This article was contributed by Omer Minkara, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Contact Center & Customer Experience Management.

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I spent last week in Marrakesh, Morocco attending NICE’s analyst summit. The event was a great opportunity to learn and discuss company’s current and future strategy, speak with users from Aon, Toyota Financial, and Solera, as well as spend 1-1 time with company leaders discussing the state of the market in contact center and customer experience (CX). This post summarizes my takeaways from the event.

First, the summit location and experience were very much a great reflection of the contact center and CX industry. As a first-time tourist to Marrakesh, the city looks very mystical when searching online. Once you’re there and immersed in the local culture, one can feel the magic of different languages, cultures, cuisines, architectures all blending together in a harmonious and authentic fashion. Ironically, this is very much the state of contact center and CX. With increasing global economic uncertainty and the pace of change in business, company leaders try to demystify buzzwords and trends to use the right strategies and tools needed to adapt and thrive for delivering magical customer experiences.

Entering a New Era with New Realities

In that spirit, Barak Eilam, the CEO of the company opened the summit acknowledging the tectonic changes happening in the overall business landscape, including the contact center and CX space. He noted that the many economies around the world are now in a transition phase from one era into another. He defined the previous era as one that includes loose monetary policy, globalization at lightning-speed and increased complexity. Combined with the supply chain bottlenecks after the pandemic and high inflation figures, economies around the world are now moving to a new era that necessitates closer adherence to economic fundamentals, greater control in managing global operations while adapting to new work lifestyles and operating at what’s already almost peak employee productivity levels.

The above trends necessitate technology buyers to more closely scrutinize the providers they work with to ensure that these providers have the operational and financial resources needed to continue innovate in order to keep up with changes impacting the contact center and CX space. Firms must also include AI-ization of their activities where they consider ways to further improve employee productivity through AI capabilities as well as add efficiency through automation capabilities.

Eilam also noted that contact center and CX interactions are increasingly moving to be beyond solely the agents. He shared several statistics that align with Aberdeen’s research on adoption of AI and automation capabilities for unattended service, but it was also important that he acknowledged that this new era doesn’t mean the end of agents. Rather, it’s one where self-service will be used more but also one where agents will have an even more important role managing more complex interactions delivering even greater impact for the business.

CX Fluency & Cloud

Also at the event Paul Jarman, CEO of CXOne at NICE took stage and expanded on the company’s CXi framework. CXi stands for customer experience interactions, and its framework delivered via what the company calls a suiteform – a combination of a unified suite of applications (e.g., analytics, WFE, self-service) within a platform (CXOne).  NICE announced CXi in 2021 as a framework enabling contact center and CX leaders to deliver frictionless experiences across all channels. At the event, many of the questions in the room were inquiring if NICE is planning to expand into marketing effectiveness, sales effectiveness, and commerce spaces given its broader focus on helping firms managing the overall CX as part of CXi. This is a question I hear often in vendor events in the CX world. Company leaders from NICE emphasized that while many organizations use capabilities such as scheduling, speech analytics, recording and routing for sales effectiveness and outbound telemarketing, the company is primarily focused on enabling businesses to deliver top-notch CX with contact center involvement. They also noted that connected data across all departments and systems is a crucial part of the CXi framework, and that seamlessly managing customer conversations by connecting the contact center to the rest of the enterprise is an important part of achieving this objective. To this point, during his presentation, Eilam noted that there are five building blocks for CXi:

  • Digital entry points
  • Journey orchestration
  • Smart self-service
  • Prepared agents
  • Complete performance

Jarman particularly emphasized that customer conversations today must be managed in a frictionless and personalized fashion where firms can tailor each buyer journey regardless of the channels used to start the interaction while making it fluid in that whether the interaction moves across channels or gets interrupted due to its asynchronous nature companies can still meet buyer needs for receiving timely and effective service. He also noted that CX fluency doesn’t mean blindly prioritizing customer needs. Rather, firms that are CX fluent master the balance in delivering on customer expectations while achieving company priorities. They do so by adjusting and aligning their contact center and CX activities to accomplish both internal goals and address customer expectations.

One of the other areas Jarman covered during his presentation was NICE’s cloud strategy and updates. He noted that the company’s cloud business has grown by 27% over the past year which marks a significant percentage growth. He also noted that an uptick in cross-purchase by customers where for example existing WEM users also buy CXOne.

