PegaWorld iNspire 2023: The Pragmatic Approach to Transforming Customer Service

Customer service transformations don't have to take years before delivering value. Join this session to learn about Pega's pragmatic approach that helped First Tech Federal Credit Union complete their transition from Salesforce to unifying its CRM solution on Pega to slash servicing costs all while improving employee productivity and the customer experience.

Transcript:

- Hi everyone, my name is Rahul Ashok, welcome to a pragmatic approach to transforming customer service. And I'm really happy to be here in-person, I know it's a cliche by this time, but it's been four years, and it's fantastic to be here in-person. And I'm joined by Mike.

- Yeah, I'm Mike Upton, chief Technology and Digital Officer at First Tech Federal Credit Union.

- Thanks, Mike. So before we get started with the topic, I actually wanted to share a story with you all. So I've been with Pega for about 18 years. I started my career as an architect, hands-on keyboard developing in Canada, that's where I was hired. And for one of my first projects where I was leading as a lead architect, I was under a lot of pressure, personally self-put pressure, 'cause I wanted to make sure the project would go really well, and my first chance to make an impression and you know, make sure nothing goes wrong. So with that, I'm an engineer by trade, so as any good engineer does, I had my lists, I had people I needed to talk to, make sure the project is executed with Pega best practices. We wanted to make sure that the business owners and the product owners were part of the session, and the user stories were well written. And we really did all that, you know, it went fairly well. We did our MLP, so for those of you new to Pega, that stands for Minimum Lovable Product, or something you can deliver in a period of about 90 days or less. And you know, our project went quite well. We were approaching our go-live, we had all the right things done for the weekend, we had SWAT teams ready to go. We made sure that if any issues cropped up, we had the teams ready to respond. And all in all, you know, things went well, there's some bumps in the road, which there always are in any program, but things went fairly well. Now, as that ended, we celebrated with a box of Tim Hortons' donuts, and if you don't know what that is, you're missing out, it's all the rage in Canada, you gotta try it if you go up there. And a couple of weeks later, I wanted to go sit down with the users. So Joe, who was our power user, and we wanted to go speak to, we walked in, it was June I think, just time now, beautiful weather, summer day. And we walk down at 9:00 AM, go through the cubicles, smell fresh coffee in the room, and I go up to Joe, and I'll pretend Mike's Joe. And I say, "Joe, so how do you like our application?" And Joe turns to me, and there's just silence. And he's like, "I'm sorry Rahul, "I don't know how to tell you this, "but I think I liked my old app."

- Huh?

- I was a gut punch, like real gut punch 'cause I had spent months of my life focused on this. And I realized that we made a fundamental error when we did that project. And that was, we didn't keep the users involved, or the final customer in mind when we were building this application. And the reason I tell you this story is, I think Mike and the First Tech team have done a fantastic job not making the mistake I did, which by the way, I've tried to avoid over the last 16 years since I learned that lesson. But it is fundamental as part of a transformation, and we're gonna talk about that today and some of the other lessons learned over my last 16 years of running projects. Mike, you wanna share something about First Tech?

- Absolutely, thank you, Rahul. It is great to see everybody in-person again, thanks for coming. So First Tech, we are the eighth largest credit union in the country. We're at about $17.5 billion dollars. And our focus is on the employee base for the world's leading technology companies. So our field of membership comes from companies like Microsoft, it comes from Amazon, comes from Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco, Nike, those kind of companies. And sometimes we get asked the question, you know, isn't it a little scary having that cohort be your customer base because their expectations are pretty darn high? And while it could be scary, it's exciting. To be held to that standard, to have those expectations really pushes us and really drives us to be America's most admired credit union. And if we're gonna do that, then we just have to get service right. And so using the Pega system and the Pega platform is core to our strategy. We were on a Salesforce platform for a number of years, and we just weren't able to do the things that were important to us to really change the service environment, the service experience the way we wanted to. When we found Pega, and we found really the focus on the business automation, the transformation, the rules as being the cornerstone of what they grew up with, that was something we got excited about that met our need. So we're gonna share our story about how we moved from Salesforce over to the Pega platform and completely transforming our service experience.

