With the acquisition of Mindtouch, NICE has finally extended the power of AI-informed intelligent assistants beyond the agent desktop to support customer self-service applications. It’s been a long-time coming.

The NICE Employee Virtual Assistant (NEVA) made its debut in 2018 at Interactions, the annual gathering of NICE’s customers, partners and analysts. A year later, in 2019, NEVA was featured in presentation called “Leave it to NEVA” from the central stage at Interactions 2019. At that event, CEO Barak Eilam called NEVA “the first step in providing a human/machine duo which balances the perfect combination of machine efficiency with a human touch.” Yet it manifested itself only as an avatar on an agents screen that could suggest next best actions, note when an agent should recognize an upsell opportunity or provide a detailed product description in response to a customer query.

A Rich Palette for the Digital Solutions Group

In late 2020, NICE formed its Digital Solutions Group led by John Wilcutts, former CEO of Speech Analytics specialist Nexidia. Both Nexidia and InConact, its Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform were acquired in 2016, the former in January and the latter in May. During the ensuing five years the parent company has pursued an orderly and largely successful process of assimilating its acquisitions and incorporating their products and services into a coherent offering packaged as CXOne, first introduced in by InContact in late July 2017. At that time, its marketing literature called it a combination of “best-in-class Omnichannel Routing, Workforce Optimization, Analytics, Automation and Artificial Intelligence, all running in the AWS cloud”.

Fast forward to today. CXOne Expert extends the “perfect combination of machine efficiency and human touch” exemplified by NEVA from the agent desktop into direct conversations with customers. The acquisition of Mindtouch gives its virtual assistant access to what Mindtouch calls “elements of knowledge” that respond to a customer, prospect or employees precise, immediate needs. Whether the information is in a product manual, Sharepoint file or lodged somewhere on a company’s web site MindTouch will locate it and respond to what it calls a “need event.” This creates a strong foundation for highly-personalized, conversational self-service or intelligent assistance.

All CXOne Expert Needs is IAuth

In addition to its CCaaS and Analytics services, NICE is one of the leading providers voice biometrics-based real-time authentication (RTA). Its latest offering, ENLIGHTEN, adds applies AI-based predictive models to its processes to identify fraudsters and to give higher confidence that the individual reaching out to a company is, indeed, who he or she claims to be.

RTA/ENLIGHTEN’s importance for fraud loss prevention is easy to understand. What is more important in the context of digital self-service is the importance of strong, simple authentication to support highly-personalized services. In short, CXOne Expert benefits from the powers Nexidia and Mindtouch, first, to understand or predict the intent of a caller and, then, to respond with the knowledge element that is a precise match to that request. Using passive, real-time authentication of the customer gives a company the confidence to provide personalized responses to each individual’s query or instruction.

Through acquisition or internal investment, NICE has all of the resources in place to deliver well-informed, accurate and personalized answers through its Intelligent Assistant (aka CXOne Expert).

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication