is final rule overrides. That's something you get really famous for. So, but that provides discipline to the organization. You have your freedom, you have your area where you connect, but play by the rules, yeah. You need to get used to it and it takes authority. That's why it's called design authority. But you refactor less, things are are working along each other, you prevent... Can I say fuck ups? You prevent fuck ups, yeah. So...

- It's Vegas. Do what you will.

- So, you really prevent those things. You know, when you're having, I mean we are a large company, we have different methodologies of authentication and we had once the example that they wanted to add an additional one and by accident they want to cut off the other. So, that creates noise in the organization you don't want to have, and having this check is really helpful. And by the way, if your application is below a gut rate score of 95, you're not deployed. Yeah, so it's really strict.

- Thank you.

- You're welcome. Where does value come from Pega? Yeah, we ask that ourself. We have huge discussions. I mean having to implement 800 processes means you need to industrialize, it needs to run like a train, perform like a production side, yeah, in standard patterns. But the point is the following, at a certain point in time, a team passes by a business team, they know it's my time. Yeah, now I get everything I ever wished for. And they will keep demanding, demanding, demanding, demanding. I don't know how that is for you, but cutting off business is always a difficult and unconvenient discussion. Yeah, because they will comment, "Yeah but that's vital. I can't give my approval to go live la, di, la, di, la." We time box, things like that. But when I ask where value in Pega is created, nine out of 10 people are saying, "It's great in automation, it's amazing how it automates, how it connects to other systems. That's great. That's what we use Pega for." I would say that is not wrong, but my perspective is when we talk about automation, we very often coping and covering up certain symptoms but not resolving an actual problem. Automation is very often expensive. I would say Pega is doing a good job on their side, but you need to adjust the system you wanna automate as well. So, you are, again, we are an agile organization, you need to be prioritized, you need to schedule in the release train, and so on. And turns out that you rather are beneficial when you're working on the root cause. So, also shifting responsibility from IT to business to solve that. And to explain that a bit more concrete, I would like to take you on a journey through a typical day of an HR process. So, the challenge in HR is that amateurs discuss with professionals. I mean when you're in finance or amongst IT, professionals are working with professionals. You have your terms, you have your rules all set. But in HR, it can be Jeremy calling and asking something. Yeah, so it's totally, you explain things like you understand them. And many things in HR are difficult to explain, parental leave, for example. So, the first point, and that was a huge benefit for us, is to streamline and structure the information part. Pega does that by managing the access rights of our employee groups. We have tariff employees, non tariff, executive, civil servants, interns, apprentices, whatsoever. Yeah, so giving them the right information relevant for them is a value. But then make that easy and streamline it down. So, when I first presented it, it was like the bottle saying, "Looks unspectacular." Yeah, and that's exactly the point. You don't want people to spend time there. HR is a waste of time. I am gonna be killed by the CHOO if I repeat that. But what I mean by that, it's killing production time. It's not what you want your staff to spend time on. And the next thing that we do, I mean customers call, they are consulted, and we reduce our calls by providing proper information. Second thing is production readiness, from my perspective, often underestimated. When you have forms and if you wanna start a request, let's say for parental leave, you sure... Or let's say for sick leave because your child is sick, you should have registered a child so that you can take that. It should be on a future date and not on a past date or today forward. You should clean that up. You should use dropdown fields. I mean, literally, what can go wrong will go wrong on those processes. Business gets very creative to get their stuff started. And then HR, it's like water it find its way, yeah. So, because it's material to them and that's screws your automation and it's the most painful thing you can do. If you're not good in production readiness, you're chasing the customer down. If you decline it just, it's not okay. Here you have it back. Yeah, customer's unhappy. It's not the way you treat your people, yeah. But elsewise, you're chasing it down. You're calling them, they're not picking up. You're calling again, you're sending an email. Second time information is also not right because they didn't get it. So, investing in a self-service front end, it's by far better than half people send emails or calling because it eases it up for them. Because anyhow, you're going to require this information. And that is also the baseline. And we experiment with that a bit, but we didn't put it live yet. That Pega chat also allows you to do that in a dialogue manner that is just from customer's perception by far better, instead of here are 25 fields with information to have a chat agent ask, "Okay, I'm going to put that for you. Could you share your address? And then I need this and then..." So, as a guided conversation that is creating more sufficiency. We have the point of research and investigation. Today, the question that we get is rarely like, "Has my vacation been booked?" Yeah. Or, "How many vacation days do I get?" We fixed that in the first step. Yeah. The questions we got is, "I have been on parental leave and I'm on part-time now, but it looks like that my holiday from last year hasn't been carried over and this year's data is wrong." So, that's the kind of questions we get on the hotline. Everyone who has an HR department knows what I'm talking about I think. But you need to figure out what's the part of the question you need to research, you need to identify that you wanna see former interactions, you need to look up the parental leave contract you made. So you're chasing all that stuff down. And it's cool because it's sounds so easy, but where's the information? We have SAP HCM where all the master data, where timekeeping and vacation is, we have success factors with certain items are, and then we have pickup processes and we have paper. Yeah, so you need to bundle that and want to have that in a 360 degree view. And Pega orchestrates those information. Yeah. It goes into the personal file to check that and allows, and we are looking forward for GenAI to summarize that for us. Yeah. But we have this central data point. Thirdly, data input and calculation. Yes, here we automate. Yeah, you want to have payroll simulated, you want to have the data in ideal way, it's zero touch end to end. And that can make sense in many cases, depending how much effort you put in. Specifically for HR, a general HR process is a master data change and the