Recent advancements in technology have been changing how we work, shop, communicate and more, and organisations looking to deliver exceptional customer experience should consider transforming their approach accordingly.
“As we enter a new era of digital immersion, the traditional conventions of delivering customer experience need to be updated and replaced with a new approach that better addresses today’s consumer, agent and brand expectations,” says Abby Monaco, senior product marketing manager of the customer experience division at Nice.
To do this, organisations should take advantage of new and evolving technology and the growing range of solutions focused on solving these specific challenges.
“Technology is an essential component, if not the core component, to delivering a consistent customer experience,” says Brian Mistretta, director of product marketing in the customer experience division of Nice. “Take artificial intelligence for example. While generative AI has been an industry buzzword for the last year, the technology didn’t emerge without the significant strides in natural language processing and natural language understanding that have been ongoing through many years, especially in the customer experience space.
“Self-service channels are now keeping customers engaged because they are providing meaningful support. They can drive proactive outreach, helping customers who may be stuck on a web form, or even handle mundane transactional tasks like making appointments and password resets, all without needing to infringe on their human counterparts.”
AI is also a valuable tool that helps human agents communicate, solve problems and deal with issues they may have not come across before in real time.
“AI tools help agents decrease the time it takes to resolve interactions by providing contextual and relevant information to the agent ‘in the moment’ as well as analysing sentiment and behaviours to guide agents on what to say next, how to show empathy or point out that they interrupt too often,” says Mistretta. “All soft skills that are difficult to coach and improve.”
While organisations recognise that they need to invest in technologies, it can be challenging for them to know which of the many options best suits their needs.
“There is an abundance of technology to choose from, and disparate technology stacks made up from solutions developed by multiple vendors don’t always ‘play nice’ with each other,” says Mistretta. “This can result in data silos, blind spots and bottlenecks for the organisation. We recognise that this is a common denominator for many organisations we are working with. They have a dynamic landscape of applications, and they absolutely must be able to work with new systems being introduced.”
To help organisations overcome this challenge, Nice has developed the CXone platform. It is designed to allow organisations to leverage existing application infrastructure to accommodate their needs.
“We offer an incredibly broad choice of key applications that focus on optimal customer experiences like quality management, workforce engagement, analytics and more,” says Mistretta. “We also recognise that every organisation’s customer experience needs are unique, so all of our applications are supported with AI that is trained using the industry’s largest conversational data set to proactively identify those unique needs and meet the customer where they are, in any channel.
“In addition, CXone simplifies expanding customer experience with pre-integrated, low-code, low-complexity interfaces that help lower the hurdle to expanding the technology stack by making the process faster and less complicated.”
The CXone platform embodies Nice’s customer experience interactions (CXi) vision, which is based on providing a single platform that empowers organisations to create frictionless end-to-end journeys. It addresses five foundational needs.
“The first need is intelligently meeting customers wherever their journey begins,” says Monaco. “Secondly, seamlessly and smartly orchestrating the customer journey from the first needs event to successful resolution, including moving between channels per customer request or proactively when appropriate to reduce friction and/or improve the experience.
“The third need is enabling fast resolution through data-driven conversational AI self-service platforms that actually work, followed by engaging agents to successfully resolve any need at the right moment in the journey, with the right information, and providing organisations with the tools they need to continuously analyse, plan, manage and improve their customer experience across all channels.”
Nice is also leveraging its partnership with Microsoft to further support organisations.
“CXone integrated with Microsoft Teams improves rapid collaboration across the contact centre and the rest of the organisation, leading to faster answers for customers and better experiences for contact centre agents and customers,” says Monaco. “The solution provides contact centres with best-in-class omnichannel routing, analytics, workforce optimisation, automation and AI, unified and seamlessly integrated with Teams.”
Mistretta adds: “Additionally, we are the only contact centre-as-a-service provider in the market today deployed on Microsoft Azure. We will continue to expand and add services with Microsoft and have a tight alignment with it on development efforts between the two organisations.”
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2023 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription