Conversica vs. Pega Customer Decision Hub

Conversica is an excellent tool if you have a large database of potential students, sales leads, or other forms of potential customers/users. It does not replace human interaction, but instead supplements it - allowing your admissions/sales/retention team to spend their time with those individuals that are in most need of assistance - whether that be because they are "hot leads" for a sale, students with a sincere interest, or customers needing assistance beyond the capabilities of an automatic system.

Incentivized

PRPC is a BPM and Case management suite from Pega Systems. Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product but is very difficult to learn. Even, if we go to Pegasystems for training, we have to work on a project at least for a year to have some confidence. Areas where it requires improvements: 1) One of the first things that client's IT department questions about is proprietary BLOB column in PRPC, for them, it is a disadvantage, but as we all know BLOB is what makes the highly complex data model of any BPM application fit inside to a common schema which eliminates the help of a DBA. 2) Another area of improvement is: when using the wizards to generate rules (such as the connector wizards) you have to be careful about the level of coupling between the work object's data model and the interface's data model. This can also create maintenance issues. 3) The complete Pega suite of products have a long time to develop and deploy and it can be easily done using other low-cost software.

Incentivized

• Conversica is great at working low level leads and surfacing those that are in fact interested in your product or service.
• Conversica is also useful in weeding out leads that are not strong.
• Since Conversica is sending emails to various prospects, customers and opportunities, it allows sales, account managers, service etc, to focus on other activities, thereby saving time and freeing up resources.

Incentivized

• Ability to design custom integrated campaigns
• Analytics to provide key insights and ability to tune your campaign accordingly
• Ability to design agent workflows

Incentivized

• The method of standing up campaigns can be a little tedious for administrators because it uses copy/paste of Salesforce Campaign ID instead of just searching for active Salesforce campaigns.
• Understanding the conversation path options that the AI could take is improving greatly, but can still use some improvements for admin awareness when standing up a new conversation.
• Understanding what conversation types exist and how they differ from one another is sometimes difficult to self-serv, but the Conversica team is always very good about helping out explaining these.

Incentivized

• Pega Customer Engagement Suite is ready to use out of the box with several features, but custom development is always needed.
• Although new features can be quickly implemented, they have to go through a screening Business analysis process, QA screening and SCRUM based development.
• Pega eliminates the need for custom code, but there are rare cases where an specific requirement has little to no support from Pega, and implementing custom code can break OOB functionality and make the system unstable.

Incentivized

Tool is extremely powerful but comes with a heavy price tag. As long as we close more than 30 deals with year with Conversica's assistance it will be an easy choice to renew. If we don't we will have to figure out if these funds are best spent in other lead generation places.

Standalone, it's very easy to use. It becomes a little more complicated when you're working with it as an integration in Salesforce.

Incentivized

Our account manager and support rep have been extremely helpful in helping us get the system where we wanted it. Given our original use case as a lead qualifier, a lot of the conversations needed to be altered or exceptions created in order to provide the customization we needed. Our AM and support rep were able to accommodate most of our requests and were extremely helpful in working with us on a solution.

Incentivized

The implementation went smoothly. The only advice I would give for anybody looking to integrate Conversica with Salesforce is to ensure that either you or somebody within your organization has experience with process builder as you'll need to create some processes to force your leads into Salesforce campaigns for the Conversica system to pick them up.

Incentivized

I haven't looked into many other conversational ai products - we received a solid recommendation about using this and have been happy with the process and experience. Price was also pretty good, so we didn't feel a need to shop around on that front. If things change I'll do that homework, but we're happy for now

Incentivized

I explained in detail in previous questions.

• We have found that each conversation type has a different ROI. Some are very hard to report off of, whereas others are easy. this is because some are more built around building awareness of what we offer where they may not purchase it for months down the line.
• Has helped us to save on salaries. If staff were to try to do the same thing our AI Assistant does, it would take them many hours to be as successful.

Incentivized

• Cost savings on print marketing and email due to better targeting
• More timely campaigns to reach customers at the right time

Incentivized