PegaWorld iNspire 2023: Pega is the Beating Heart of Virgin Media Ireland’s Total Customer Transformation

In less than 12 months, Virgin Media has transformed its customer service and product offering delivery to new levels, using customer intimacy to propel the company forward. With Pega Customer Decision Hub™ and Pega Customer Service™, Virgin has driven simplification across B2C customer journeys and rolled out the latest version of Pega across all channels – initially focusing on customer service and swiftly adding Customer Decision Hub for marketing journeys on Virgin Media cloud. Learn how customers are connected in real time using a single brain that enables an omni-channel, self-learning approach.

Transcript:

- Good morning everybody. My name is Mark Jackson. I work in Pega's comms and media team, and I have the pleasure of introducing Virgin Media today to you. We've heard the warmer pack this morning, and he gave us a good shout out. So now the real time real meets gonna happen here. And before I introduce them, I did want to give them big shout out because hopefully you've heard that they were winner of our innovation award, along with Telenet, another part of the Liberty Global Group for the work that John and the team have done. So it was great to see that, and it's great to see them there rewarded for that. So brilliant. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Terry and Stuart who will talk to you about what Virgin Meter Island are doing.

- Good morning, everyone. You're all really welcome to our breakout session today. We are here... Well, first of all, it's been an amazing event so far, and we'd just like to thank our friends in Pega for inviting us here today to share our story with you. Thanks, guys. Our story today is going to take you through our journey, our vision for the product. We'll tell you a little bit about ourselves and where we're from, our implementation of the product and our next steps. If you hadn't already noticed from the 80 foot screen and recognize me, my name is Terry McCaul and I am four and a half years with Virgin Media Ireland. I am leading teams in the telecommunications industry for the past 20 years, so I've seen a lot of what works and what doesn't work.

- Yeah. Morning, everyone. Yes, my name's Stuart Jameson, and I'm the Senior Digital Transformation Manager. I've joined the company in 2007, so a long time now at this stage, but a few various roles through that period. But I suppose I've always really in some element of product management. So my role now is I kind of look after all of the agent toolkit, the digital side of the house, and our kind of sales order entry systems and anything in between really is a product team. So yeah, that's me. But yeah, good for you all.

- We're just gonna give you a quick recap from John's keynote session earlier where he did an absolutely smashing job, nailed it. So I just wanna click it on. This should work. Just talk amongst yourselves there for a second.

- We're gonna get an API out.

- I do remember seeing on one of my first days here, our IT director, John Walch, drew a picture for me of our IT landscape, and I almost ran outta the building with fear. On November, 2018 I joined, just over four years. Terry was here on the 1st of February, I think.

- So I have been with Virgin Media for the last four and a half years. Virgin Media is one of the biggest entertainment telecommunications companies in Ireland. We employ about 1300 people nationwide.

- Building tomorrow's connections today is a key component of what Virgin Media Ireland is about. We tabbed 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 systems at a time when customers were on the phone.

- For an agent having to navigate through multiple systems, it doesn't allow them focus on the conversation with the customer. So part of, you know, our journey with Pega was, you know, to amalgamate those systems into one single agent desktop.

- It has allowed us to deliver a more consistent journey, a more consistent experience for our agents. Our team are less frustrated with having to use multiple systems, and as a result, it just, again, makes it easier for us to retain our staff because we can now cross skill them.

- Because our agents are multi-skilled and they're able to have that full rounded conversation with the customer without having to transfer, our relationship NPS has increased providing credit customer experience for our external customer, but also for our internal customer, because we're actually slowing down attrition.

- Customers that are coming through on chat, and that same customer potentially coming through on voice and that same customer potentially using our self-service solution. Having Pega as that balance between all of those three channels now enables us to see that customer journey end to end. And as a result, some of our teams have reduced their transfer rates by up to 20% directly linked to the Pega solution now being available across the center.

- We're all about digital first. Pega is all about digital first. This is our platform to be able to kind of, you know, simplify that whole servicing of a customer world.

- So it has brought us leaps and bounds forward from where we were, but from a technology point of view and an experience point of view.

- Let's get back on track. Great.

