The Transformation of NICE: Next-Gen CX Powered by AI

These days it’s not just the features or products you offer to customers, or your amazing pricing strategy that determines whether you’ll be successful in a competitive landscape. The one thing that matters more than anything else to your consumers – is the experience you deliver.

Companies that focus on “CX” (Customer Experience) earn almost 80% more revenue than their competitors, and their profits are up to 60% higher. But delivering an amazing experience isn’t easy, particularly as consumer expectations evolve. To delight and retain your customers today, you need to deliver amazing, convenient, and personalised support across multiple channels.

The only way to do this? With the right contact centre platform. Vendors like NICE, one of the leading innovators in the CCaaS space, are transforming the customer service landscape. Combining artificial intelligence, with unified digital platforms and rich CX capabilities, NICE’s contact centre gives businesses a revolutionary way to separate themselves from the competition.

Today we’re taking a closer look at the NICE CX portfolio, and how its has evolved over the last couple of years.

Introducing NICE: A CX Pioneer

NICE is one of the world’s leading “CX” technology brands, offering a variety of tools for everything from omnichannel customer engagement, to workforce engagement management (WEM). As of 2023, it was named a leader in the Gartner CCaaS Magic Quadrant for the ninth consecutive year.

Plus, NICE has been recognized by a host of other industry analysts and publications, from Forrester, to the Ventana Research 2023 buyer’s guide for contact centres.

Since it launched in 1986, NICE has made a name for itself as an innovator, taking a comprehensive approach to serving companies looking to compete on experience. The NICE portfolio today offers tools for everything from journey orchestration, to intelligent self-service, and even generative-AI agent assistant apps. Plus, NICE benefits from one of the world’s largest partner communities.

It’s open and flexible approach to development means NICE technologies can integrate with a host of different resources and tools, such as CRM, ERP, and even UCaaS systems.

NICE promises companies:

• Intelligence: Business leaders can build digital-first contact centres with NICE, using its cloud native platform, purpose-built AI, and unified suite of CX apps.
• Digital first experiences: NICE believes the future of customer service is digital. The CCaaS platform supports more than 30 digital, messaging, and self-help channels.

• Comprehensive results: With NICE, companies get a comprehensive and best-in-class combination of CX applications, including workforce engagement tools.
• Excellent service: NICE is committed to supporting its community with incredible resources, technical guidance, and expert assistants.
• Proven leadership: With more than 30 years of leadership in the contact centre space, and a proven track record, NICE stands out from its competition.

The Heart of the NICE Portfolio: Nice CXOne

Today, NICE offers companies one of the most comprehensive portfolios of CX tools in the modern world. It’s comprehensive range of tools all comes together in one unified solution: CXOne. The “CXOne” CCaaS offering is one of the most complete cloud CX platforms out there, and one of the most advanced, thanks to the newly implemented “Enlighten AI”.

Here are the core components included in CXOne:

Enlighten AI: The Generative AI Toolkit

Probably the most exciting update to NICE’s product collection in the last few years, was the introduction of Enlighten AI, a generative AI toolkit custom-built for contact centres. The full toolkit consists of a handful of incredible tools, such as:

• Autopilot: An AI-powered virtual assistant that guides customers through self-service experiences, offering personalised recommendations and support.
• Copilot: The virtual agent solution designed to support supervisors and agents in the flow of work, with real-time coaching, summarisation, and suggestions.
• Actions: Comprehensive data-driven reports and insights, and guidance offered by a generative AI conversational bot.
• Auto Summary: The automatic note-taking tool that can summarise every interaction and highlight key trends and action points.
• AI routing: Intelligent routing to match every customer with the ideal agent, based on your customer profile data and other factors.
• CSAT: AI-powered customer satisfaction score solutions designed to give you insights into the factors that influence customer sentiment.
• XO: AI tools for building your own self-service experiences across channels, and training team members.

There are also Enlighten tools for specific functions, such as complaint management, specific segments, like vulnerable customers, and Enlighten tools for sales teams.

Omnichannel Contact Centre

As mentioned above, NICE believes in empowering companies to connect with their customers over the channels they use most, from SMS, to messaging apps like WhatsApp. The comprehensive omnichannel contact centre supports every form of interaction, whether your customers contact you by video, phone, or social media.