- Awesome, thanks Mike. So these are the logos you guys work with. So before I get started, hey, it's PegaWorld, right? I gotta share a little bit about Pega and Pega customer service. So we heard from from Alan earlier today, and Karem repeated it, but Pega is a low-code platform for AI-power decisioning, and workflow automation. We've taken those capabilities and brought them together to build what we consider the best customer service solution in the market. And I think Mike will agree, and we have real stories from that. But the whole point of how we deploy it is different from a lot of our competitors. We wanna make sure you focus on the journeys, and then as you do those journeys, you can extend them across channels, you can drive efficiencies, and you don't do it in a big bang approach. The key is that MLPI talk about, and again, that's minimum lovable product, we love our acronyms. But that is what sets us apart, and what I've seen driven a lot of success in my decades at Pega. So a little bit about digital transformation. Look, we have about 30 minutes here, I'm not gonna be able to cover everything on digital transformation. I'm sure they're experts here in this room who know more about it than I do. But my practical, pragmatic experience, and some research I did in preparation for this session, the fact of the matter is that about 60 to 80% of transformation projects, quote/unquote, "Fail." And by fail, they don't deliver the value they were set out to deliver when the project or program got funded. And you know, I've been part of projects that haven't gone well, I'll be frank. And the ones that have gone well, I feel they've executed differently, they've focused on execution of some key principles, and we're gonna cover four of them on this topic. So I'm just gonna share it, right? No secrets here. So number one, and we'll get into each of these and talk about it in depth, but you've got to have a vision, and that vision has to come from the top. And I'm glad I have someone from the top at First Tech to talk about that. You've got to make sure that you're focusing on key outcomes. If you can't articulate the outcome, and if you don't have the buy-in from everybody in your organization, you're gonna struggle to deliver. Focus on those quick wins. I'll share a study that MIT has done. But people need to see results early. If it takes two years to show results, you know, I think there was a line earlier where two CIOs could change in four years in companies. So you're gonna have multiple leaders go through your program if that's when you're gonna deliver your result, so fundamental to deliver measurable results. And then finally, as I mentioned on the last slide, these things are really, really hard. Things are going to go wrong, I can guarantee you. And by having the right level of connection at the executive level, at the program level, at the project level, it really makes a difference. Mike, your thoughts?

- Yeah, no, I'm in agreement, and I'm gonna amplify that last point that you made, Rahul. I think as we all know, right? We're gonna have problems in any of these large-scale implementations, we certainly had our share of them as well. The thing isn't the problem, the thing is having the human relationships, and really having those executive sponsors. And that's why I'm up here on stage talking about Pega, is because when we ran into our problems with our implementation, and we ran into our challenges, the Pega executives came to the table, they worked with us on solutions, we found ways to keep things going. And you don't find that a lot, and it was critically important. So anybody who's considering coming down this journey, absolutely build those relationships, make sure that you've got strong connections to the executive sponsors within Pega. Now, Pega is a large organization, and a lot of times it, you know, you could get lost trying to navigate different parts of the organization. But with the team that we had, with the sponsors that we had, you know, not only did we overcome the challenges, we stuck the landing, so it was a good experience.