- Yeah, so, I mean, John has touched on this earlier. So, you know, Virgin Media Island, we were founded in 2005, part of the Liberty Global family with the leading entertainment cable in broadcast business in Ireland. You know, really it was, it started out with, you know, TV and then moved into broadband, and then we brought voice, and then of course we brought mobile back in 2050, I think that at this stage. We play around 1300 people across multiple locations. The main offices were in Dublin, and then across the core, which is the contact center, which is in Limerick. So yeah, you can see we have a lot of people that would benefit or benefit from the fact that we've got Pega in there and now in the mix so.

- So Limerick. Limerick is the third largest city in the Republic of Ireland. But simply the best. We're not known for our casinos, but we are known for our culture and our history. We're just absolutely steeped in history. We're, you know, famous for our music. We heard the cranberries earlier on before the keynote sessions. It's their hometown. And we just love our sport. We're the home of Munster Rugby and we're also all Ireland hurling champions, three years in a row. For those of you who don't know what hurling is, it's very similar to ice hockey except for it's played on grass, on foot and with a leather ball called a slitter and a wooden stick called a Hurley. It's the fastest land sport, well field, land sport. So you need to be up pretty fast in the morning to get to catch us. We're very proud to be, you know, a local employer in the county where our success center sits just in the outskirts of Limerick City, and we employ, there's about 500 people that work outta the office. 350 of those are frontline agents or working in support services helping the operations. We're a typical contact center. We deal with query type, supporting our mobile products, our technical product, billing. We've social media, so through voice inbound and outbound, social email, chat, case management. And I think we deal with about 20 to 25,000 contacts on a weekly basis. Virgin Media, Ireland's brand purpose is all about building connections that really matter. That obviously, you know, is with our customers that have our products and also our suppliers, our partners. But I think one of the things that's really important is that we recognize our internal customers, our people as part of that brand purpose.

- Yeah, so I suppose something from the customer teams, really the four key principles that we have and that we're trying to run through is think as a customer. We always putting that customer first. It was mentioned around digital first, but not digital only. It's really about not leaving any customer behind whatever demographic they are. You know, really making sure that, you know, that customer journey is solid and also, you know, simple, really. Heartfelt service of course, as well. And that's something that we really wanted to kind of bring through. You know, John mentioned it there around, you know, giving, you know, handling time's not really a key metric that we wanna reduce, but it's about giving that really meaningful conversation. So that heartfelt service is core to that. And then digital transformation, again, it's something that we've been on, you know, a journey from, you know, 2018, 2019. We'll go into some of the systems that we have, some of the architecture we have that Pat called out there, that's, you know, we've really inherited a lot from our, you know, being a traditional telco from the Liberty group as well. We have some local apps there that we'd kind of brought in ourselves as sticking plasters around all of that. But they were all very, you know, unconnected, they were very, you know, yeah, just only fit a purpose for that one use case necessarily. So I think, you know, that digital transfer, it was key for us and we got backing at kind of a senior management team level for us to really go after it, I think. So, you know, that checkbook was signed for us to go after it. And then the one obviously make it easy, and that's really for customers, but really agents is where we focused first. It's about making, you know, their processes simple, having everything in front of them, intuitive, you know, support flows and just make really, yeah, just making it simple, easy there, easy work for them to do. And then the vision for that one really is, it's about that right contact to the right place. Obviously we had the Global pandemic in the middle of all this as we're going through this global transformation. It really, I think the steps that we'd put in place as part of that really supported that move from the office into home and supporting customers. So we kind of, and we had to ramp up quickly, of course, like everybody else did. But we put the building blocks in place to really manage that hard experience. One touch, that's something that, that's a key metric for us is around that repeat rate, that repeat contact rate. And then also I think even in, it's a challenge that we still have to some extent, it's around, you know, customers engaging with us in multiple channels at the same time. Like, you know, we saw it there where it might be they're on the phone, they're online, they're trying to do a chat with us, and it's around really that one touch, getting it right first time and, you know, making sure that the customer's needs are served. So, and then that kind of goes into the other ones, which is, you know, obviously we wanna sell more. Every time we have the engagement with a customer, we wanna be able to up upsell and cross sell and then anybody that wants to leave us, we wanna save them. Simple as that. And we not only do we wanna save them by, you know, throwing the farm at them, we use the power of CDH through our retention office to make sure that it's an appropriate offer that we give to that customer based on their lifetime value. You know, based on that, you know, what product holdings they have, you know, and even that propensity to churn that they may have as well. So that's really key for us. What was the key vision for us, I think. So just like this, this is a very, I was trying to put an architectural diagram together, which, but you should have seen it, it was ridiculous, wouldn't even fit on this page. So even on that big screen that we saw down in the conference center there. So I've just got some of the, just some of the very high level ones here. So on the left there, we've got comet, which is our sales order entry, and this one, this is a, a kind of home built local app for all of our sales orders that we load it in that. We have a third party emphasis that kind of swivel chair out of that at the time. And they would pick it up and then put it into our CRM. So they'd load that order into the CRM. So what we did is we moved to bring it into comet so that we got it all in one place so that we could have future opportunities. We have Clear Choice, which is our kind of retail store version of that very same app, but again, they have to be managed independently. They've got their own kind of product catalogs. They've got their own configuration that needs to be taken care of. We have clarify and the ACC, which is, it's our fixed and mobile CRMs. ACC is very kind of black box clarifies, end of life ancient, if anyone kind of knows a little bit. I mean this one's, it's been a painful process for a long time for us to do anything in there. And then again, some of the local apps there, we had Cassio, which is for our case management. We had our Oracle right now for all the kind of communications, kind of email and case management from kind complaints with customers. We had live person for chat. And then from a troubleshooting perspective, we had CDM, which is kind of, you know, customer device management. And then we had servicer and Ceasefire, which is really around kind of and support for broadband basically. So as you can see, that's complicated and you've got agents that kind of skipping in and out. They're flipping, you know, all of these at the same time. There's, you know, the quality is, well, we don't support high quality by our going into all of these things, as you can imagine. So we moved really to sales entry, which we have comet and connected partners, which is basically connected partners is the same, is a retail version of comet. And then even for our online flows, we have digital commerce. So what they do, they all go into the comet backend. And that allows us to then have automation off the back of it that we then insert into clarifying into ACC. They're still there. And I think as John mentioned there, we're kicking off a program now to kind of retire those two systems. We'll have a new mobile and fixed comm, which we're just at the very start of that process. So I think Pega really has helped us to kind of get through that whole piece really. And then now we can move on, as again, quoting John again, that kind of air cover allow us to then unpick all of that and move on to the next level. And then we use Pega for case management and troubleshooting across, but it's kind of the glue that holds all of that together, I think at an enterprise level. That's that. Just very high level on some of the product life cycle, we kind of kicked off in, you know, we did have a drop in 2019, but we did the knowledge base and we did the customer 360 view. In November, 2020, we had small numbers of agents, small teams getting that feedback to us so we could get into the next lot. And then in February we had the agent tooling. We had CDHMBO, so that's the next best offer through the agent desktop. And then we moved that into online after that, Once that we'd kind of made sure that that was working. We launched with Pega Chat 8.4 again back in March '22. And then we had the kickoff of case management. So there was some simple use cases. We then went in August, we went into CDH for retention offers. So that's really, yeah, as I'd kind of said there, that propensity to churn that, you know, trying to save a customer without giving away the farm that, you know, the system learning what offers work for what cohort of customer and really putting that power into the agent's hands. We upgraded in to 8.7. We're not in the cloud at the moment, so we're just kicking that off to go into Pega Cloud, which I think will be great benefit for us. But we had to upgrade ourselves standalone there. And then also we brought in XGS-PON, which is our new fiber technology, which support our new fiber network. And also we use wholesale networks as well. So we've got partners in, you know, in areas that we wouldn't have a presence at the moment or we have as of like two weeks ago. So we had to build all over that whole network as well using XGS-PON. And that's kind of, December '22 is when we brought that in. We brought the next phase of case management, which is really where we could then really start going out to the customer, this full end to end case management, particularly around customer complaints as well. And then March '23, we had Pega chart 8.7 and then end to end case management. So again, we kind of ramped upon that. So that's a very high level where we've gone. And as you can imagine, we work in, there's been lots of mini drops all the way through that. We kind of work through a cadence, particularly the last, I'd say the last six to nine months where it's been almost every two weeks there's been another drop and a drop and a drop and an improvement. So yeah, that's kind of the product life cycle.

- So October 21, we took the plunge and launched completely in the contact center. So changing all of our agents to use our single agent desktop. We took a very phased approach and piloted with a number of, I wouldn't say teams, but we championed, we used champions, I suppose, to use the products rather than just go out with the full big bang. We used those people then to take, you know, the feedback from using the tool to identify areas that we hadn't, that we'd missed potentially, or things that they were doing or using in the backgrounds that we had never, and that they never highlighted to us in our requirements gathering. Very quickly, it was 2021, it was post COVID or still in it, I can't remember, I'm blanking it out of my memory. But we had a surge in demand and we found recruitment was a challenging time for, as I'm sure anybody from a contact center environment probably shared that same, I think it was a worldwide struggle. And we had to activate a satellite operation really, really quickly. Something that we were able to do in four weeks that would've been a 12 week task to get people from a new operation on calls, talking to our customers within four weeks. We learned from that and immediately changed how we trained and onboarded into our billing teams. And John mentioned it earlier on, we shaved off a week off our training and we've continued to do, you know, work through that. And it's working really well for us. We're training now only seeing solely through our single agent desktop, and our agents when they come in the door, they love it. It wasn't without challenges as there there is with everything. I'm gone to, here we go. So there's a reluctance to adapt. So you're dealing with tenured agents that are used to working in other systems. There's a whole change piece. Some people like change, some people don't like change. Some people take it in a different path. So there was that reluctance to kind of, to move in. And we did have people coming out of this single agent desktop into backend systems. As we moved on in our journey, I suppose we really listened to those people. We used those champions and we got ourselves a really great implementation coordinator, Shelan. She's sitting down there in the middle of the room. She's a rockstar. So she was that really that middle person. Give Shelan round of applause, she deserves. But Shelan was that key person that sat between, you know, technology, Stewart's team and the operations that was able to just bring that feedback back into all those teams to help us to, you know, take the feedback from the agents and make enhancements like to our navigation, expanded our guided assists flows. And what are guided assists flows are the tool to take customers through the conversation or take agents through the customer conversation. So it just does all the heavy lifting for them. And we embedded our knowledge base. Throughout 2022, our adoption grew, we were looking at 85% adoption rates and the trust in the system was building. It enabled us as an operation to launch two programs, our Amazing Connections program and our infinity program. And what these are, they're conversational frameworks that are built around the customer experience and finding common ground with the customer. It enables the agents to easily find a cross seller and upsell opportunity and not just a resolution for the customer. This has been really, I suppose, powerful in our CS teams, which would've historically been that resolve, you know, they had to navigate through so many systems you know, if they could get to a resolution, they were lucky. So in those teams we've seen upsells and cross sells increase by 30%. They're now that, you know, that seller that everybody wants. And you know, we had these teams that were, you know, single skilled. We had mobile teams, fixed billing teams. So as a customer, if you called in with a mobile query and you also had a fixed product and you came up with a query when you were on the call, you had to get transferred and nobody likes that. We now cross skill all our teams. We now don't have those single skilled teams. They are blended skilled teams. And we've seen that 20% reduction in those in transfers on those teams, which has been amazing. And it feeds all into that customer experience, positive customer experience. It also really has helped the agents. We've seen less attrition. They now have a clear progression path. They feed this into their PDPs so they can see a future for themselves and a career for themselves within Virgin Media. And we don't just stop at, you know, a mobile skill and a fixed skill that moves into a technical skill set and then maybe, you know, into a further career opportunity for them. And by the end of '22, our relationship with Pega was completely stabilized and we were all in. Again, our challenges continued with us along the journey. Again, not all lines of business were in single agent desktop, which meant that some people had to come out and again, tenured agents had that bad behavior where they were going back into to the legacy systems or the older system, backend systems. And then we found that our new people that were coming out that knew no different were budding up with the tenured agents and learning the bad habits. So we were in this kind of a bit of a snowball effect. And then from an operations perspective, we had this reluctance of, so you were all thinking, why didn't you just turn it off? We had this like, what if everything goes down, you know, we can't be in a situation where, you know, we have an outage or a massive outage and we can't access the backend systems. So thankfully for us, we haven't had that, you know, Armageddon. It hasn't happened and hopefully it won't happen. So '23, we launched our Pega chat and our case management. And the beauty of this is we now have that, you know, umbrella of voice now joined with the digital contact. Our journeys are authenticated. You know, our customers are now getting that full round end-to-end conversation. They're coming in, they're getting a resolution, they're potentially, you know, getting educated in something that they can do online themselves and they're getting an add value. And as a result, over the last six months, our relationship NPS has increased by 15%. We're working smarter, we're using AI through bots and also, yes, we are actually gonna take the plunge and remove access to backend systems. We started that actually before we left here. We're going to take a controlled phase approach to that. We're not going to do the big bang and we'll use our champions to champion that. So we started to turn off some of the backend systems with the view to having most of them turned off by, I dunno, the end of July I think, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And we're at 95% adoption rate. So hopefully, you know, by end of the year we'll be at a hundred. Isn't that right Stuart?

