Pega vs.

Salesforce
for Customer
Service
This paper is intended for customer service professionals who are considering the next
CRM application for their enterprises. It compares two popular solutions, Pegasystems
Pega Customer Service and Salesforce.coms Service Cloud, across five areas of
functionality essential to meeting the complex customer service needs of the enterprise.

WHITEPAPER

INTRODUCTION
As a customer service professional, you understand how the industrys landscape is evolving. Consumer
expectations are rising. Customers expect personal, expeditious and trustworthy service, no matter when or
how they contact your organization. Customers who receive consistent and relevant experiences that deliver on
their needs and preferences are more likely to remain loyal.1 If theyre dissatisfied, its easier than ever for them
to take their business elsewhere and to share their negative experience with others via their social networks.
Aging, legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software simply cant keep up with the demands of
this new generation of customers.
Whether youre responsible for delivering the overall customer journey, or specifically focused on overseeing
operations within your customer service organization, you recognize the need to meet your customer demands
while at the same time increasing employee productivity and managing costs. Your organization depends on
strong, enterprise-grade CRM software to strike this critical balance, now and in the future.
To be successful in complex, global enterprises, customer service applications must be able to deliver in
five areas2:
1. Connecting the end-to-end customer journey, seamlessly and consistently across every channel
2. Increasing employee productivity by guiding employees and streamlining systems
3. Anticipating customer needs and delivering real-time personalized service
4. Managing the complexity of a global enterprise to simplify customer and employee experiences
5. Delivering long-term value by effectively keeping up with changing customer needs
The gap between the promise of legacy CRM systems and the value they actually deliver is significant, and that
the gap is growing even larger as the pace of change accelerates. Salesforce.com (Salesforce) pioneered the
use of cloud computing for sales force automation applications.3 Its customer service application, Salesforce
Service Cloud (Service Cloud), is reported to be effective at capturing and tracking contact information and
interaction history. These capabilities have allowed Salesforce to rapidly grow its Service Cloud business,
especially in the small-to-medium business (SMB) market.4
Pegasystems has helped complex, global enterprises deliver better customer experiences. Buyers and
independent analysts suggest, however, that Service Cloud lacks many of the core capabilities required to meet
the customer service needs of these larger enterprises. These include the ability to deliver on-premises or in
cloud deployments. It also includes the ability to connect multiple disparate systems into one platform, and
the ability to provide the sort of real-time analysis and intelligent guidance of back and mid-office processes
that comes from dynamic case management and real-time decisioning. This often results in unexpected
maintenance complexities and a higher-than-predicted total cost of ownership.5

Pegasystems has helped complex, global enterprises deliver better customer experiences.
Choosing the right customer service solution starts with understanding your challenges and goals, and selecting
an application that will best support the complexity and scale of your organization and infrastructure. This can
be an especially difficult task for large, complex organizations where making the wrong choice can have longterm, unwelcome effects.
This paper examines the five areas listed above to compare Pega Customer Service and Service Clouds ability
to deliver world-class service in a complex environment.

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CONNECT THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

The customer journey is the full lifecycle of a customers interactions with a company over the course of their
relationship. Ensuring a connected customer journey is the key to making every customer feel as valued as your
first customer. To earn customer loyalty, organizations must deliver a continuous, connected journey tailored to
each customers needs. At each moment of truthwhen a customer may choose to remain loyal or switch to a
competitorthe customer receives great service with minimal effort. To effectively deliver on this journey, your
customer service application must enable you to:
Hold a single conversation across all the communication channels a customer may select
Connect and streamline the functions within your organizations ultimately responsible for fulfilling your
promise to the customer. This means connecting the front line service teams to the back office operations

