With an emphasis on delivering souped-up anlaytic capabilities to understand customer conversations across any channel, at scale and in real-time, both eGain and NICE Systems announced new platform soultions this week – the former through the acquisition of Exony and the latter via deployment of updated customer engagement tools.

As another validation of the Conversational Commerce model for customer engagement, eGain has acquired Exony. Now the omnichannel offers of eGain are combined with the analytics and reporting capabilities of Exony under the same corporate roof. This forms a strong combination of operational strength, analytical power and deployment flexibility. Let’s take deeper look.

Operational Strength
eGain has a strong portfolio to manage omnichannel engagement. They offer solutions that encompass voice and digital, including chat, social, email. At the same time Exony offers a strong package of analytics and reporting. In today’s deployments, it is necessary to have a deep understanding of the customer journey, which is comprised of the conversations customers are having with organizations, and for management to have the capabilities to fine-tune responses regularly. Today, this requires great analytics and reporting.

Together, eGain and Exony provide intelligent insight into customer conversations, and the foundation to make a customer conversation easy, effective and memorable. On top of all this, they now provide a very compelling offer to Cisco and non-Cisco partners to provide a strong “deploy-operate-analyze” approach to great customer care.

Analytical Power
The eGain-Exony platform will provide a single analytics and reporting view to manage across the omnichannel conversations. Often analytical tools don’t span the various channels of conversation that a customer can employ. Through the single, consolidated view across channels, the customer journey can be analyzed, and improved for a great experience. We are beginning to see this maturation of analytics applied to the omnichannel conversation, and this is a great example.

Deployment Flexibility
The combined platform can be deployed as either on premise or in the cloud. This makes perfect sense as contact centers are mostly deploying a hybrid approach to deployments of new technology and they consolidate, build-out and squeeze out investment in their contact center investments cloud. While clearly focused on supporting Cisco-based contact centers, a very interesting aspect of the eGain-Exony platform is that it is abstracted from the telephony infrastructure, providing a basis for very flexible, cost effective and scalable solution.

Nice Announces Real-Time for Contact Center

In a related story on deployment of advanced analytics tools, NICE Systems released its Engagement Platform designed for 100 percent real-time analytics at compelling cost and speed. This is cool. Oftentimes, we hear about an analytics platform, which is really more of a business intelligence tool for post-conversation analysis, followed by delayed implementation. By eliminating the time delay in analysis, leading to instantly targeted behavior, NICE has really upped the game in the Conversational Commerce arena.

NICE recently conducted a poll with Harris that concluded: “Some 59 percent of Americans said they place the most value on quick and correct answers when speaking to a customer service agent on the phone.” Quick and correct (Q&C), speed and effectiveness, let’s take a look at those concepts as applied to the contact center, contact center operations and fraud reduction within an organization.

In the Contact Center – There a range of activities during a customer conversation where Q&C is appropriate, be it assessing risk of churn, intervening at critical moments, collecting important moments for later use, or automating processes. Each of these activities is time-dependent. Too slow, they are rendered meaningless. It’s important that a platform have the scale and breadth-of-power to conduct analysis and take action to support correct conversations with agents.

For Contact Center Operations – NICE has consolidated a recording server for voice, video, screen, and arching. This can certainly make life easier, which is Q&C for a contact center operations manager. And as we see with many solutions, this one has both an on-premise and cloud deployment options. Hybrid solutions, particularly in disaster recovery scenarios, can make recovery Q&C.

For Fraud Reduction – This platform can provide instant fraud detection using techniques such as voice biometric identification. Opus Research has long tracked the voice biometric market segment closely. The ability to detect, identify and effectively deal with fraudsters is certainly dependent on the timeliness of the interaction. NICE Engagement Platform will make the customer experience better, and reduce fraud impact.

Both eGain and NICE Systems clearly see the value in understanding and analyzing customer conversations in a timely manner. We will keep a close eye on on these developments moving foward. What do think?

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Articles

Tags: Contact Centers, Mergers and Acquisitions, customer care analytics