- Easily. 101.

- No pressure. So obviously we love it. We are telling you this 'cause we're here today, but we recently had an engagement survey and we asked people, you know, how are our systems. And our users give us some lovely verbatims. They're not scripted. These are just random. And I'm not gonna call them all out, but I like Aaron's one there where he is like, the broadband usage too is a thing of the past. And Karen's one at the top where she's calling out how simple and easy it is to use. So that's, I suppose that's what we want. It's the simplicity. Okay.

- So yeah, I think for the future enhancements, you know, some of the stuff we're talking about there is, you know, we've got the new comm for, as we call it there, we'll get me our CRM for mobile and for fix. But I think one thing that will, it's clear to that is we got, you know, that challenge that Terry talked about there, where agents are going into with these old systems is right from day one, they won't have access to these old systems, they'll be headless, so it'll be all Pega. So we'll be all in them with Pega. So there'll be no option, there'll be no back office teams going in to the other systems. It'll just be purely, you know, Pega front end. So from an agent desktop perspective, you know, we'll be moving on to the, as I said there, the new mobile fixed CRM and really looking at what automation opportunities we have through that whole piece there. And self-serve as well, you know, where we can get customers to, where we're restricted at the moment, we can't put an automation opportunity for a customer. You know, what can we do with the new systems which allow us to do that and we will surface them online. We're about to kick off building a new app for customers so that, you know, we hope that all existing customers will go through and only use the app for all of their engagements. And again, Pega will be the heart of that one. From a CDH perspective, we're in the middle of launching that propensity to churn. So what that will do is it'll give agents, when a customer calls in, they might not be calling to terminate, but it'll just give the heads up to the agent that they're in that category where they're just, that they've had a bad experience or that while, or whatever it is. So they may well be a churn risk. So, you know, what do we do? We try and tie them back into a contract or, you know, we manage that conversation. From a collections we're looking at using CDH as well so that we can really kind of set off those campaigns around trying to get customers to not even get into that collections process, but also when they do, you know, having kind of bespoke payment plans for customers so we can get them to pay. And again, just that we treat them, we treat them differently at the moment. We treat every collections customer or anyone that falls into collections, we treat them in the same way and it's all down to the agent and how they respond to that customer and how they, you know, manage that customer experience. So that's a big one for us. We're just going through that one at the moment. We're looking at moving CDH more into that customer service element away from commercial. So looking at the context of the customer when they're engaging in whatever channel they're engaging with us in to try and, you know, look at what, you know, data points to say what's happened in their life recently. Have they paid a bill or they've had a technician now or they've had, you know, an outage or whatever it may be so that we can self-serve them through that process so we can try and, you know, just almost predict what's going wrong with that customer. Then we're also looking at, again, using CDH for lead generation. We did a proof of concept earlier in the year, so we'll just kind of looking at the results of that one and then we'll ramp that up. So that's for customers where we invite them to leave their, or sorry, I should say potential customers, where we invite them to leave their, you know, their email or their contact details and then we can then flow through and, you know, get an outbound campaign to them or get a marketing campaign or whatever it may be to try and convert that customer. And then also looking at paid media as well. So instead of it, we just have a blanket kind of paid media at the moment where we just, you know, we throw, you know, cash over there at Google Cash over there at Facebook or whatever. But this one looking really at that cohort of the customer, you know, looking at that demographic, what they like to buy, what they like to look at. And then we're then going to, you know, rather than putting our eggs in one basket, will be kind of bespoke paired media to that cohort of customers. That's what we're looking at next. And then from a triple treatment perspective, really we're kind of really ramping up at the moment. We initially when we kind of onboarded for this XGS-PON, this new file we were just doing like for like, but we're going really into the next level of that. So it's really looking at TV troubleshooting, but then also looking at that connected home experience about troubleshooting for smart home. So looking at your, you know, your Nest doorbell or whatever it may be. And then also support for mobile devices as well so that we can, again, we can self-serve customers to be able to look at their, you know, what issues there are in their house or their home with mobile devices. So that's kind of it in a nutshell. Obviously there's the glaring miss on this one and that's because we obviously it's been a lot of, the whole conference of being about gen AI so we we're obviously gonna be looking at that as well. That's gonna be weave through all of this, I think and if we can get moving in that. So yeah, that's that. Sorry, the last thing there, just around that, we had to put in a lot of tactical solutions as we did for the new mobile and fixed CRM. So we're going run a second phase of that one, which will, again, it'll all be through the agent desktop and then really that enhanced sales conversion version support. And then that next level health check as I said.

