Using our research, best practices and expertise, we help you understand how to optimize your business processes using applications, information and technology. We provide advisory, education, and assessment services to rapidly identify and prioritize areas for improvement and perform vendor selection
We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.
Services for Technology Vendors
We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.
I recently discussed how NICE continues to invest in its core products while creating a full customer experience platform, combining its core offerings with products newly acquired from inContact and Nexidia. During two recent briefings, I learned that these investments continue at quite a pace; the company announced a new product to address the ever-increasing number of channels of engagement, and another so that smaller centers with less sophisticated requirements can take advantage of a specialized workforce management product.
The first product is NICE Quality Central. Our benchmark research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud confirms what we all know: organizations are supporting more channels of engagement. Specifically, our research shows that the average number of supported channels has reached almost eight. Thus, organizations need quality management processes to assess how employees handle these additional channels in much the same way they currently assess call handling. The product consists of a set of tools that enable the capture of calls, text chats and email messages. In addition, it can capture information about back-office tasks such as claims processing and compliance auditing and connect the quality management of these with interaction handling, which gives organizations a wider, more holistic view of how agents handle interactions. The product also supports creating and customizing quality assessment forms, workflows that function across all types of interactions and automated identification of coaching needs as well as the option for supervisors to give personalized feedback, and reporting across a variety of metrics.
NICE Quality Central, available for deployment on-premises or cloud-based, can run stand-alone or integrated with third-party recording systems or other NICE products; for example, it can use speech and text analytics tools to automate categorization of interactions and identify where action is required. These capabilities, along with the multiple deployment options and the ability to run independently, provide opportunities for more organizations to apply quality management and thus better understand customer-related activities.
Similarly the second product, NICE Evolve WFM, makes workforce management easier to use and more affordable for smaller organizations. It is a purely cloud-based system sold on a subscription basis and thus more affordable than on-premises systems. The product is easy to set up, manage and use, making it a better option than spreadsheets, which our research shows many organizations still use. Despite being designed for organizations with less sophisticated requirements, NICE Evolve WFM has a rich set of capabilities and new ones it recently These include:
Added together, these tools comprise a rather sophisticated set of capabilities. Based on my research and conversations with contact center managers, I believe Evolve WFM could meet the needs of most centers.
Both of these products, and several others, were being demonstrated at the recent NICE Interactions17 event. Barak Eilam, the company CEO, kicked off a special analysts day and the main event with forward-looking presentations communicating the message that the coming together of NICE, inContact and Nexidia is going very well and there are several new developments in the pipeline that will continue to enhance the integration of the three company’s products. He also laid out how the combined product portfolios and services will enable organizations to reinvent customer service at a much faster pace than was previously possible. In a subsequent keynote, he and Paul Jarman, the CEO of inContact, broke the news that a major new development later this year, a ground-up new product, will combine capabilities from NICE, inContact and Nexidia. This will create under the inContact brand a single platform to manage assisted and digital channels of engagement, intelligent interaction routing, workforce optimization, a smart desktop, a wide range of analytics capabilities, and integration with business applications such as CRM. I have written before that I see such a platform as the absolute requirement to support enterprise-wide multichannel customer engagement, so I will be tracking this very closely.
Creating and managing a contact center has never been easy, simply because interaction types and volumes can be unpredictable and employees’ circumstances change. The need to support more channels of engagement and distribute interaction handling across sites and business groups has added to this complexity. Moreover, our research shows that business objectives have also changed; although centers are to a large degree still driven to keep operating costs down, we see emphasis shifting to the quality of the customer experience. For this shift to be successful, organizations must have the right number of multiply skilled employees who are capable of satisfying customer expectations. NICE has been a leading provider of workforce optimization systems and these, plus the other developments I wrote about in my previous perspective, demonstrate its intent to stay ahead of the game. I believe that interaction handling has grown too complex for organizations of any size to continue to manage it using spreadsheets. I therefore recommend that any organization looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of interaction handling – and along with it, customer service – assess how products from NICE can help those efforts.
Regards,
Richard Snow
VP & Research Director, Customer Engagement
ISG Software Research is the most authoritative and respected market research and advisory services firm focused on improving business outcomes through optimal use of people, processes, information and technology. Since our beginning, our goal has been to provide insight and expert guidance on mainstream and disruptive technologies. In short, we want to help you become smarter and find the most relevant technology to accelerate your organization's goals.
Ventana Research’s Analyst Perspectives are fact-based analysis and guidance on business,
Each is prepared and reviewed in accordance with Ventana Research’s strict standards for accuracy and objectivity and reviewed to ensure it delivers reliable and actionable insights. It is reviewed and edited by research management and is approved by the Chief Research Officer; no individual or organization outside of Ventana Research reviews any Analyst Perspective before it is published. If you have any issue with an Analyst Perspective, please email them to ChiefResearchOfficer@isg-research.net