that are required to satisfy the customers needs

HOLD A SINGLE CONVERSATION

Customers increasingly prefer using multiple channels when engaging with companies: 74% of customers
use three channels or more for customer service issues.6 But customers are often frustrated by the disjointed
experiences resulting from broken conversation threads that increase the time and effort they must spend to
receive a resolution. Independent industry analysts agree:
To support your customers omnichannel journey seamlessly, standardize the experiences across
those channels, guide customers to the paths of lowest effort, and allow them to stop and restart
conversations as well as switch channels.7
Pega Customer Service has two unique capabilities that ensure seamless conversations:
Omnichannel design. With Pega, business experts can configure the optimal experience for a customer (data
processes, knowledge, UX, business rules, etc.) and then deploy that same model across channels and devices.
Pega Customer Services responsive design generates the user experience for each channel and device.
The customer enjoys a tailored, yet consistent experience regardless of channel. Since changes across all
channels can be made in a single place, the experience is far less costly and time consuming for your business
to maintain.
Dynamic Case Management. Pega Customer Service automatically creates a case for every customer
interaction and service process, leveraging industry-leading Dynamic Case Management (DCM) capabilities.8
The case records and maintains the integrity of the customer conversation, even when the customer
switches channels. The case automatically tracks the details of the interactions including any specifics about
the overall service request. This helps organizations better understand customer communication patterns,
measure first contact resolution across all channels and adapt their channel design to their customers needs.
Service Cloud provides support for modern communication channels like mobile and social. Both Pega and
Salesforce.com provide mobile application development capabilities.9 While Salesforce does provide the ability
to create and route cases within the Service Cloud, neither Salesforce nor any of the applications currently
available on its partner application exchange are recognized or validated for the strength of their case
management within leading analyst reports. In fact, Salesforce doesnt appear in either of the two independent
industry analyst vendor rankings on case management .10 Given this lack of recognition, one can conclude
that neither Service Cloud nor its ecosystem has the best-of-breed back and mid-office case management
capabilities required by large organization to connect those channels, and relate individual interactions to an
overall conversation with regards to a service request.

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CONNECT THE BACK AND FRONT OFFICE

Pega Customer Service uses industry-leading business process management (BPM) and dynamic case
management (DCM) to connect all the people and systems required to resolve customer queries, including
those that go beyond the initial contact. For example, Royal Bank of Canada deployed an end-to-end resolution
process called CART (Client Action and Request Tool) to guide its users through the complexities of resolving
problems.11 CARTs simple navigation screens, coaching tips, step-by-step prompts, and process automation
drive higher efficiency rates by automatically retrieving customer data required for resolution. CART spans all
channels and lines of business. It also routes cases to the correct support group and generates supporting
forms and correspondences. The CART deployment is representative of a growing trend in enterprise customer
service.
In some enterprises, agents must follow complex yet reproducible processes that cut across
functional silos and require accessing data from both front- and back-office applications to answer
customer requests. These enterprises are increasingly relying on customer service solutions with
native business process management (BPM) capabilities that can support process flows to increase
consistency, compliance to the company policy, and service efficiency.12
Pega Customer Service allows this connection of front- and back-office through Pegas industry-leading
Business Process Management (BPM) and Dynamic Case Management (DCM) capabilities.

Salesforce limits an agents ability to resolve a request on first contact.

Salesforce products, including the Service Cloud, are not recognized in analyst reports on BPM or DCM.13
Without these capabilities, it is safe to assume that complex business processes related to fulfillment,
back-office order management, and exceptions must be manually coded. In Salesforce, this means using a
programming language unique to Salesforce called Apex.14 By not supporting these processes that connect
front- and back-office, Salesforce limits an agents ability to resolve a request on first contact and increases the
difficulty for business analysts to maintain the system.

INCREASE EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY

Delivering efficient customer service by maximizing your employees productivity is a core goal for most
customer service organizations. Operational metrics such as average handle time, first contact resolution and
cost per contact often highlight inefficiencies. These inefficiencies typically stem from employees needing to
access information across many different resources in separately maintained systems and being forced to sort
through excessive content and data that is not relevant to a particular interaction.
Both Pega Customer Service and Service Cloud provide a 360 degree view of the customer by pulling data from
disparate sources into one location. But Pega Customer Service goes beyond Service Cloud in two key areas:
automation and intelligent guidance.