- There we go.

- Break free from boredom and find your play. Virgin media, it's playtime.

- That's just something we pulled together for this.

- Brilliant, thank you very much. That was excellent, excellent. I do have a vision though in my mind. When you talked about switching the systems off the backend access to those systems just before you left, I've got this vision of you sort switching it off and show hot footing it out to get the plane over here and leaving everybody and going back to chaos. But hopefully it won't be like that. Brilliant. So fantastic. Have we got any questions out there for anybody? Brilliant, I'll come so we can hear what you're saying.

- [Guest] Yeah, thanks. Thanks for that. Could you tell me what the biggest challenges were for you both from a technical point of view and from a project management point of view?

- Well, I think from a technical point of view, it was just that multitude of and complexity of architecture that we had really. We had a lot of kind of archaic systems, a lot of black box systems that we just couldn't get into as well. So I think that biggest challenge really around all of that was just how we planned ahead to do it. I think from a kind of program management perspective, we did and we got there and you know, as Terry said, we looked at, you know, with Cheryl Ann being in place to really kind of being that liaison between the kind of product team and the business. I think that's something we learned as we went. I think if we went from the outset with that process, we probably would've been a bit quicker. Would it have been better, I don't know. because we, but that whole collaboration from day one I think is key. It was at the start I think it was very push almost from the product and the IT team to the operations team and the contact center. And now it's definitely a lot more collaborative and it has been for the last couple of years, I think. So I think it's really starting off with that, you know, that plan early I think is rather than learning as you go, I think to spend the time in, you know, putting that structure in place and putting that process in place, I think, yeah. So hopefully that answer your question. I think from a technology perspective it's really, yeah, I mean it was every single system that you're trying to either integrate with or decommission, you know, there's a challenge with it, especially with as we try and bring agents through that whole process as well.

- Brilliant. Any more questions out there? Lovely.

- [Guest 2] Thank you. We're on a similar journey, very early in our journey. And I'm curious, you talked a little bit about, you know, all products weren't on the new system upfront and we're trying to have similar kind of ideas around how we'd implement, you know, do you go three or four products at a time and then you have people on two different systems, two different platforms. Do you just do a new team with the new system and you onboard new people with this new system and kind of slowly bring the old off? Just talk a little bit about some of the challenges and complexity around, and kinda the path you guys took in kind of bringing on this new one fell swoop, individual product lines. Just curious to hear about that.

