Last week I spent two days at NICE’s Interactions annual 2019 conference. The first day of the event featured an Analyst day — filled with conversations covering the company’s product capabilities and roadmap as well as overall market messaging activities. It also included customer discussions and offered opportunities to interact with company executives.

The second day allowed me to join several conference sessions to observe how various companies are managing their CX and back-office activities through technologies such as AI, automation, analytics and authentication. This article provides a brief summary of my takeaways from the event.

Strategic Pillars

One of the highlights from the analyst summit at the event was an overview of the strategic focus areas driving company activities. NICE’s CEO, Barak Eilam listed those areas (in no particular order) as:

  • AI and automation;
  • Analytics;
  • Cloud;
  • and Digital.

Between December and January of 2019, Aberdeen published several articles (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) highlighting the top contact center and customer experience (CX) trends in 2019. The four areas noted above closely relate to those findings.  For example, AI was cited as the number one technology capability CX leaders plan to incorporate within their activities in 2019 and beyond. Meanwhile, automation was cited as the fifth top focus area.

Cloud

As companies incorporate various technology capabilities, one of the decisions they need to make is how to access them — specifically, if they’re available through a cloud-based solution vs. an on-premises model. As detailed in Aberdeen’s July 2018 Cloud Contact Center study, an on-premises technology infrastructure requires firms to incur acquisition costs upfront as and use internal or contract IT resources to manage and maintain the technology. Cloud technology, on the other hand, allows companies to use the same technologies through a subscription model where upfront costs are unnecessary. Instead, companies pay for the number of licenses or the number of interactions they need to address.

Aberdeen’s research shows that companies continue moving their contact center applications to the Cloud. In fact, while business continuity and security were once cited as some of the reasons why companies prefer an on-premises infrastructure, they’re now some of the top contributing factors for making a move to a cloud-based infrastructure. Case and point: True Green noted that it used to observe unwanted service interruption when using an on-premises contact center which resulted resulting in disruptions in service delivery — this issue was alleviated once they made the move to a cloud-based contact center.

Digital

It was refreshing not to hear any of the NICE executives at the analyst summit use the word ‘digital transformation.’ Companies have been using digital tools to transform their activities for decades. In fact, in the contact center, even phone calls are digitized by using voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology — allowing for more accurate management of phone calls and interactions across other digital channels such as email, chat, messaging, etc.

Chatbots

An important area of discussion as it relates to NICE’s digital capabilities was the topic of chatbots. The company announced that it incorporated a capability within its CXOne platform that enables companies to configure and manage chatbots within the platform itself. It’s worth noting that Paul Jarman, CEO of NICE inContact, emphasized that the company doesn’t see chatbots as a tool for contact centers to replace all customer interactions. Instead, it’s a tool designed to enable customers with the ability to interact with a virtual agent / chatbot to address simple issues such as password resets or account balance checks. By integrating the insights captured through the chatbot interaction with the agent desktop, agents are empowered with relevant customer data needed to more efficiently handle customer issues. The approach of using chatbots for resolution of simple issues and seamlessly integrating chatbots with the agent desktop are among the top capabilities deployed by Best-in-Class organizations in Aberdeen’s March 2019 research on the topic.

Synthetic NPS

One of the areas of discussion that I found most interesting at the event was the company’s synthetic NPS (net promoter score) measurement capability. This refers to capturing customer sentiment and feedback data as a way to augment NPS data. While many companies use NPS to measure customer satisfaction, it’s actually not designed to measure this result. Rather, it’s a measure of customer advocacy — which is tied to customer satisfaction, but not the same. Therefore, by using capabilities such as surveys and customer journey analysis, users of the synthetic NPS capability can gain voice of the customer (VoC) insights that are more accurate in understanding and managing customer satisfaction rates.

Persona-based Routing

Yet another highlight from the event was how NICE incorporated the capabilities from its Mattersight acquisition across nearly their entire product portfolio. The acquisition provided NICE with the ability to route customers to agents by using customer and agent personas. This is done by analyzing customer data stored in CRM and other systems to build visibility into the persona type of each client while simultaneously analyzing agent personas by observing the ways in which agents handle certain issues and interact with various customer personality types. The technology then uses these combined data points through an algorithm to connect the right customer to the right agent. This capability was discussed as an important part of the company’s analytics capabilities helping contact centers and other departments with their customer journey management efforts. In addition to routing optimization, contact centers can also use this capability to determine how agents respond to different training and coaching techniques and materials, and use these insights to optimize employee performance management activities.

 

Which of the above activities do you currently use or plan to use in your contact center? Tell us what’s in your plans to enrich your contact center and CX activities through the rest of 2019.