- Yeah, it was great. Mike and I were on biweekly calls on the project as it was running, and decisions had to be made on both sides. And you know, you'll hear Leon, who runs our sales org, also talk about governance as if you don't have proper governance, you can guarantee the program project's not gonna go well, almost. So with that, let's start with a vision. So as I was preparing for this session, I wanted to do some real industry research, and Pega sponsors MIT's CISR Lab, which is their Center of Information Systems Research Lab. Dr. Stephanie Woerner and her colleagues have been doing research on digital transformation for the last 20 years. So this is heavy research, PhDs people, multiple times smarter than me. And they have identified at the end of it, you know, there's a lot of material on there. I would suggest you go look at their webinar, they do a much better job than I could in the next 20 minutes to talk about this. But fundamentally, it comes down to making a choice, and looking at these two things on the x and y axis. And what those are, it's hard to see, is customer experience and operational efficiency. So if your program is not delivering on a significant, improved customer experience while delivering the value that comes from building an operational backbone, and operational efficiency to improve margins, your program's not gonna succeed. That's their result of their research over 20 years, 1,000 companies across many different verticals. And if you look at the pathways, they talk about the 25%, 26% really talk about combining those two, and that's what Pega's approach is, that MLP approach. So focus on those quick wins, build them, see if you wanna focus on customer experience for your first journey, then look at the operational backbone. But you need to look at both those dimensions, and I think First Tech did a very employee-focused view of this. So if you can share that, Mike.

- Absolutely, so taking it out of MIT studies and bringing it back down to, you know, how are you gonna do this at your company? The thing that we decided that we were gonna focus on, on our strategy was, we need to make things easy for our employees. If we make things easy for our employees, that will translate into delightful experiences for our membership. So the very first thing that we did is, we went to our frontline teams, went to the contact center team, went out to our branches, and we saw that if a member was coming in or giving us a phone call, and they needed some sort of a servicing activity, our employees were literally going out to SharePoint, they were grabbing a document, they were downloading the document, they were typing in all the information, maybe they make a mistake, maybe they didn't make a mistake. Then they're firing it off to the back office, into the black hole, into the chasm. We had no idea if there was follow up or follow through, we didn't have service level agreements between the front and the back. We didn't even know if the members' servicing need got met, so that was the environment that we were in. We started our journey by targeting those 75 SharePoint servicing forms, and converting them into Pega workflows, the performs. It paid huge dividends for a couple of reasons. The first is, it won over the hearts and minds of our frontline staff. You know, we talk about MIT studies, we talk about strategies, we talk about efficiencies 'cause that's what executives do. But the frontline staff is listening to all this, and they're like, "I don't know what to do with it. "I don't know how to make heads or tail outta that, "I don't know what it means to me." And by the way, if it doesn't mean something to me, and if you don't show me some results, then it's just another tech vendor. It's just another platform, it's just another name, right? And they'll probably just another CIO soon. But by getting just that really quick win, by delivering that immediate tangible value, now what we did is, we changed the psychology of the organization. We started to get evangelist, they started to talk about, not the story that you told earlier.

- Yeah.

- When you went out and said, "Hey, how did it work for you?" Actually we got the opposite. We got the, "Hey, we need more of this, "Can we do more of this? "Can we do more of this faster?" And so that's the kind of attitude that you wanna have, especially if you're gonna start a journey. As a Chief Technology Officer, I'll be honest, I spend more time talking about psychology and about people than they do about technology. Because if you don't get the people right, and you all know this, if you don't get the people right, you know, the tech isn't really gonna matter. So my encouragement would be, you know, really start with the people, help them understand what problem you're solving, what it's important to solve that problem, and what you're doing for them. And you'll find that they'll start coming along the journey, and helping you with the rest of it.

- Thanks Mike. So the next one focused on business outcomes, right? I think I love how Mike and team focused on the efficiency and focus on the employees. They also had a very strong business case that they had built, and the user stories that the product owners developed were centered around measurable business outcomes. So ow are those individual user stories going to deliver the outcomes that the executives had set? And business outcomes, in my experience, also need to be reinforced. You can't just say it once at the beginning of the program, and then it goes away. This is a major change management moment, and you have to reinforce it frequently. We had Mike having conversations, we had the SVPs of the business, and the operations leads having conversations 'cause you really do have to reinforce that. And I find that at times when you're prioritizing user stories, there's a lot of pressure by people who have the loud and the strongest voices that may not achieve the outcome that you're set to achieve. So you gotta make that right balance, and that's critical, and getting the executive support for that is critical. And the business value around that, right? Like, what is the business value that you're gonna deliver? People have to believe that because it's their job, they're the ones executing the program. So having your executives, having your leaders, having your teams align around those core principles is absolutely critical. Mike, you wanna share something about how you guys did that, and what that resulted in at First Tech?