- No, you're right. And I think that the difficulty is you need to have a saturation or at least a number of use cases there to make it worthwhile to kind of launch or even, you know, even if it's a smaller team it's down to. But you also need enough people on it to learn. So it is difficult. You've gotta have enough, I think, like, you know, I think one of the Pega ways is it's the MLP rather than the MVP. So it's the most minimal loved product. So it really is about having enough there for them to want to go in and want to use it and enough people on there to learn, I think is the key thing. It was frustrating I think in the early days because of that, we probably went too early I think with what we went, it was read only. The feedback was as you'd expect on a read only platform. So it was just like, oh yeah, it looks great, but what else can it do? You know, so what, kind of thing? So I think if we'd have started again, I think on that, I think it probably would've waited another, at least another couple of cycles. Probably at least another, you know, maybe three or four months before we really tried to get a decent volume of agents on there. But yeah, that's the only thing I'd say.

- Thank you very much. Somebody else with another question?

- [Guest 3] Along the same lines, I was curious about your average tenure of employee and then you talked about your challenges with adoption. So would love to hear a little bit about what you uncovered, what was preventing their, you know, desire to go and use the new system. I think you touched a little bit on that, but just love to hear a little bit more.

- Yeah, so we have, our tenure's changed since COVID, so we have people that are with us up to 15 years, but maybe about 75% of our teams are now maybe a year, two years with us, three now probably max. So you have people probably in legacy systems from 10 years ago from, you know, the way they were trained. And we may have moved away from that, but they're still back there. So that whole, it's just, that's what they're used to. That's what they've always known. And then you had our new people that were just trained solely through single agent desk desktop, didn't know any different. So they, you know, and if I was doing, again, I'd keep them separated when they come out on the floor. I wouldn't integrate them with the tenured people, but the tenured people are key. we started getting those guys as our champions. So as we rolled out and Amsterdam was rolling out new features or enhancements, we got those guys to test them or you know, so we were trying to make them ambassadors for the change. And some of them, most of them have come along with us and we're, you know, we're gonna do a big relaunch now that we've shut off our systems or we're shutting down our systems and we're taking those people along that journey. But we need to use their, getting them involved in that change along the way is key.

- And I think one of the mistakes we made as well along the way, which I think we, you know, we're very aware of now, I think is we use guided assist flows for a lot of the outcomes. So, you know, the agents have to go through this, well, hoops, they have to jump through these hoops to be able to do a certain thing for a customer. So we've been too prescriptive with that. We've been too, you know, we've been forced that I think too heavily. And I think that's probably why the buying probably was a bit slower in some instances as well, particularly for the longer tenured agents. So I think that's something we're gonna, we're definitely gonna be rolling back on a bit, given a bit more control back to the agents to say, to make their own decisions 'cause you can go too far. So if it's something that's just simple, binary, click this or click that, then, you know, I think we'll probably we'll take them out, guided a system, just allow agents to just do it straight away. And it might be something that you do by, you know, role or by tenure or you know, by profile. So, but yeah, I think you've just gotta be careful going down that road too heavy I think, would be one thing I'd call out

- The question over here.

- [Guest 4] This is a little bit of a strategic question. In fact, there was a question raised in the main room as well. There are plenty of CRM solutions out there. I understand we're on PegaWorld, but apparently your question is why Pega CRM, why Pega Workflow Management. On a hindsight, would you have made a different decision? And that's one question. And two, there's an extension of this. It's a low code configuration and it's, you know, it allows for business enablement. What, if any, steps have we taken or have you taken from a business enablement standpoint? Not so much from an outcome perspective, but in terms of how to get to the outcome perspective, building, allowing business to build applications. Thanks.

- Well, I think for the first question, I think, you know, from the product side, I literally couldn't care less who it was, if it was Pega or whoever.

- [Guest 4] Hang on minute, come on, come on, come on.

- No, but that's, I'll be very clear on that though. It was always from a requirement perspective and outcomes, that was something that I wanted. But of course, you know, from a Liberty standpoint and from John said that senate of election excellence, that Pega was the you know, way out in front. So for me, as long as I got my, you know, requirements delivered and the outcomes and I was happy. And of course, you know, it's all been proved wrong 'cause Pega has... It's all been proved right 'cause Pega has been-

- we need to edit that out.

