#27 - Ying Chen - On how to create breakthrough business results by augmenting people

My guest on the podcast is Ying Chen, Head of Product Marketing at Pegasystems. She’s acting as the Head of Product Marketing for Pegasystems platform for Digital Transformation. In this role, she’s leading product marketing strategy, positioning, and go-to-market. She joined Pegasystems in 2015 with more than 10 years of software product management experience in various Fortune 500 organizations and VC-backed startups.

What triggered me to invite Ying to my podcast was the story around the Pegasystem Platform – and in particular, how it helps the world’s leading brands achieve breakthrough business results by using the latest technologies to augment people.

During our interview, we explore how value potential increases once you start looking beyond just automation. How, by improving employee experience, every company can and will improve customer experience, and why much of the value can be achieved by understanding and then removing intended and unintended obstacles.

The thing that triggered me most from my interview with Ying:

“Organizations need to think from the place of what is the experience, the journey that you want to improve?

Why did this trigger me? What's the bigger value here?

Think about customer experience in the context of a call center. It’s about getting the right and relevant answers, empathy, and on-the-spot creativity to solve their case. All too often, organizations use technology to automate. But if your target is to increase customers experience, automation will only get you halfway.

Pega Systems takes the concept of Workforce Intelligence – using artificial intelligence to look at the physical employee experience to support every aspect of the customer journey. Their approach is to measure and understand the intended or unintended obstacles that employees face in their day-to-day work environment, and with that knowledge guiding them with ‘next best action’ advise. This increases quality, but more importantly, it drives a strong employee experience which in turn leads to greater customer satisfaction and helps companies achieve business outcomes with precision.

What’s the more significant question/opportunity that raises?

Following the essence of the concepts discussed above, it's striking to realize how much time, effort and investment is still focused across the board on “automation” with the aim to do “more with less”.

As Ying quoted rightly, “It’s not about how can I reduce the number of agents" – It’s about “how do I not make my customers wait”. That’s a subtle difference, but an important one. What we should strive for in developing any business software solution is “How does it contribute to growing the differentiating value your customers deliver to their customers?”

Searching for the ideal ‘Human / Machine’ combinations will result in 1+1=3 outcomes. With that, everybody wins.

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How you can dramatically improve the value of your solution by not just focusing on the current action, but actually on the next best action.
2. That applying AI and robots can be extremely beneficial for uncovering patterns in user behavior.
3. Why it’s more beneficial to focus your effort at business model innovation, rather than process optimization in isolation.