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AUTOMATION
Pega Customer Service automates routine tasks to limit unnecessary human intervention. For example,
it updates multiple source systems simultaneously, checks for fraud, retrieves pertinent transactional
information, executes complex calculations, issues automated surveys, initiates processes on external systems,
captures audit history and drives fulfillment requests through the back office. Pega Customer Service makes
real-time decisions based on business rules and analytical models to ensure a conversation can be resolved
expeditiously without the need for a supervisor. It will remove the burden on the service representative to do
such things as determine offer eligibility or recommend a retention or collection plan.
Singapore-based OCBC is ranked by Bloomberg as one of the worlds strongest banks with a global network
of more than 500 branches.15 Using Pega Customer Service, the bank was able to embed and automate its
150 account opening tasks into a seamless onboarding experience that enables OCBC staff to focus on the
customer, and not on filling out forms. As a result, the bank has seen a 40% increase in customer satisfaction
versus its competitors.16

With Pega, the bank has seen a 40% increase in customer satisfaction.
Service Cloud provides some limited support for automation through the use of configurable triggers capable of
handling simple workflows and reminders17 which industry analysts do not, as previously noted, regard as best
of breed for Business Process Management or Dynamic Case Management. When it comes to meeting the less
straightforward requirements of a larger customer service organization, Service Cloud requires either looking
to find an entry-level solution in the app exchange, or manual coding of business logic in Apex. Since process
or logic changes must often be managed by programmers or IT, one can assume that requirements delivery
lags behind business needs resulting in more manual activities and extended agent training. To preserve cloud
resources, Salesforces governors place numerous limits on workflows and process management, many of
which fall well within the range of what large enterprises require to manage their complex needs.18
While sales of Service Cloud have been strong, thanks to industry leading investment in marketing and
sales, some larger enterprises that initially deployed Service Cloud have subsequently asked Pega to replace
or augment19 Salesforces solution after discovering the lack of automation capabilities. In one example, a
European wealth and brokerage firm needed to handle client service requests of high value investors, such
as trade resolutions and trade splits. Despite trying to extend Service Cloud with a team of developers, the
company was still relying upon emails, spreadsheets, other back end systems, and manual work to manage
client incidents. They switched to Pega to better map their processes and ensure each customer inquiry was
routed and owned appropriately by their employees.20

Despite trying to extend Service Cloud with a team of developers, the company was still
relying on manual work.

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INTELLIGENT GUIDANCE
Pega Customer Service automates customer service flows, but also intelligently guides work that requires
flexibility and human judgment. It leverages its industry-leading business rules and next-best-action analytics
to anticipate what each customer needs, based on the context. For example, leveraging data delivered through
integration with a telephony system and merged with data from core transaction systems, Pega Customer
Service will queue up relevant tasks, screens, knowledge, scripts and data for the service representative to
leverage on a particular call. This capability has helped UnitedHealth Group reduce training time of more than
5000 agents by 75%.21
At Kaiser Permanente, a top U.S. healthcare provider recognized for its customer service excellence22, customer
service reps were spending 60% of their time navigating between eleven backend systems. Pega Customer
Service drove its First Contact Resolution up to over 90%, and drove down Average Handle Times by 20%.23

Pega drove First Contact Resolution up to over 90%, and drove down Average Handle
Times by 20%.
During a customer interaction, Pega Customer Service continually suggests the proper actions to take,
guiding agents step-by-step to deliver a personalized experience. Recognizing that not all customers merit
equal treatment, Pega Customer Service can dynamically adjust service levels and recommend offers based
on customer lifetime value. Pega Customer Service can lead service representatives through complicated
inquiries that require multiple steps and may require multiple departments to work together. At Royal Bank of
Canada, Pega Customer Service enabled the bank to reduce average request resolution times from 5 days to 30
minutes, and dropped most of its staffs training time to zero.24
Like Pega, Service Cloud is able to suggest and guide agents to relevant knowledge articles and content.
However, its documentation does not describe how Service Cloud can suggest tasks or recommend actions
continually throughout the customer interaction.

