CRM machine learning leaps forward, assisting process automation

If you think you've heard it all when it comes to new automation technologies -- artificial intelligence, advanced data analytics, chatbots powered by CRM machine learning -- you haven't. Robotics is next.

Simply put, CRM's flavor of Software robotics encompasses chatbots, tools for back-end automation and even data collection tools that watch employees work. All have the ultimate goal of helping sales and service staff better serve customers, explains Pegasystems CTO Don Schuerman. The robotics push from Pega follows its 2016 acquisition of robotic process automation and workforce analytics software vendor OpenSpan.

Here's the dirty little secret. The vast majority of what everybody's really excited about with robotic automation are what we used to call macros.

"Here's the dirty little secret. The vast majority of what everybody's really excited about with robotic automation are what we used to call macros," Schuerman says. "They're elegant, [and] they're much more cloud-managed. You've got much more control over how you can use them and tie them into things like document recognition and text recognition -- but, at the end of the day, they're macros."

Robotics work invisibly in the background, and employees only see the result, such as a prompt in the CRM system suggesting they make a certain offer at a certain juncture in a customer conversation. In other cases, software robots might simply collect data and utilize cloud analytics systems to identify manual processes employees are undertaking that are ripe for automation.

In this podcast interview, we delve deep into this topic, as well as other observations and CRM implementation trends from the floor of the PegaWorld 2017 user conference in Las Vegas. Among them -- how AI and CRM machine learning will help cut down on companies over-communicating with customers, saving time for both the customer and the company.