- Yeah, you know, it proved right because Pega's been exactly the, you know, the right partner for us. It's been excellent about where we wanted to get to. So I think that's why, but I think, yeah, it depends, you know. For me it's all about the requirements and does it deliver all we need it to deliver, and it absolutely does. And then I think from the second question you were kind of more around how do we, so you're talking more of a getting the business involved in the kind of the development of the system? Well we kind of, we do from, again, from a requirement perspective, not getting their hands into, you know, the app developer or anything like that. We do see a gap there, I think with the current platform where we wanna bring some of that functionality that's there in the kind of app developer side and bring it forward, you know, so that you could have some supervisors or team leaders you know, doing small stuff, stuff that you could do during working hours. Stuff like, you know, changing agents' profiles, changing the queues that they're in, the concurrency, et cetera. So there's kind of a middle ground, I think, that we wanna reach rather than having the business teams going and, you know, developing I think is probably the ultimate. Now Terry might have a different opinion, but Yeah.

- Yeah, no, I think the next stage for us is totally that, especially in the chat or for us to have a little bit more control from an operations point of view to be able to control a queue or if there's a demand in a certain, there's an outage somewhere that we can drop a bot in to dissolve that demand or whatever, so yeah.

- Any other questions? Oh, couple here, I'll let you go first.

- Hi there, it's from the Kindred Group. We are using CDH and we are 18 months into our journey. So maybe you've got a head start and you can help us out on some of the challenges you faced. So firstly, case management, CDH, all that, is that a IT driven or a marketing driven initiative? Where does it sit under? And secondly, from a project management point of view, whenever there's say changes, actions, treatments, primarily I'm focused on CDH. How do you manage this? Is that always like a managed project where you have like a big set of machines to turn, or have you simplified enough that project management can just come back and let the organization drive the work?

- Yeah, so I suppose on the first question around CDH case management, it's really from the business. So it's the marketing and it's the commercial strategy that feeds into CDH, absolutely. So I was gonna say recently, it's probably about two years now, I moved away from kind of more the customer team into the commercial side. And then yeah, long story short, we're all kind of together now. But yeah, we definitely take the commercial lead on that and the people that kind of do that day to day running of CDH and that local configuration are within the customer value management team which is part of the commercial team. So yeah, absolutely. And from case management perspective, it's more around on the consumer side, it's more, you know, customer care than commercial. But again, we all roll up to the same VP, so it's aligned KPIs I guess is probably the easiest way to describe it. And then, sorry, on the second question?

- It's the project management aspect.

- Yeah, so what we do is we have program increments, we're in a safe methodology. Our program inputs are basically a quarter a time and we start about six weeks out kind of defining what the scope is of that. So we're all measured around that. So as a product manager for Pega and other systems, we do a prioritization call on whatever it is that's gonna give value to the business. And that's what then would then be delivered within that programming current. So there's no specific project management as such. It's all through that safe agile methodology. Unless there's something specific comes in, you might get something from regulatory or some project that comes in that needs to be delivered through that mechanism as well. Then we may get a project manager. But other than that it's all release train engineers, scrum masters, product owners, product managers, developers, QA team and so on and so on and so on. So yeah, that's kind of the way we set up.

- Try to be quick.

- So you mentioned a few things about your, you know, now cross training agents. We talked about your shared KPIs, but these are, and all these sessions keep talking about Pega as really a technical transformation or we're moving this application to that application, but these are really business transformations first. So how do you bring the larger business first decisions into yeah, we're adapting to Pega.

- Again, I think it was just, it was really on the outcome. It was about what was it we wanted to do? I think we had slide a few back around what the key objectives were. It's about that simplicity really. So it is a technology transformation and the business transformation. I think you can do both the same together, you know? Absolutely. I think there's an absolute need for, there was an absolute need for us to do something. We couldn't stay where we were, particularly with the future plans that we had to kind of up our expense, expand our network and go into every, our ambition to go into every home in Ireland. We really need to have the systems there that we're gonna transform that business. And of course all the way through that you always have, you become a lean business as well because you know, there's always that compete around opex. So head counts get cut all over the place. So you've gotta do more with less. As always, it's always that comes continual challenge. So I think as we did the technology transformation supported that business transformation I think ultimately. But they were one and the same. It was just a different aspect to the same thing.

- Brilliant. Well I think that's pretty much perfect timing. Look at the clock there. Eight seconds to go. So thank you very much for your time everybody. And yeah look forward to .

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