Channel Optimization, AI & Intelligent WEM

An important aspect of CXi – and the overall CX space today – is that customer/company conversations are no longer solely limited to an interaction (synchronous) that has a beginning (initiating a phone call) and an end (ending the call). With use of text messaging, social media, email and IVAs conversations are now asynchronous – meaning that each conversation is part of a broader relationship with the customer and that there is no end to the conversation because customers can ask another question anytime at the time of their preference. Barry Cooper, President for Workforce Engagement at NICE noted that these changes mean that firms must move from a mindset of managing channels to managing conversations at scale. Specifically, this means recognizing that customers may need help any time and using existing data and technology tools to predict when that may happen to adjust workforce activities but also using data in a masterful way to fuel self-service programs that can quickly and accurately handle customer needs.

Cooper expanded on the role of NICE’s Enlighten AI that’s weaved across the CXi framework and CXOne. He noted that AI capabilities are a core part of the company’s customer matching (routing) activities, including the ability to handle cognitive-load such as how many interactions an agent can handle simultaneously factoring in previous agent performance, skills, etc. to optimize efficiency. On the agent side, Cooper noted enabling supervisors with AI capabilities to better monitor, coach, collaborate and takeover interactions. Such targeted and data-driven use of AI capabilities help contact center and CX leaders transform traditional workforce engagement activities that encapsulate workforce management and workforce optimization.

Proactive Communications

Also, a speaker at the summit was Dr. Mark Smith, CEO of Contact Engine by NICE. Dr. Smith noted that today approximately 90% of customer/company conversations are inbound and that they expect this to reduce to almost 50% with the remaining moving towards an outbound model that uses proactive communications such as alerts, reminders, notifications, etc. One of the important takeaways from Dr. Smith’s session was reminding contact center & CX leaders that the future of CX must manage conversations in a personal fashion and not in a persona-based form. Companies must speak with customers knowing the unique nuances for that customer and not some other customer that looks like the client.

The three building blocks of proactive communications were highlighted as:

  • Pre-empt: provide the customer information they are most likely to need easily and early proactively without the customer contacting you
  • Prevent: predict the likelihood of a customer needing something and prevent the need for the customer needing to contact you for it
  • Proact: engage customers that never contact you to solve problems and open new opportunities

Dr. Smith expanded that firms must use these building blocks effectively in order to truly maximize the benefits of proactive communications. He also noted how AI helps firms expand use of proactive communications by infusing greater intelligence and enabling increasing use of outbound communications.

Knowledge as a Foundation

The role of knowledge management has long been understood in the contact center. Without relevant knowledgebase articles, agents will struggle helping clients. Without relevant articles, self-service will also fail functioning resulting in unhappy customers and escalations to assisted channels. So, Tim Harris, Head of Product at NICE noted during his session that knowledge is a foundational component of running any contact center and shared knowledge centered service which means creating, editing, publishing, and sharing of knowledge. To facilitate ease of access and managing of knowledge, Harris highlighted NICE’s integrations with numerous platforms, including CRM, UC, and others.

One of the important points Harris highlighted was journey-aware self-service. While traditional self-service is very static in that it’s designed to work based on if-then statements where if a customer types or says a certain word, they are provided with a specific knowledgebase article, journey-aware self-service is adaptive. Specifically, this means that firms use natural language understanding (NLU), workflow management, automation and other CX capabilities to detect the context of the customer journey and adapt self-service activities based on that broader context. Furthermore, it also means automatically analyzing self-service activity results to determine areas of improvement and adjusting workflows and articles in order to continuously optimize self-service.

Demos & Customer Panel

The event also included a demo session that allowed analysts to observe many of the product capabilities in person. It was helpful to see the various functionalities within the CXOne platform enabling agents to perform at high levels while enabling brands to detect and manage customer conversations across all channels in a fluent fashion all the while also optimizing the supervisor and agent collaboration to improve quality management and coaching processes and outcomes.

The customer panel featured numerous interesting conversations on a variety of topics, from self-service to integrations to AI. On AI, it was validating Aberdeen’s research to see all speakers note that AI is a priority. While firms are at different places in terms of their AI journey, all brands acknowledged that they are looking to increase their use of AI capabilities to support greater efficiency and a better CX.

Summary

The contact center and CX space is like no other. Fueled by changing customer behavior, technology innovation and business climate, it’s ever evolving. This can create a sense of mystery and even give a sense of mystical practices that business leaders pursue to keep-up with changes and attain their goals. Businesses that truly excel in this changing and uncertain environment are the ones that truly master data, use the right tools, and pursue the right strategies. In turn, they enjoy the rewards of delivering magical customer experiences. Fluency in managing CX across all departments, all channels and using all the tools is not easy, but it’s how forward-thinking brands differentiate themselves from their traditional counterparts.

Please share your thoughts on the above takeaways, what activities or technology tools are most important for your activities in 2023? Where are your in your journey for providing fluent CX?