For almost four decades, Pegasystems has helped the world’s leading brands solve problems fast, transforming for tomorrow using Pega’s industry leading capabilities which underpin service experience and delivery in some of the most customer-contested industry sectors on the planet. This includes 18 of the top 25 top global banks, seven of the top 10 insurance companies and nine out of the top 10 telecommunications companies – brands like Wells Fargo, VISA, Mastercard, American Express, HSBC, Pfizer, Vodafone, Commonwealth Bank, Allianz, Google, Optus, GE Healthcare and many more.
For these organisations, Pegasystems delivers an industry leading AI-powered decision and workflow automation capability on a powerful low-code platform. From personalising engagement to automating customer service to streamlining operations, Pega clients use real-time artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation to work smarter, unify experiences, and adapt instantly – benefiting both organisations and their customers.
“Since our founding, we’ve brought business and IT together with low-code technology, while our scalable centre out architecture helps enterprises stay ahead of change,” Rob Bollard, Industry Principal for Public Sector with Pegasystems, explained to The Mandarin.
In the public sector, government leaders are increasingly recognising that excellence in digital customer service is at the heart of success in delivering outstanding public sector outcomes. Good experiences can enhance citizen outcomes. They grow engagement and trust. They drive down government costs, increase compliance and maximise internal staff value and citizen satisfaction.
Pega is now empowering public sector digital transformation in more than 20 countries and facilitating over a billion interactions daily. Within the United States, they are embedded in 11 of the top 12 largest Federal public sector organisations agencies including the US Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Department of Defence.
Australia’s public sector is also strongly embracing Pega with a growing footprint including Services Australia, Home Affairs, Department of Justice and Community Safety Victoria, Transport for NSW, and the Department of Defence. And more recently, with COVID-19 creating the heightened need for agile, citizen-centric systems, many agencies are seeking Pegasystem’s expertise and capabilities to support their intelligent approach to digital transformation.
Solving public sector digital transformation challenges
At Pegasystems, transformation challenges facing the public sector are solved one journey at a time. For the UK Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, the core challenge was in transforming recruitment and onboarding processes to better support personalisation for more than 180,000 candidates every year. Today, the process is predominantly manual, which can result in long recruitment cycles and contribute to higher candidate dropout rates. The new application will help reduce the recruitment process for those candidates that wish to progress quickly to as little as 30 days. By creating a multi-channel, self-service model, candidates can take ownership of their progress and next steps, allowing recruiters to provide one on one nurturing to the candidates who need the most support during the recruitment journey.
Using a low-code approach to development, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force recruiters will be able to make future app changes themselves, any necessary changes or service improvements may be achievable in hours or days rather than weeks or months, providing the required flexibility and agility to continue to modernise and stay current.
For the US Department of Agriculture, the need was a grants management platform that was scalable, holistic, modern, and could be used to process more than $100 billion in grants, loans and cooperative agreements annually, across multiple agencies. Their new capability, ezFedGrants, has delivered a scalable grants management platform that has reduced processing time from eight months to three business days and condensed 14 human touchpoints for grants payments down to a single point through intelligent automation. The new capability provides a 360-degree view of its programs in real time, allowing for greater operational efficiencies, as well as the ability to decrease potential fraud, waste and abuse through improved audit history, tracking, and transparency.
In designing and implementing a successful intelligent automation system, Bollard said a “radical rethinking” of customer engagement is required – from reactive, to proactive, and even pre-emptive.
“Customer experience leaders know they must anticipate individual service needs to meet their increasing expectations,” he said. “They must engage proactively with next best actions, personalisation of experience, contextual and targeted informational insights and offerings to build improved outcomes and trust with their citizens.”
Leading organisations also need to be transforming their service delivery model to create a connected and frictionless service experience designed around the citizen that supports unified e-regulation that cuts red tape. This will require orchestration not just within their agency but beyond – to create service platforms shaped by strong service design centred around the citizen, encompassing public, private and not-for-profit services delivered seamlessly.
“Today there is an expectation that the public services will be as responsive and connected as the service consumers receive from banks, airlines, insurers or even when they order a pizza on their mobile phone for the family on a Friday night,” Bollard said.
The trend, he said, demands that government goes beyond data insights into leveraging data to support real actions, which support personalisation, drive greater efficiency and effectiveness of service, as well as deliver on the operational and strategic outcomes for agencies.
“Governments globally have done an incredible job in very challenging circumstances throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” Bollard said. “But the increased engagement with digital channels by citizens and growing service demands of the public, combined with urgent budget repair, will require new thinking and application of next generation intelligent automation and assisted decision making based on responsible AI.”
Responsible AI – machine learning that is purposely built with positive intent to take into account fairness, equity, biases and equality – is increasingly being used by public services and ethical corporates to reimagine personalised and seamless service delivery. “That means controlling the risks, maintaining transparency and fairness all while making AI use cases explainable and under the control of ethical and strategic rules and policies,” says Peter van der Putten, Director AI Lab at Pegasystems.
Solutions supporting Australia and New Zealand’s public sector
Within Australia and New Zealand, Pegasystems is growing strongly within the public sector thanks to an industry leading platform that continues to deliver success.
For Services Australia they are implementing an Entitlement Calculation Engine, a capability that aims to future-proof Australia’s welfare entitlements system through a market-proven, highly agile and configurable Pega platform.
In NSW, the Department of Planning and Environment is transforming the way its citizens interact with the NSW planning system. Leveraging the Pega Government Platform on Pega Cloud to create the NSW ePlanning Portal, they have reduced application determination times by over 50% – and reduced the friction between the many agencies and councils involved in the final approval processes.
Within New Zealand, the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has launched Business Connect, a platform that makes it easier for more than 800,000 small businesses to access services from multiple government agencies on a single platform. This has delivered 30% efficiency gains for first time applications, 80% efficiency gains for renewals, and 70% consistency of design to support repeatability and rapid development of the platform as new capability is added. It is estimated the potential benefit is worth $NZD300 million ($AU270.3 million) through reduced administration, faster processing of applications, and increased business productivity.
“Workflow automation and service orchestration are key elements for delivering digital Government service delivery models of the future,” Bollard said. “Government agencies are working hard particularly in the service orchestration space to leverage strong service design principles around the citizen.”
But the public sector, Bollard said, can also take their thinking around intelligent automation to the next level.
Like the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), who uses Pega capability to build deeper, more personalised relationships with each of its 14 million customers, positioning it as the market leader in customer experience management. Presenting what they call the ‘Next Best Conversation’ for each customer, across more than 18 channels seamlessly to support personalised engagement and drive value. The CBA delivers over 24 million real time personalised messages and offerings per day, to their customers in less than 200 milliseconds. This included 250 million real time personalised messages to support customers during COVID-19.
CBA has extended this capability by introducing an AI-powered benefits finder feature to proactively contact customers eligible for economic support during the pandemic and during recent natural disasters. It is currently helping customers to ease the cost of living pressures, with many able to access a range of benefits and rebates, across approximately 400 different benefits, refunds and rebates. It is estimated to have saved customers more than $481 million over the last year.
“Government has the chance to reimagine digital experience with citizens, leveraging proven technologies and use-cases from some of the most customer focussed industries on the planet including banking, finance and telecommunications,” Bollard said.
And with the right partners, this transformation can be made easier, delivering significant value to the public sector and their citizens.
