It is not often that I sit in the audience at a technology vendor event and feel genuinely moved by a customer story.
However, that’s what happened at Pegaworld, Pega’s annual customer event, in Las Vegas last month, when they shared a case study on the main stage about the work that they have done with NHS 24, Scotland's National Digital Health Service.
Now, NHS 24 operates 24/7 from South Queensferry, just outside Edinburgh, and covers the whole of Scotland (population 5.6 million).
It handles over 1.6 million calls a year and is the service people in Scotland call if they need urgent medical care for non-life- or limb-threatening injuries. It also provides help to people who are in mental health distress or when their local doctor, pharmacy, or dentist is closed.
Watching how they have worked hard to transform what was an ageing, rigid legacy system into what is now an intuitive, clinically safe platform using Pega, AWS, and Coforge was genuinely heart-warming.
Their work has reduced average patient handling time by 10 minutes, freeing staff from wrestling with technical bottlenecks and workarounds, allowing them to focus entirely on ensuring patients receive the right care.
Pega’s Customer Engagement Expertise
As a native and resident of Scotland, I must admit the whole story left me a little dewy-eyed.
But it also made me reflect on my visits to Pegaworld over the years, and I realized that I first attended a Pegaworld event back in 2016… ten years ago!
Over the years, I've realized that Pega not only creates top-tier technology but also leads the market in how it approaches customer engagement and issue resolution.
Here are three examples to illustrate my observation:
1. Next Best Action
In 2016, they talked about determining the "next best action" for customers by using their Customer Decision Hub as a central organizational brain to facilitate that.
They were one of the first technology vendors to do so, and they are still talking about it, announcing at Pegaworld a new agentic user experience for their Customer Decision Hub (CDH), called Customer Engagement Studio at Pegaworld.
What this means is that while CDH determines what to recommend, to whom, and when, Customer Engagement Studio brings together Pega and third-party AI agents in a single agentic workspace, enabling marketers to move from marketing brief to live personalized actions in a matter of minutes, all while maintaining governance and control.