Version 8.5 focuses on the following key themes:

• Enable project developers to be more agile and adapt quickly to changing customer needs
  • Best practice-driven case type templates to quickly build new service cases, leverage best practices for case designs that reduce implementation time, and increase service consistency and updateeability between releases.
  • New microjourneys across the vertical editions, each leveraging the new case type template.
  • New Guardrails present warnings if application customizations have a possible update impact.
  • More critical rules are locked and extension points are provided. Rules no longer used by the core application are deprecated.
• Triage more volume across new and existing channels
  • Added support for the WhatsApp messaging channel, for self-service and assisted interactions.
  • A new public interactive voice response (IVR) API to personalize your IVR call treatment with customer data and execute service cases on an IVR channel.
  • A new third party routing API for chat and messaging interactions to make routing decisions that are external to the Pega application. Useful when you are looking to get more out of your agent pool, because it blends agent availability across voice and text.
• Help reduce costs through smarter service delivery
  • Numerous email enhancements allow CSRs to be more efficient in how they manage their email assignments, and make it easier to compose a response while reviewing customer needs.
  • Initiate new email interactions from a service case notification or from a request for information.
  • New click-to-call feature automatically launches a phone interaction by clicking a phone number in an interface.
  • New configurable CTI contact lookup feature eliminates the custom implementations previously required for that feature.

For more information about key features, see What's New in Pega CRM.

For information about new Pega Platform features, see the Pega Platform Release Notes.