- Yeah, so we set up an executive champion group, so myself, our head of operations, our head of retail, we as the executives made the commitment to come together on a weekly basis to be sure that we were aligned. And it sounds like it's something simple, and I know depending on the size of the different organizations, that may be harder for some than others. But if you don't have that alignment internally at that executive level where everybody is understanding, what, again, the problem that we're solving, what that business value is, you know, we bring finance to the table, we wanna have full transparency as to what exactly we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're gonna go do it. And again, it comes back to getting the people right, is gonna be critically important to getting any of the deliveries right.

- Thanks Mike. So then we talked about quick wins. So what does that mean to do quick wins? I think the identification of the business problem is critical, but alongside that, you're buying Pega, you're using Pega, you've made a conscious decision to leverage this low-code platform for AI-power decisioning and workflow automation. So reuse what comes out of the box. I know it's a cliche, some folks who've been working on it for a long time, I'll always hear, "Well, it doesn't work for us, "we need to customize it "because that's not how our business is." Well, I can tell you from my experience, at least for customer service, it's a pretty standard way of, we've been doing this for 20 plus years. Our Chief Product Officer, Neal Beliveau for the CS business, ran one of the largest call center businesses in America. He's got a lot of experience, people have a lot of experience, and we really thought through our solution. What Mike and team did is, they really told the teams, "You're gonna use Pega." Sandeep is in the audience, he was our product owner, and Chris is here. And they really helped us and coalesced around, we're only going to do what is absolutely necessary, and that has resulted in some fantastic wins. I think last month you guys just upgraded to our latest version, Pega 8.8, they're ready to use the Pega gen AI capability when that comes out. So reuse of those features is critical, and Alan talked about the layer kick earlier today. What I can tell you is that as you build more applications on Pega, each subsequent application you build gets faster, and easier, and cheaper to build because you're gonna reuse the assets. Yes, you have to think about how you build it, there's a certain best practice and paradigm for building it, but that really allows you to get those benefits that we've got listed there. And I think, Mike, you guys had some fantastic success with this, right?

- We did, and I, again, I'm gonna go back to emphasizing what you shared, Rahul, don't touch it. Resist the urge, it is so tempting. You know, for a number of us that have been in the industry for a long time, we're makers, we're builders, we want to get ahold of things. You know, I don't know about y'all, but we're special, right? We're different than everybody else, right? What they are doing doesn't really work for what we're doing. Resist those urges, don't listen to those voices. The more you can stay with the core common componentry, and just leverage the low code, no code, and keep yourself, and keep your teams away from getting yourself into customizations that are gonna end up causing you a big hangover later, the better off you're gonna be. And it's easy to stand up here and talk about those things. And again, I come back to, this is why it's critically important that you have your other executives aligned, this is why the messaging to the teams, right? If you're gonna do something different, you're going to have a different result, a different outcome. You can't get in there and start messing with it before you even know how it works. And that is a compulsion that a lot of of groups have, especially the technologists, right? We get in there and wanna mess with it. So our ability to keep it simple, keep to the core, non-customization actually allowed us to accelerate our delivery. So our sprint teams that we stood up, you know, their velocity and their quality both exponentially increased throughout the project. So sometimes they say, "Hey, how do you measure whether this is working or not," right? You can measure the velocity of change that you're delivering and the quality of change that you're delivering. It's another proof point that shows people, hey, this really is working. After the big deployment, we committed to a warranty period because everybody says, "Oh, y'all are just gonna build this thing, "and then you guys are gonna go away "and all that little stuff isn't gonna get fixed." So we put a warranty period, we showed the organization everything in the warranty period. We actually ended up having a bit of a cautionary tale, we started moving so fast, we were moving too fast. So when you're delivering at velocity, you also have to remember the ability for the organization to consume change. So keep it core, keep it simple, build your momentum and your velocity, but manage the expectation that too much of a good thing can sometimes turn into a problem that you weren't anticipating.

