Pegasystems has a single base for all the software it develops: Pega Infinity. During the virtual version of the PegaWorld iNSpire conference, the company announced that Infinity 8.6 will be available from the end of Q2. As usual, this means many new features, for front-end, back-end and customer engagement.
In general, the new features fall under three different components of Pega: Pega Platform, Pega Customer Service and Pega Customer Decision Hub. We’ll walk through the most notable updates for each component below.
Pega Platform
Within Pega Platform, the main focus is to speed up application development. These updates are therefore aimed at the developers within organizations, both professional developers and citizen developers. Low-code plays an important role in this. In Infinity 8.6 Pega has updated and simplified the design UIs. These updates are so important according to Pega that the company has sent out a separate press release about them. We have incorporated that into this article.
In addition to the innovations in the area of low-code, we also note updates in the area of Pega Process AI. This component brings together the AI-driven decisioning that Pega is strongly committed to with the company’s low-code process automation software. A few weeks ago, Pega sent out a post about this, which we’ve incorporated into this article.
The latest news around Pega Platform is that Process Fabric, announced last year, is generally available in Infinity 8.6.
Pega Customer Service
Within Customer Service, Pega has expanded the range of channels you can use to communicate with customers. The idea behind this is that the customer, who often has a preference for a channel, has a choice. It is now possible to have a conversation with customers and switch between channels via a single embedded message widget without compromising the quality of the conversation. Specifically, Pega lists the following channels in the press release: chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter and Apple Business Chat.
Furthermore, Pega has extended the so-called microjourneys. These are pre-configured blueprints for general incidents within a specific industry. There are new microjourneys for financial services, insurers and (tele-)communications. You can now choose from more than 180 of these types of journeys.
Finally, Pega announces that Pega Customer Service can now also be configured using the low-code capabilities of Pega App Studio. This should ensure that the responsible managers can adapt the functions within Customer Service more quickly to new requirements.
Pega Customer Decision Hub
The last component we will cover here is the Pega Customer Decision Hub. This component is mainly about personalizing the engagement between companies and their customers. For example, there are new features in the Next-Best-Action Designer. With this, marketers can better advise/engage customers to take the next step and purchase additional services or products. It is mainly about adding context, in order to get better insights into the possible wishes of the customers. Using AI, you can now also better predict what customers will or will not do.
Infinity 8.6 further enables you to manage your AI models more easily within the Customer Decision Hub. In fact, Pega has added new MLOps capabilities. Data scientists at companies can use these to roll out, update and replace models used for next-best-action purposes with better models relatively easily. In addition, it will be possible to use Shadow Mode to compare the performance of an active model with that of any replacement.
Pega Infinity 8.6 will be available from the end of Q2 2021.