Case Study
DKB accelerates connected self-service and operations
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Quickly extended workflows to digital self-service
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Transformed project delivery process
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Improved design and architecture, reducing TCO
“Pega enables our teams with a single platform where business, development, and design can collaborate on the ideal customer journey, which both digitizes and automates our back-office processes and can be easily extended to customers directly through web and mobile. Pega has accelerated the delivery of customer self-service capabilities and done so in a way which will provide greater reuse and maintainability moving forward.”
The Business Issue
With nearly 5.5 million customers, Deutsche Kreditbank (DKB) is one of the largest banks in Germany with a focus on responsibility, sustainability, and giving back to the local community.
DKB’s focus is on providing a seamless, accessible experience for its customers at every touchpoint. Which in today’s age means taking existing service and operations workflows and extending them to customer self-service. It also means connecting customer-facing front ends – like web and mobile apps – directly to operational workflows in a way that is:
- Fast – limiting the amount of custom UI and integration development needed in order to deliver a seamless customer experience, matching DKB’s brand.
- Secure – leveraging DKB’s security architecture and best practices with little custom componentry to close gaps.
- Maintainable – enabling agility through proper separation of UX and workflow and ensuring changes to one layer (e.g. UX or workflow) do not require development and testing in all layers.
The Solution
Pictured: self-service workflow built on Pega embedded into DKB’s customer-facing website using Pega Web Embed
DKB started on a multi-year journey with Pega to build a platform for customer service and operations workflows that could be extended for direct customer self-service. By building customer service and operations workflows on Pega, DKB saw an opportunity to accelerate on its self-service strategy in two ways:
- First, by improving business, IT, and design collaboration by bringing all three functions together into a streamlined framework to accelerate the overall delivery time.
- Second, by building service and operations workflows that could be shared across front-office, back-office, and customer self-service through Pega’s unique Center-out™ business architecture that enables workflows to be quickly deployed to multiple channels – enabling collaboration by customer service agents, operations employees, and customers directly.
In addition, DKB chose Pega to deliver on its technical requirements for its self-service platform:
- Front-end integration – Pega Web Embed enabled a seamless front-end and workflow integration, which is more responsive and secure than iFrame-based approaches and requires less custom UI development to create a seamless UX.
- Lower TCO – Pega DX API provides a unique integration pattern for self-service. The DX API provides UI metadata – driven by the workflow – to power front-end experiences, so workflows can be embedded into front-office channels in a way where UI, data, and workflow can be adapted independently while maintaining a consistent experience.
- Low code – Low code accelerates development in comparison to coding. But with Pega Constellation, low code enforces a better technical design that is more composable and more maintainable.
- Performance – Through a single-page web app architecture built on top of the DX API and a React-based front end, DKB webpages can send less data, reduce “chattiness,” and provide a more responsive user experience.
The Results
DKB has deployed the first nine self-service workflows directly to customers through its corporate website. Across all these workflows, it has been able to:
- Focus on the customer journey – Moving from focusing on UI mockups to designing end-to-end workflows. This allows improvement to the design, development, and business collaboration process.
- Seamlessly embed workflows into the front end – Spending less time on custom UI code to ensure iFrames work seamlessly across web and mobile. With Pega, DKB can embed workflows into its front end such that it inherits all styling, layout, and security directly.
- Build a more componentized architecture – By moving business logic from UI into the workflow and data layers, DKB is able to drive more reuse of views and automations while decreasing maintenance time.
DKB plans to continue building out customer self-service capabilities on Pega – with plans to deploy another five workflows this year. It also sees an opportunity to transform its end-to-end delivery model with Pega – with plans to look into:
- Accelerating the design-to-development process – Design and development are working to embed Pega’s reusable patterns into DKB’s design process, decreasing the design-to-development handoff time.
- Rapid, business-led prototyping – With Pega’s rethought low-code UX configuration experience, there’s potential to bypass requirements documents and for business and IT to work together collaboratively to go directly into a working prototype in days, not weeks.