- Yeah, absolutely. And I know those are just bullets, but I really want to call that out. First Tech replaced a fully functional Salesforce deployment that they had taken 15 years in less than nine months, including data migration to Pega customer service. And the only way that happened is 'cause they stayed out of the box, and we were able to leverage the functionality, and that change management was done. So it's done, it's been done, and it's a great, great story. And I love how fast the innovation, like the four times faster, it's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful message. All right, last item, governance. I can just sit here and talk about governance all day long, I'm super passionate about this topic. So governance is not just, you know, I think most people do governance wrong. And it's not just about getting together and providing statuses, and just saying, "Hey, everything's good, "and things look green or yellow." I think beyond the basic, I think everyone does the first two things really well. You have your daily scrum calls, you have your weekly project calls. I would say 70% plus of the time things fail, the moment it gets to program level, and executive level, governance. In my mind, what that looks like is having some real heart to heart honest conversation, difficult conversations, and saying, "Hey, we don't think you're doing this right," or "Pega," Mike called us out on it, "this is what you did, you told us, "and you weren't able to deliver, what is our solution?" And we got over that, and if we didn't have that honest, open conversation, bidirectional, I don't think it would've helped. Mark Andrews is in the room, he runs our industry teams. Mark and Mike have regular connects. Mike just met with our product folks, we've got our strategy vice president in the room here today who's talked to Mike. So we are really trying to execute this level of cadence at First Tech. I've done this at other clients of mine, and I've strongly, strongly urge everyone to do this. And if you're having challenges, talk to me, I'll help brainstorm figuring this out. And Mike, I'd love to have your opinion on this as well.

- Yeah, well I shared it earlier, right? I mean, one of the critical elements to success of anything that's ambitious is really gonna come back to those human relationships, it's really gonna come back to the sponsorship. You know, it's gonna come back to when the problems show up, right? Do the partners show up, right? And Pega's been a fantastic partner on that, you know? Yeah, enjoy the relationship with Mark, with Rahul, with, you know, the other executives. And we have challenging conversations, you know, it's not all rainbows all the time, but we all have a solution oriented mindset. And once you start to talk about things in terms of solutions, you're very transparent about the problem, it's amazing how much you can actually get done. And a number of cases, you know, Pega has pointed us to various different partners that we have brought in because, you know, we don't know everything, our organization doesn't know what it doesn't know. And so, you know, having the ability to have that conversation with a Mark who I'm saying, "Hey, I have this problem." And he's like, "Hey, you know what? "There's another institution has a problem just like that, "here's a partner of ours," right? "That we should introduce you to "because they specialize in solving that problem." And so now we have a number of those, and we're bringing them in to help us because again, it comes back to having those relationships to make the tech work.

- Yeah, it really is about the people, isn't it Mike?

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

- Yeah, all right, so you wanna share some of the results?

- Yeah, so these are our actual business results from having implemented the Pega solution. The 5,000 hours comes a lot of it, the bulk of it comes from, we automated our wires process. When we sat down and we mapped out what it took to do a wire, there were 105 process steps, it's almost embarrassing to say that. Now, clearly the members don't have to do 105 things, but there were 105 different touch points throughout the organization just to send a wire. We were able to use the Pega platform, we knocked that down to five. And so what we were able to do, is calculate the cost savings on the payment operations team, 5,000 hours of work that they didn't have to do on an annual basis. If you can take 10 different things and make 1% improvement on it, that's how you're gonna get to these types of numbers. So find the place to start, know that you're going on a longer term journey, measure the results, share the results. And in our case, meaningful savings, sped things up, made it easier for our employees, makes it better for our members, and we're just getting started on it.

