This is the introductory blog in a five-part series that describes how to implement the Pega Customer Decision Hub by following the Pega Express™ Delivery Approach end to end, and in the right way.
Previously, we explained why next-best-action is a superior approach to customer engagement. To reach this desired state, a focused transformation program is needed, considering not only technical and functional, but also organizational transformation aspects.
Your program needs to start with the right first scope, for the right reasons, and of course, in the right way. Implementing the Pega Customer Decision Hub can be easy with the right support, and we’ll gift you with all the free tools and resources you need to get it right. Our gift to you will be the gift that keeps on giving to your organization.
Following an agile methodology when delivering your use cases allows you to quickly implement and gain value. And, while you implement the consecutive projects and use cases on your roadmap, you will already be reaping the benefits from each of the completed projects.
In this blog, I’d like to provide a high-level overview of the Pega Express Delivery Approach, which will help you get started. This consists of four phases:
Discover
In this phase, the delivery team verifies the selected scope and business outcomes.
Now, how to do that in an exhaustive way?
Here comes our first gift to you: Pega developed a specific asset called the Solution Alignment Workshop (SAW), which ensures you’ve met all entry criteria for a successful project kickoff, so you can deliver on your promise of an on-time, quality delivery.
During this phase, you also need to make sure all your stakeholders are informed and aligned.
A project would typically include deliverables on the project management side, like a formalized project plan and milestone planning, as well as a detailed definition of the functional, technical, and organization deliverables. Examples of these are: an assessment of the as-is and target state logic blueprint, an overview of the as-is organization, or a definition of the protocols used for backend and frontend integration.
For each of these, Pega has a complete set of templates available.
Prepare
In this phase, you’ll make sure the infrastructure that you’ll be running your Customer Decision Hub on is in place and functioning well. Let’s call this: “what the box stands on.”
This includes the application and setup of the right cloud environment. Also, here you’ll look at how to configure the Customer Decision Hub application itself and make sure you've integrated and tested the various data sources and other front and backend applications.
Build
In this phase, you’ll start to build out the actual use cases that create client value. Let’s call this: “what you put in the box.”
You can do this by developing decision logic, offers and actions, prioritization formulae, as well as introducing mathematical modeling and self-learning AI into the mix.
The result is a “logic blueprint” that allows you to fulfill your use case (e.g., cross-selling a group of products on your website), but is at the same time robust enough for all your future implementations.
To help you do this, we’ll give you three more important assets as gifts:
- Standard analytical data models:
These data models have more than 200 “best practice” attributes, and recommendations on when and how to apply them. They provide a detailed overview, in tableform, of the data that you’d want to know about your customer, how it should be used, and from where it should be sourced.
-
Frameworks:
These templates define a standard configuration to accelerate your implementation of Pega Next-Best-Action Designer and Pega Customer Decision Hub. They help you automatically optimize business outcomes for typical areas like Acquire, Nurture, Grow, Service, and Retain.
-
Next-Best-Action Designer:
Pega’s Next-Best-Action Designer empowers clients to create, configure, and activate their one-to-one engagement strategies, following a straightforward approach. It will decrease your time to value with foolproof configuration, and helps you avoid common mistakes, like focusing on segmentation.
Adopt
In this phase, you make sure that the organization is enabled to run the Customer Decision Hub by itself, making sure all the members and stakeholders involved know their roles, tasks, and activities. This is often the most interesting and most rewarding part of an implementation. This is what I call: “the people that manage the box, and the people that manage the people that manage the box.”
We’ve defined best practices across three areas of people and process that should help you on your way. In an upcoming blog post dedicated to the Adopt phase, I will describe the three most important best practices, including:
- Agility
Having the right process to consume and make changes is critical to support getting to market fast, balanced with mitigating risk. I’ll describe in detail the agile approach taken to transform business requirements, large and small, into tested and deployed changes in the Customer Decision Hub.
- Governance
The Governance best practices describe how the Customer Decision Hub solution fits in the broader organization, helping you create support, as well as decide on and prioritize large and small program changes.
- Execution
This is the real stuff: it describes the roles and responsibilities of the operational team at the core of the solution, and how to enable them.
And now you have it, a complete overview of the tasks involved in running a successful Customer Decision Hub project, and how we are here to help. Plus, you have our set of gifts to help you Discover, Prepare, Build and Adopt. But it doesn’t stop here. The proof of the pudding is in the eating! I’d encourage using this approach and the assets in your projects and letting me know when you succeed or run into trouble. If you want to know more, keep following this blog series, and read on below for detailed information on each of these topics.
In upcoming blog posts, we’ll dive deeper into the changes that need to take place across people, processes, and technology for an organization to experience the incredible business benefits of a next-best-action engagement approach.
Recommended Resources:
-
Take this Pega Academy training to learn more about how to deliver a Customer Decision Hub project successfully, and which assets are available from Pega.
-
View our webinar series, “The Ins and Outs of 1:1 Engagement” to learn how to connect conversations and build relationships.
-
Download the whitepaper, “Crossing the chasm: From campaigns to always-on marketing,” to learn how 1-to-1 marketing helps increase customer value.
-
Find the relevant assets for your microjourney on the Customer Decision Hub site.
-
Visit the Business Excellence page to access up-to-date reference materials on following best practices.
Don't Forget
- JOIN THE CONVERSATION on Collaboration Center
- FOLLOW @PegaDeveloper on Twitter
- SUBSCRIBE to the Pega Developer Podcast on Spotify or via RSS