ANTICIPATE CUSTOMER NEEDS

The only way to deliver a real-time, personalized service interaction is to understand the customers context and
anticipate their needs. Sometimes this means knowing a customer already has an issue awaiting resolution.
Other times it may be recognizing that a retention or upsell offer perfectly suits a particular customers profile
and current situation.
Pega Customer Service anticipates customer needs in real-time, based on continuously evolving customer
data and business context. It intelligently provides the right service strategy, tasks, knowledge and associated
scripting for the right channel at the right time. Pega gives managers the ability to design and execute a
companys optimized strategies, so customer interactions are instantly adapted to account for changing
interests, needs and objectives. A rich set of business rule types; including decision trees, declarative rules,
and decision tables can be leveraged in concert with predictive analytics, automated actions, and fulfillment
activities. Pega Customer Service leverages big data to store customer interaction history and analytically
determine the most likely customer behavior. These real-time interactions are self-adapting based on machinelearning algorithms to ensure an organization is constantly adapting to change and improving performance.

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Salesforce has capabilities for predictive intelligence, but those capabilities are native to the Salesforce
Marketing Clouds messaging platform25 built from a separately acquired technology stack designed originally
for web recommendations.26 This capability is currently lacking in Service Cloud.27 Like Pega Customer Service,
Service Cloud has capabilities for agent collaboration, mobile and knowledge management, but there seems
to be no public case studies or documentation of inline real-time predictive analytics guidance within Service
Cloud.28 While the promise of Salesforces Analytics Cloud may address that gap in time, Service Cloud currently
lacks sophisticated predictive analytics. Customers seeking data warehousing, data mining, online analytical
processing or predictive analytics need to procure third-party solutions from AppExchange or elsewhere.29

MANAGE COMPLEXITY
In large service organizations even the simplest request requires the orchestration of complex processes and
decisions. Service representatives must handle multiple products, access numerous systems and keep current
on a large volume of policies and procedures that change on a continuous basis. Enterprise-grade customer
service applications must scale to handle millions of transactions per month. It must take into account regional
variances and exceptions. And it must integrate into an already burgeoning technology ecosystem with multiple
vendors and legacy systems.
The core Pega platform contains the capabilities and architecture to help businesses manage this complexity.
It is the platform on which our applicationsincluding Pega Customer Serviceare built. Pega emphasized the
importance of business rules processing, direct model-driven development, and predictive analytics well before
competitors.30 Our platform and applications support a wide range of business behaviors, from orchestrating
prescriptive and controlled processes to managing very dynamic and ad hoc knowledge work.31
Pegas patented architecture32 is designed to enable the re-use and specialization of common policies and
procedures into multiple business units, channels, geographies, and customer segments. Pegasystems and its
clients call this a Situational Layer Cake.33 At insurer AIG, Pega manages the global complexities of end-to-end
claim processes in a single application, enabling more than 100,000 claims professionals across 250+ contact
centers in 80 countries. Despite handling more than 40 million claims each year, theyve achieved a 20-30%
reduction in cycle times for higher frequency claims since implementing Pega applications.34
This focus on managing the complexity of global organizations reflects Pegasystems well-publicized
commitment to exclusive support of large enterprises.35 Pega offers cloud and on-premises deployments, and
provides customers a mix of licensing models including term, perpetual and subscription-based models. Pega
lets clients extract business logic and proprietary data from their deployments at any time, whether in the cloud
or on-premises.

Since implementing Pega, the company achieved a 20-30% reduction in cycle times.

In contrast, Salesforce splits its focus between the enterprise and SMB markets36 and is a cloud-only offering
licensed via subscription-based pricing. Salesforce lacks some of the architecture capabilities that are essential
to managing the complexity of a global enterprise. Extracting business logic and customer data from Service
Cloud requires additional services and fees. As such, while Salesforce has steadily taken market share away
from legacy CRM vendors, it has not always been successful in large, complex contact center deployments.37

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A major European Communications provider was forced to abandon a planned implementation of Service
Cloud, once they realized that Service Cloud could not deliver the level of support they needed for complex
inquiries such as customer moves. This resulted in roughly 15 million in unrealized cost-cutting measures.38
In another case, a customer-service outsourcer serving the Life Sciences industry licensed and implemented
Pega Customer Service to augment their Salesforce.com solution. Service Cloud alone could not manage
complex processes such as sending out samples to physicians, handling adverse events case processing,
providing patient assistance programs, and patient adherence.39

Service Cloud could not deliver the level of support needed for complex inquiries.

DELIVER LONG-TERM VALUE

Change is constant. So the requirements for a CRM software implementation are not limited to immediate
challenges of adoption, time to market, and need-it-now functionality. The question is, how can organizations
adapt service delivery over time and how easily can CRM software support that change? How will you update
your systems to account for additional communication channels, changing social media preferences, wearable
devices, new regulations, new market opportunities, and the continuous push for improved efficiency?
Pega Customer Service is built on the Pega Platform, a unified architecture ranked by industry analysts as the
leading architecture over all enterprise CRM solutions.40 The Pega Platform makes it easier to manage constant
change. It is 100% model-driven, allowing business and technology teams to collaborate to make code-free
changes without additional customization. Pega is 8 times faster than more traditional coding methods for
changing and evolving enterprise applications, including customer service.41 In the cloud or on-premises, Pega
simplifies integration with systems of record and delivers secure, scalable, and highly available applications.
Service Cloud becomes more expensive over time. Like most B2B pure SaaS companies, Salesforce typically
increases its subscription prices annually by as much as 7% for each renewal, or higher if a promotional price
was offered.42 And because business logic changes require manual programming in Apex Code, rather than
re-using common policies and modeled procedures, clients report that the total costs of ownership continues
to add up, especially when accounting for the frequent changes that are an inevitable part of todays operating
environments.

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CONCLUSION
This comparison presented five areas critical to any decision-maker who must choose CRM software to power
the customer service within their large organization.
To remain competitive, organizations need to move at the speed of customers, and they need systems and
software to support that flexibility. Pega has proven itself capable of delivering the business agility required
to evolve your CRM. Meanwhile, as industry observers have noted: Salesforce.com was founded by an Oracle
sales guy who set out to fix the ills of expensive, inflexible corporate software and is now becoming the very
thing that it battled.43
If youre a large enterprise considering your next CRM application for your customer service
organization, make sure you ask these questions:
How does the application help connect customers to the back-office operations needed to get things done on
their behalf?
What is the specific improvement in employee productivity that you would estimate being able to deliver
by automating repetitive manual tasks, integrating with other systems and suggesting actions to take for
customers?
How does the application help predict and adapt to customer needs, even before they contact us?
To what extent does the application manage frequently changing, complex service inquiries and cases across
products and geographies? Can you demonstrate this in a proof of concept?
How will you orchestrate your existing infrastructure, while evolving to meet the needs of your customers
tomorrow?
May we speak to a customer reference who can talk about how your application has connected multiple,
disparate systems, across multiple countries and geographies, and created a seamless integration?
Visit pega.com/service to learn more about how Pega Customer Service can help you keep service at the heart
of your organization.

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END NOTES
1

2014 Temkin Experience Ratings, Bruce Temkin; Temkingroup.com, Mar 2014.

These criteria were assembled from over 200 publicly released Request For Proposal documents submitted by Global 2000
organizations to Pegasystems in 2014.

Why Salesforce.com Has Passed Its Prime, Peter Cohan; Forbes, Feb 2015.

SalesForce Analyst Day Presentation, October 13, 2014,

Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, Michael Maoz; Gartner, 2014.

Optimizing Customer Service in a Multi-Channel World, Ovum.