- Thanks Mike. So I'm just gonna almost finished here. I think one of the things that Mike just talked about, right? Sharing and measuring, I think it's critical to understand what is going well, and we talk about it. Any kind of agile and scrum best practice, you say what's working well, what's not working well? I see that, you know, we get this inertia when programs go on, and we don't always follow that. So yes, everyone knows it, but actually executing and doing this becomes difficult. So think about even as you're joining, as each MLP progresses, what has changed, right? Maybe when you started in pre-November last year, there was nothing around generative AI. And by the time you release your first two MLPs, generative AI is a big thing. How does that fit into your strategy? Are you starting to play with some of those areas, which are gonna be imperative in business? So I think it's really critical as the program starts and continues, that you go back, you measure, you see what's going well, you see how you can optimize and what you can change, and reflect that, all right? Mike, can you share with us just kind of the timeline of this journey for you, right? How you started, what that looked like, and where you're headed?

- Yeah, so I've already talked a little bit about this, so I won't go over all of it. But again, we started with our static forms, so that we could show quick wins to our employees, so they could feel it, so they knew what it meant to them. We were making their jobs easier. Then we replaced the CRM. So we got Salesforce out, and we went and transferred over the CRM. Then we started working through that business process automation, we were looking for, where is it that we are spending a lot of manpower, doing a lot of manual work, or there's a lot of complexities. So people are busy and oftentimes they confuse being busy with, you know, being productive. And it's like, no, you're just comfortable is what you are. And by going at wires as a great example, right? Saving the payment operations team all that time. Now, they're a huge evangelist. Now, the other parts of the organization are coming forward, and they're saying, "Hey, you know what? "We're doing all this stuff manually. "How do we let our employees work on things "that are more interesting, they're more compelling, "they're more important? "Save money for the organization, "and create a different and a better outcome, "and a better delivery for the membership." And now where we're working is, we're working on a proof of concept pilot around personalization. So we're looking at the customer decision hub based off of the strength that we've built in the servicing side. Now, we're gonna work on that. How am I gonna have a one-to-one relationship with my member? Where am I gonna be able to be present at the moment that being present matters the most, whether it's across our contact center, whether it's across our retail branch, whether it's across our digital channel? And here again, we're gonna start small, we're gonna start focused. we're looking at our deposit products. Everybody needs deposits these days. And we're looking at creating that an experience such as if you're an existing member, you come online, you've logged in, we know who you are, we can present you, we see you don't have a bump CD, where we can bump you up, we can get you greater savings than what you have today. So we can put that in front of you in that moment, and we will learn, did it work? Did it not work for you? Not for Gen X, not for millennial, not for somebody, you know, with this income statement and this age. Those types of segmentations, they don't work, they're not good enough. And so we're excited that we're gonna be going down that journey of converting you the theory of personalization into the practical application of personalization when and where it matters the most for our members. And we're using the Pega system because it will learn, and we will calibrate, and each time we have an interaction with our member, we're gonna tailor the experience to that member.

- Thanks Mike. And the best part is it's all unified, we've got our brains and workflow automation all working together. And with that we'll open it up for any questions. Mike, the mic-

- The mics.

- Oh, there are two mics?

- Microphones.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, if anybody... And if anybody wants to stay afterwards, you know, I think both Rahul and I are gonna be here after. I know it's a a busy day for y'all, so.

- So going from Salesforce to Pega was probably a pretty big culture shock for your company. I'm wondering how did you navigate that, and convince them that Pega was the better solution?

- Yeah, that's a good one. Actually, we benefited a little bit because our teams were so frustrated with Salesforce that we had the opportunity to get it right when we did it with Pega. And by using that example, by starting with those static forms, and converting forms into automated workflows that pre-populated that frontline staff that was discontent with the existing solution. When they saw this, that's when they got so excited, and they were like, they couldn't get off Salesforce fast enough. So again, back to the cultural psychology of your organization. I hate to say it sometimes, you know, financial institutions, they love to hate their vendors, right? And we love to hate Salesforce, but when we offered something better that people could connect with, they could see that it made their job easier, they could see the power of it, that changed the psychology, you know, that was a little spark that lit the fuse. So it wasn't that hard to get them off Salesforce, but it is hard to make sure you do it right, getting onto the next platform, if that makes sense.