What’s more, NICE has a fantastic “digital and self-service” product collection. You can access knowledge management tools to create FAQs and guides that inform and guide your customers. Business leaders can design proactive conversational AI tools and chatbots, that respond to customer questions, or reach out with product recommendations.
Plus, there are built-in tools for self-service analytics, interactive voice response management, and web and mobile engagement.

Journey Orchestration and CX Analytics

NICE excels at providing companies with the insights they need to deliver better customer experiences. The comprehensive range of reporting tools and analytical solutions offer insights into everything from employee performance and call quality, to customer sentiment.

Companies can analyse interactions with natural language processing, create surveys to send out to customers and monitor customer satisfaction scores, and even track analytics throughout the customer journey. Plus, there are real-time dashboards available for tracking metrics in real-time.

The NICE CCaaS toolkit goes beyond simply giving companies the tools they need to monitor customer journeys and experiences. It allows brands to complete orchestrate and optimize the full omnichannel journey. The omnichannel routing tools use AI to seamlessly connect consumers to the right agent on any channel, based on profile data.
There are proactive dialler tools, to help outbound call center agents generate more revenue, reduce hangups and proactively connect to customers throughout their journey.

Workforce Engagement Management

One of the ways NICE sets itself apart from other contact centre vendors, is that it focuses on more than just customer experience. The NICE team knows great customer experiences start with fantastic employee experiences. That’s why the NICE portfolio includes a host of tools for training, coaching, supporting, and managing employees.
The NICE contact center comes with a dedicated supervisor workspace, where business leaders can track quality management scores, and examine employee performance. Plus, they can deliver real-time coaching and advice to employees throughout customer conversations.

There’s an omnichannel agent desktop, where staff members can access all of the communication tools they need, analytics, and AI tools like Enlighten Copilot. What’s more, NICE has it’s own workforce management solution, which leverages AI to help with everything from forecasting and scheduling, to automated agent augmentation.

The NICE Open Cloud Platform

Finally, the NICE Open Cloud platform ensures companies have the freedom to extend, customise, and optimise their contact centre solutions however they choose. The open cloud foundation means business leaders can access hundreds of pre-built integrations with powerful tools, through the NICE CXOne marketplace.

Plus, there’s the option to leverage NICE’s voice as a service solution if you want to add voice to an existing application. There are even countless developer tools and APIs for creating automated workflows and boosting employee productivity.

As an added bonus, you can access all of these flexible integrations within a platform that promises comprehensive security and compliance, FedRAMP support, and global resiliency and reliability.

The Evolution of the NICE Portfolio

Over the last couple of years, NICE has made a number of powerful updates to its CX stack, focusing heavily on the evolving power of artificial intelligence. It was one of the first contact centre companies to implement a generative AI solution into its toolkit, both for self-service and agent support. It’s also one of the few vendors that allows companies to build and customise their own conversational bots and AI journeys.

NICE has also increased its integrations and partnerships with other major market-leading brands over the years, from Microsoft and the Azure platform, to Voise Inc for sentiment analysis. What’s more, the company is constantly rolling out new features and capabilities for its customers.

In 2023, NICE introduced its “Industry Benchmarks” solution, to help businesses compare the performance of their service teams against other industry standards, using proprietary data. Plus, NICE has also introduced Desktop Process and Analytics tools for more in-depth insights.

What’s Next for NICE?

Over the last couple of years, NICE has continued to prove itself as an innovator in the contact centre landscape. The company’s focus on delivering a unified experience solution has allowed it to craft a comprehensive toolkit that benefits both employees and customers alike.

The brand’s continued investment in generative AI, automation, and innovative new technologies ensures it stays one step ahead of other CCaaS competitors. Plus, it’s vast partner network means that NICE’s CX tools are some of the most flexible and customisable in the world.

If you think NICE might have the CCaaS solution you need to elevate your business to the next level, use our Comparison matrix for a behind-the-scenes insight into all the benefits you can access. Alternatively, reach out to our team to find out more about how our Transformation Fund can help finance your digital transformation efforts.