At “Interactions 2019”, NICE Ltd.’s annual gathering of customers, partners and analysts, company executives highlighted progress in four major strongholds: Cloud, Analytics, Digital and AI and Automation. In doing so, the company, which remains one of the powerhouses of call recording, touts successful augmentation of its CCaaS offerings, especially those announced with the  Spring Release of CXone, its branded Customer Experience Platform.

From a Conversational Commerce and Intelligent Assistance perspective, the star of the show was NEVA, an acronym for NICE Employee Virtual Assistant. As depicted in the small image above this paragraph, NEVA can spontaneously pop-up on an agent’s screen. In this case she appears in a Salesforce user’s workspace to make suggestions regarding what it takes for a utility’s customer to obtain and install a “smart meter”. NEVA knew all about the customer, all about the smart meter and everything in the product literature about related services and upgrade opportunities.

In that respect, she is a conversational front-end to a multiplicity of business processes designed to simplify discovery and retrieval of information or data that is often “owned” by back-end systems (for booking flights, checking inventory, changing addresses, etc.). She (can also be a noodge who perceives what it takes to complete a task fully, by instructing the agent to ask certain questions or by suggesting next steps, which might culminate in making a new sale or ensuring the retention of a customer. Even though she is prompting the agent during his or her conversation with a customer, she is not designed to carry on a conversation directly with that customer.

“Moving Massively to the Cloud”

In a pre-conference Analyst Summit, NICE executives provided vivid descriptions of the road ahead for the combined company. NEVA, which was launched at NICE Interactions 2018, is but a small part of NICE’s overall cloud strategy. Less than a year ago, in August 2018, NICE announced that it completed acquisition of cloud-based, behavioral analytics specialist Mattersight. At Interactions 2019, the Mattersight’s core technology is the foundation of its Predictive Behavioral Routing (PBR) offer and was featured in an impressive demo to the 3,000+ individuals at the opening, plenary session.

James Cave, senior director of omnichannel customer experience at Macy’s, and a Mattersight/PBR user for over two years, described how the technology has been used to match callers with their most appropriate agents to dramatic effect. Saying that Macy’s isn’t leading its customers on “blind dates”, he noted that, 44% of calls  have been routed using PBR since 2017, resulting in a decrease in average holding time of 55 seconds and a 5.5% productivity improvement. That’s quite a testimonial.

In addition, the plenary session featured use case in the travel and hospitality vertical where a parent was organizing a trip that involved quite a bit of coordination. It represented a chance for NICE to illustrate the power of PBR, in terms of matching a caller with the proper agent skills as well as the role of NEVA to make suggestions during the call, and, more important to some, provide a summary of the call so that live agents don’t have to.

NICE’s CEO Barak Eilam noted that “NEVA is the first step in providing a human machine duo which balances the perfect combination of machine efficiency with a human touch.” For customer facing Intelligent Assistants, NICE-inContact have a number of virtual assistant providers in the CXone Marketplace. Among the exhibitor-sponsors were PassageAI, Inbenta and Omilia, among others.

“We’ve Already Authenticated You with Your Voice”

Yet the most impressive aspect of this omnibus demonstration was the point in the call where the customer was transferred to an agent in order to complete a transaction. At that point, the IVR system said something to like, “We’ve already authenticated you with your voice. You may now proceed with your transaction.” It was a clever call out of the effortless authentication made possible by NICE’s Real Time Authentication (RTA) services. With so many services to showcase in the cloud, analytics, artificial intelligence and automation categories, it was nice to see RTA featured for 3,000+ attendees to observe.

There were also break-out sessions featuring real world implementations of RTA. Presentations by executives from Optum, the fast-growing information and technology subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group; M&T Bank; and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Central Michigan explained the why passive, voice-based authentication and fraud prevention are so attractive today. The spokesperson for Optum delivered impressive results for the company’s deployment of passive enrollment and authentication. M&T Bank described its implementation of voice biometrics for fraud detection and described immediate results, as the technology identified a repeated fraudster trying to gain access on day one of the deployment and was able to avoid losses associated with his or her access. Plus the spokesperson for BlueCross/BlueSheild described the decision factors involved with choosing RTA as a authentication and fraud prevention strategy in the healthcare setting.

Kudos to NICE for giving coherency to such a far-flung portfolio. In relatively short order, it has been able to turn the acquisitions of inContact, Mattersight and Nexidia into a unified offering under the CXone umbrella. The CEOs of the inContact and Nexidia, Paul Jarman and John Wilcutts, respectively, remain with the company. Mattersight’s high-profile appearance as PBR in the CXone offering speaks for itself. RPA, which is an internally developed service offering, is about to take a central role as well as strong authentication across digital channels assumes “necessity” status.

NICE occupies a space in the Conversational Commerce ecosystem that spans UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaas (referring to Unified Communications, Contact Centers and Communications Platforms, respectively). It’s packaging, promotion and marketing efforts carve out a promising beachhead in an otherwise chaotic solutions stack. As a result, it is a profitable company with revenue growth in the 16% range over the past five years. In the parlance of Conversational Commerce, that speaks for itself.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles