What do you like best about the product?

Pega really is an incredible tool for business process automation. The amount of out-of-the-box support for 90% of the user stories we handle makes complex process a breeze to tackle. I have singlehandedly automated processes for one of the world's largest companies that require input from dozens of users, sometimes simultaneously, in under a month. There's a lot to uncover, but the more time I spend in Pega, the more time I learn there is a handy preexisting feature that makes my work quicker to complete and more stable.

Pega also has a well thought out system for UI and achieving branding standards. The Skin offers a central place to alter and view changes to make easy-to-understand changes to the CSS. This feature allows me to create powerfully branded proof of concepts that have won my employer contracts.

What do you dislike about the product?

The learning curve for Pega is steep, steep, steep. There is a lot of knowledge to be gleaned to get to even a novice level, that in my experience can only be achieved through a combination of playing around in Pega AND going through their coursework. I was lucky to be employed with a company that has a 90 day training regime after onboarding to allow employees to get up to speed before being asked to tackle real work, but were it not for this grace period, Pega would be very hard to learn and therefore use effectively. Indeed, I've worked with a handful of different Pega contractors who clearly didn't take the time to learn the ins and outs of the platform and make hacky code and buggy projects that end up being more trouble than they're worth. If you want to learn Pega, make sure you have plenty of time to read and freedom to experiment because you WILL need it.

On a similar topic, the secrets of Pega can oftentimes be hard to learn. Niche questions can often go unanswered, as Pega's support message boards don't usually produce helpful answers. I've gotten out of quite a few jams because I work with 100+ Pega specialists who have passed on the oral tradition of a lot of Pega tips, tricks, and rules. That said, they did recently overhaul their community support site, so it does seem that they are actively engaged in trying to solve this problem.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're mostly using Pega to automate customer engagements, internal reviews, customer support, and sales prospecting. It does have powerful native abilities in these areas that greatly accelerates delivery, which makes our customers happy. Consequently, we've realized benefits like higher customer satisfaction and profitability after investing up-front time in employee development of Pega skills.

What do you like best about the product?

Pega software is well-polished, and their service dept. is great.

What do you dislike about the product?

The Pega Platform is quite alot of money.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I most recently used it to qualify for my certificate.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Definitely play with it and implement something fun. You'll learn so much just by doing it. (As Yogi Berra said "you observe alot just by watching")

What do you like best about the product?

Pega platform has many of the latest and greatest CRM features and also caters to Analytics, Robotics.

What do you dislike about the product?

This is a tough one. Since Pega platform offers many features, sometime projects are implemented without considering the right design and that leads to longer timelines

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

1. Business Process Automation - Quick and smoother resolution leading to Customer Satisfaction and Business Value generation.
2. Customer Service -effective call handling, automated and intelligent call routing.
3. Robotics - automation
4. Analytics - Adding intelligence to processes

What do you like best about the product?

While build application for Dispute, the visual-driven application development lets inexperienced developer deliver apps faster, with no coding required.

What do you dislike about the product?

When added handling for legacy page adaptors, get admin error

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Automation

What do you like best about the product?

The wizards to create web services (SOAP or REST), generate related components to greatly improve developer productivity.

What do you dislike about the product?

You need to develop your applications on a platform (e.g. PRPC). It would be nice to write your code using an IDE and deploy it to the runtime environment.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

All workflow/business processes related applications. Fast development.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Use one database for sharing rules between applications versus separate databases for group of applications, need to be thought carefully. You need to find a good balance in between. We started with one database instance for enterprise sharing rules but as we grow our applications we encountered challenges. The split from one enterprise database to LOB databases costed business lots of money without adding any new feature. It was painful.

What do you like best about the product?

More out-of-box capabilities than competitors, great in-platform rulesets and rule set versioning features.

SLA, Audit trail are good examples.

Great declarative processing features.

What do you dislike about the product?

Overpriced, making it harder for adoption by medium and smaller companies.

Class structure and design seems to be over engineered from a business user perspective (especially since business users play a role in deciding the vendor along with Information Technology).

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

automation of business processes

What do you like best about the product?

The case management tool and low code app building really sets Pega apart from every other application we have at UCare. Case management is easy to use and helps get apps to market quicker.

We are excited to use more capabilities that Pega offers out of the box like Pega Call, Pega Chat, Next Best Action, and Co-browsing. The wealth of tools available to us is a major plus!

What do you dislike about the product?

Performance has been a consistent issue for us, and it's very important in the Customer Service world to have an application that renders pages quickly.

The out of the box report browser and other reporting capabilities have been difficult for our end-users to learn. Creating ad-hoc reports is nice, but it takes quite a bit of practice and training for most Customer Service users to build their own reports. Also, we had to go through a separate effort to move the data out of the blob so running reports wouldn't tax the system's response time.

For Knowledge Management, we wish we could link articles to specific screens rather than an intent task. We have a step in a process called Identify Caller and we want to link a knowledge article to that specific screen, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do that.

For Pulse, we wish we could link a post to child and parent cases. Currently we're only able to link using one context id, and therefore can't show the post on the intent task it was logged and the parent interaction or show it linked to both in reports.

We have found it really difficult to build a solution in Pega that meets our call documentation and auditing needs. We tried using pencil clicks and Customer Inquiry as ways to make documentation clear, concise, and quick for end users, but neither solution seems to be very reportable or user friendly. Pencil clicks can only be recorded in the history log, and once checked, you can't uncheck them. It would be nice if there were an out of the box solution that would better capture more granularity of what the interaction was about, so we didn't have to listen to the call.

We wish there was a better way to communicate changes to the application to end users than the out of the box Alerts and Messages tool. We were hoping there was an out of the box feature that allows business users to create meaningful guides that users would go through upon first log in, much like you would get when an app on your phone has been updated. We envision it to look similar to how Pega does some of the self-guided demos of their products, but we have been told this would be completely customized and fragile to build.

Lastly, we find implementing most new products to be expensive and difficult to resource for given the Pega-specific expertise needed. We want to continue to upgrade our product, but it always takes a significant amount of time and resources for a small non-profit like UCare.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are trying to ensure quality, efficiency, and transparency of interactions with our customers, while also improving their experience via pre-emptive service and process improvements.

We have seen some improvement in these areas, especially with quality and process improvements. Shortly after our initial implementation, we saw a reduction of call average handle time of over 1 minute. Over time we have lost some of that benefit due to performance issues, but we have been able to reduce the amount of work sent to other areas as well as the time to resolve member inquiries/requests for action.

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of use/Low code.
Very intuitive way to design applications.
Very resilient platform since version 7.
Works on the most popular technology stacks (WAS, JBOSS, Oracle, DB2, MSSQL, ...).

What do you dislike about the product?

Upgrades for Pega frameworks are sometimes very painful.
Deployments are dual site (as the "code" is deployed to the centralized DB shared by all the JVM nodes).

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use the platform to develop the main application for our call center agents to receive calls and service customers.
We have over 30 business processes defined from very simple ones to very complex ones.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Hire the right people to get you started. Make sure to have employees and not just contractors who work on your applications. Spend time defining a DevOps pipeline at the beginning.
Invest in Automated Testing (inside the platform and outside) to help with regression testing.

What do you like best about the product?

Salesman's transparency and desire to be successful

What do you dislike about the product?

nothing yet, I need to understand more once I am working in the tool daily

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

customer service + workflow
nothing yet still purchasing

What do you like best about the product?

Ability to quickly build highly reusable

What do you dislike about the product?

Difficulty in finding skilled developers

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Complex order processing