document creation. So, creating contracts, filing them, putting them to the personal file is relevant for us at last and order tracking. Because if we tell people when we are done, they stop calling us. So, that takes a lot of workload from the contact center because we have this stupid request like, "Could you tell me when my vacation time is booked? Or when you have approved my parental leave or something like that." We tell them in the front, we tell them it's gonna take three weeks and ideally we need two weeks because then customer's happy that it has been faster. But you can be sure three weeks and a day they call. Yeah. So that manages also our backlog and helps us to provide customer service according to expectation. And with the business discussion, especially in this beautiful agile world, where we prioritize time instead of money, we have the point that we always need to translate that and need to challenge the guys in a way to say what does it cost to optimize that? What's the budget that you got? And actually consider how much value it brings because we need to say all the business experts have the tendency to rely to IT. It's the other way around as well. Yeah, so no finger pointing. But the thing is, the more thorough you think on what can be screwed by the customer and where the customer pain in the process is, the easier you can fix it. Yeah, just as an example, we optimized our travel expense system. And travel expense is the most painful thing that in some cases you need to loan your money to the company and then you chase it back. So, whatever we could, we tried to connect. So, in today's world, you don't need to book your taxi, your hotel, your air transportation, your ground transportation. We all pay that by directly being linked to others. And that's a bit the mindset by which we approach it to say what creates the value, what bothers employees when they're in context to HR and try to take pain out of this equation. That can be complexity of a form that can be... Having a person you can talk to, it varies, yeah. And that is in the business and that's where we hold them accountable. So to sum it up at this point it's a bit eased up, but I try to come up with a quick summary, production readiness, so thinking about your process, which steps to be taken. Data fields is something totally underestimated. Yeah. It takes time. It needs to be validated and it is the main driver for efficiency because at the end of the day, the implementation effort for IT is easy. It's fastly done. You need to anyhow have the form, yeah. So, the more thinking you put in there, the more value you get out of that. I'm always very carefully with automating data input and calculation, connecting to other systems especially, and we are talking here mass business, right, 800 processes. If you have your one specific process, you design in the best way possible for sure. But if you need to run a lot of processes through an implementation project, that's the thing which can make you slow, which can drain you. And nobody said that once you have implemented all the processes, you can do the automation afterwards. And that is rounding it up from my perspective in here, good is good enough. Yeah. Don't die in beauty. If you have something that is working, provides a better service than it does today, provides the efficiency you are expecting, it's time to move for the next process. You can come back later when you're done. Business is not going to be happy. But that's the only way you have a chance to manage such a volume of transactions. And the last thing, and I don't know if you treat it in a similar way, but we do it, we repeat and resell our innovation. We have a lot of processes in the company having volumes between 20,000 and I would say 150,000 tickets, where very quickly you run out of budget for the sake that you don't have an application, AOAM budget, application operation, application maintenance, that you need to connect third party systems and so on. What we did, and now we close the loop towards the first slide of the presentation where we talked about the enterprise class structure, having a reusable items for a middleware connector, an authentication layer, connection, corporate . So, all the things nearly everyone needs that has a value. Somebody gladly pays money. I mean we are talking internal business here, but I think everyone who works in a corporation knows that there are branches which are competing and everyone needs to do their stuff and needs to get their things in order. So, you let them participate and in return get funding to refinance your platform. You give them the freedom to do their thing, but on the other hand, you get the governance to keep the things together and have a lever to really build a scalable platform. We really see that. I mean we are the shared service of Deutsche Telekom, but we really see that as a service to do stuff quick and to provide IT architecture to the organization. I mean, in former times when we implemented a software, it took us two and a half, three months till things were done with data security and privacy approval, with connecting to single sign in, and so on. We now can provide with Pega an instance which has all disconnect us in less than 14 days. So, you can come up with an idea, we talk about the the budget, we provide it to you, you're good to go. Yeah, and that is the part where we say there is a willingness to pay within the organization in order to participate. No one said that you need to give your platform for free. Yeah, and that, I mean, you shouldn't overprice as well, but it's a fair share in order to refinance and make sure that new reusables emerge out of that business. Because if you give it away for free, valuation may be so, so. To close my session, and was a wild ride through the HR implementation, first thing, an underestimated right modular structure. If you do that good, you benefit from reusability, speed, and scale. Second, be careful where you spend your money on. Even if it's automate, if you don't get the production readiness done, you won't be good. And last but not least, get creative. There are cases and values for your organization and the stuff that you do and you need to take, you need to see your whole platform as a reusable asset, which might bring benefit to someone else in your company. And they will gladly let you participate on that as well. I don't have anything more to say, I'm afraid, but I gladly take questions.

- I think we're done. I'll close with, you know, come to my GenAI session this afternoon, but I'm glad we got through a session without talking only about that, right? Get your big rocks right, right? Get the core stuff right and then layer the incremental value on top of that. You can do it incrementally, right? So, make the basic investments first. Get those places in and then you've got a place to lay your value. You've got a place to lay your AI to move things forward, but not until you know what the pieces are to move that stuff forward. I think we're done. We'll take questions if you've got 'em or hang around for a little bit and chat afterwards. Thanks again for coming.

- Thank you.

- Any closing group questions? Looks like not. All right, we'll hang around for a few minutes if you wanna come chat. Thanks everybody.