Channel Management: Core to Your Customer Service Strategy, Kate Leggett, Fraser Tibbetts, Forrester.

The Forrester WaveTM: Dynamic Case Management, Q1 2014, Craig Le Clair, Derek Miers; Forrester.

Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms, Ray Valdes, Van L. Baker, Richard Marshall, Jason Wong;
Gartner, 2014.

10

Critical Capabilities for Case Management Frameworks, Janelle B. Hill, Kenneth Chin, Rob Dunie; Gartner, 2014.

11

Royal Bank of Canada Pegasystems Case Study.

12

Choose The Right Customer Service Solution For Your Business, Ian Jacobs, Kate Leggett; Forrester, 2014.

13

Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites, 2014, Gartner, and The Forrester WaveTM: Dynamic
Case Management, Q1 2014, Forrester.

14

What is Apex? Salesforce.com documentation

15

Worlds Strongest: Banks, Bloomberg.com.

16

OCBC Bank Pegasystems Case Study.

17

Examples of Workflow Rules, Salesforce.com documentation.

18

Process Limits, Salesforce.com documentation.

19

Pega ProcessExtender AppExchange listing for Salesforce.com

20

Customer interviews and win-loss analyses conducted by Pega in November, 2014.

21

UnitedHealth Group Pegasystems Case Study.

22

Kaiser Permanente Again Ranks Highest In J.D. Power Member Satisfaction Survey, March 2014.

23

Kaiser Permanente Pegasystems Case Study.

24

Royal Bank of Canada Pegasystems Case Study.

25

http://www.salesforce.com/marketing-cloud/features/predictive-internet-intelligence retrieved February, 2015

26

Salesforce.com Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire ExactTarget, June 2013.

27

Salesforce.com Customer Service Review, CRMSearch.com

28

www.salesforce.com/service-cloud retrieved Feb 5, 2015.

29

Salesforce.com Product Review, CRMSearch.com

30

Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites, Teresa Jones, W. Roy Schulte, Michele Cantara;
Gartner, 2014.

31

Critical Capabilities for Case Management Frameworks, Janelle B. Hill, Kenneth Chin, Rob Dunie; Gartner, 2014,

32

Method and apparatus for digital data processing with mutable inheritance, Justia Patents.

33

Pega Insights video.

34

AIG Pegasystems Case Study.

35

Pegasystems 2013 Annual Report

36

SalesForce Analyst Day Presentation, October 13, 2014

37

Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, Michael Maoz; Gartner, 2014.

38

TalkTalk Hit By Failed Customer IT Project, The Telegraph, Feb 2015.

39

Taken from customer interviews and win-loss analyses conducted by Pega in November, 2014

40

The Forrester Wave: Customer Service Solutions For Enterprise Organizations, Q2 2014, Kate Leggett; Forrester.

41

A Productivity Comparison of Pegasystems Pega 7 versus Java Enterprise Edition Custom Build, Cap Gemini, 2014.

42

Salesforce.com Master Service Agreement, 12.2

43

Why Salesforce.com Has Passed Its Prime, Peter Cohan; Forbes, Feb 2015.

Salesforce.com, SalesforceExactTarget and Social Marketing Cloud are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.
com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Pega and Pegasystems are registered trademarks of Pegasystems Inc. and
Pegasystems owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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ABOUT PEGASYSTEMS
Pegasystems develops strategic applications for sales, marketing, service
and operations. Pegas applications streamline critical business operations,
connect enterprises to their customers seamlessly in real-time across
channels, and adapt to meet rapidly changing requirements. Pegas
Global 500 customers include the worlds largest and most sophisticated
enterprises. Pegas applications, available in the cloud or on-premises, are
built on its unified Pega 7 platform, which uses visual tools to easily extend
and change applications to meet clients strategic business needs. Pegas
clients report that Pega gives them the fastest time to value, extremely rapid
deployment, efficient re-use and global scale. For more information, please
visit us at www.pega.com.