- Yeah, so was it more of a change of process, or was it more of a change of the vendor that made the difference?

- Well, I think our staff, they sort of put the two together, you know, so Salesforce is Salesforce, Pega is Pega, most of our frontline staff couldn't tell you the difference between the two of them. But they know that this system is very difficult for them to use, and they struggle with it. And then when we introduced the performs, which is again one of these low-value, high volume tasks that they're typing all this stuff in, and they're throwing it to the back office, and they lose visibility, and they don't know if anything happened. Solving that problem for them, using the Pega solution, they equated, you made my life easier with this process, therefore I love this platform.

- Thank you.

- [Mike] Yeah.

- All right, I think of this.

- Okay, yeah.

- Okay question.

- Just to build on that question just a little bit.

- Yeah.

- So I mean, you know, Salesforce, Pega, and at some point, right? They're very similar, they can do a lot of the same things. And I think what the gentleman was trying to get to as well, is like, if you did Salesforce with the process you built at Pega, could Salesforce worked, or was it going to Pega as tech, that was the answer? Or was the way that you utilized it went about building your process what made the big shift? And that was one of the questions that I had, it says, you went from Pega, and I think it was '21, right? You went from Pega, or I'm sorry-

- [Mike] Salesforce, mm-hmm.

- Salesforce to Pega, and replaced the CRM. How did you go about making sure you didn't put like, for lack of a better word, right? Crap in crap out, right? Just replicating what's already existing, how did you go about that?

- Yeah, so that, if you're gonna go and you're gonna replace a major platform of any type, whether it's a Salesforce, it's a core system, any of these things. Understanding the problems that you're trying to solve, getting very clear about that, building out those use cases before you start the tech project, so that you know what problem you're solving, what order the problems you're gonna solve, how you sort of build that model, is vitally important because you've got your legacy, and your legacy is your legacy for all the reasons that your legacy is your legacy. Everybody has good intentions, they all mean well, over time they sort of cobble all that stuff together. We looked at a couple of factors, could you use Salesforce, and could you go back through and re-engineer the thing, the Frankenberger that we'd built over the years? Or should we go clean slate, transport the data over, but then really build it out the right way? There were two other things that, well, one thing that really, really helped us in that decisioning. So if you use the Gartner, right? You see the Magic Quadrant, Salesforce's CRM number one, Pega's number two. So we're like, okay. You go to Gartner's Magic Quadrant, you looked at the Business Process Management, BPMS, right? The rules automation, the workflow automations. Pega is number one, Salesforce is barely on the chart. So what problem am I trying to solve over the long haul? Am I trying to solve a CRM problem, or am I trying to solve a larger business process automation workflow problem that has AI inherently built into it, that I can then journey into, personalized one-on-one engagements? So my answer for us was, it's a combination of clean slate, picking the best tech, and giving yourself the ability to not touch all those objects, was a reboot and a restart. And so that I think, we tried to learn a lot of our mistake lessons, and when we saw the tech, and where the tech could take us, it was a lot easier 'cause I'm not just swapping out CRMs, and I'm not gonna waste a bunch of time trying to turn Salesforce into something that it isn't.

- [Audience Member] Great, thank you .

- Cool, all right.

- Okay, if no other questions, then I just wanted to share a couple of sessions. So if you wanna look at the latest technology, you know, go to the innovation booth, there's a whole section on customer service that we have. These are the sessions for tomorrow, we've got Virgin Media Ireland, we've got Bupa Healthcare, Verizon & Cognizant have been doing great work in transforming customer experience there through AI and automation. And finally, I think it's one of the most popular sessions that I've seen at previous PegaWorlds, we put our product folks up on the table and it's like an ask me anything. So that's tomorrow evening, and hopefully I'll see some of you there. All right, thank you everyone.

- [Mike] Thanks.

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