NICE: Enhancing Customer Experience with Analytics and AI

We reside in a technology-fueled, hyper-connected and hyper-competitive era where organizations are shaping customer experience (CX) to attract potential customers and retain existing ones by wrapping their offering in a package of digital transformation. However, how do they take these strategies from boardroom to execution? More importantly, what are the ingredients that bring success in the CX race? The answers to these lie with NICE. In the race to customer delight, NICE is focused on assisting organizations to improve their overall customer experience as well as protect the customer’s data and assets. “In today’s experience-driven economy, NICE helps companies lead in their domain by helping them deliver engaging experiences that increase loyalty. We harness the power of data—both structured and unstructured—to help organizations make smarter decisions that improve business performance and efficiency,” says Darren Rushworth, President of NICE APAC.

Rushworth explains that the company has been delivering high-end customer experience solutions via its NICE2B Strategic Plan—built on four fundamental pillars involving Omni-channel, Cloud, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). As revealed by the veteran, NICE has been investing heavily in driving innovation in AI, Analytics and machine learning besides executing novel strategic acquisitions to provide solutions that focus on the key business challenges of enterprises as well as small-medium businesses (SMBs).

At the core, NICE CXone, the industry’s first fully integrated, open, all-in-one cloud customer service platform has strengthened NICE’s position in the customer experience management sector significantly. With its open architecture and hundreds of APIs, the ‘all-in-one’ solution—integrating self-service, omnichannel support, analytics and workforce optimization—empowers organizations to provide an exceptional customer experience by acting smarter and responding faster to ever-changing customer expectations.

NICE inContact CXone was particularly beneficial during the crisis created by Hurricane Harvey that dumped 27 trillion gallons of rain over Texas, USA. With 33 counties declared a federal disaster and millions of people affected by the flooding, the need for a large contact center to be set up was an immediate and urgent necessity.

NICE inContact CXone was deployed within just 72 hours for 25,000 agents and became productive from day 1, a task that would typically take weeks to even months. With NICE inContact CXone, Contact Centre agents were able to deliver a rapid and effective experience to get families and communities back on their feet. CXone made this possible by providing one unified experience for administrators, supervisors and agents.

The cloud solutions offered by NICE ensure flexibility, scalability, and agility coupled with the highest levels of data security, global coverage, and disaster recovery protection as well as a lower total cost of ownership. “We leverage cutting-edge technology such as AI to free employees from mundane tasks, provide analytics that offer game changing insights and more—all to ensure that our customers deliver the best experience to their users. We understand that in today's economy, experiences are the key differentiator, and our offering is geared to harness technology and drive exactly such outstanding experiences,” adds Rushworth.

By implementing analytics, NICE assists clients in understanding customer behavior via every interaction occurring between the customer and the contact center or medium. “Analytics continues to play a vital role in our platform strategy,” states Rushworth. NICE taps into analytics to help companies understand their customers and their perceptions via every interaction they have with the contact center, and over any channel. Mattersight Corporation, the most recent acquisition of NICE leverages interaction analytics to attain insights concerning the needs of both the customers and agents, which helped it to connect with the consumers with a personalized approach. Powered by Nexidia, NICE analytics integrates with Mattersight’s behavior analytics to empower organizations in experiencing the market's most advanced analytics in the cloud, driving personalization and smart connections in real time and create a superior customer experience. NICE Satmetrix, the company’s Voice of the Customer Solution also provides a holistic approach around customer feedback in real-time. It captures and consolidates silos of feedback across all channels so the enterprise has a single, consistent perspective of how their customers view the way they run their business.

NICE has been the recipient of numerous industry accolades, making it to the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Frost & Sullivan 2017 Product Line Strategy Leadership Award, and Forrester's Customer Journey Analytics Wave. Artificial intelligence has emancipated NICE to go beyond just providing analytics recommendations and facilitate automation of business actions for their clients. Interestingly, NICE has recently launched is very own virtual assistant, NEVA. “With AI evolving to get smarter every day,” says Rushworth, “There is a great opportunity for further growth in this strategic pillar.”