The inevitable march to digital customer communications is being fully embraced by NICE and is embodied in a flurry of product upgrades announced at its Analyst Summit in Jackson, WY. The company’s array of products and services are tied to AI and automation, omnichannel routing, advanced workflows, real-time assistance, and what Tim Harris, Head of Products for CXone, calls “invisible intelligence.”

NICE executives quoted a stark figure where 81% of customer journeys start with digital-first interactions (search engines, apps, website visits, social interactions), leaving a paltry 19% of customers directly seeking contact center and agent assistance to resolve their issues. John Wilcutts, VP & GM for NICE Digital Solutions Group, terms these “massively asynchronous” conversations. Regardless of the entry point, a successful customer experience requires leveraging real-time customer journey data that must be contextualized, enriched, and converted into actionable Conversational Intelligence. It’s a complex problem that requires a well-orchestrated solution.

NICE unveiled CXi, a decidedly non-contact-center centric framework for digital, multichannel communications. Again with a goal of contextualizing ongoing interactions, CXi straddles multiple communication channels — voice (IVR/ACD), digital channels, scripted automation, knowledge management, intelligent automation (more than bots) — for full-service CX orchestration. EnlightenAI serves as the recipient platform for channeling all the customer entry points to help prepare agents with real-time agent assistance, training, supervisor scheduling, and complete performance metrics. Data and AI are the glue to fulfill on the promise of CXi.

Indeed, NICE boasts an enviable amount of conversational data assets and historical recordings (based on 35 billion customer interactions each year) used for building machine learning and AI models out of the box. This includes powering a product known as Enlighten XO which help trains bots to be smarter, extend quality and compliance, and optimize routing and agent experiences. Enlighten can personalize interactions in the moment, automating decisions based on RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and proactively improve future experiences. These are features that can move the industry forward and driven by perceived needs of customers and prospects.

Bringing Conversational AI to CXone Platform
NICE played up an important new partnership with Amelia, formerly IPsoft, a provider of intelligent assistant solutions. Powering CXone SmartAssist, Amelia allows organizations to build and deploy effective, intelligent self-service assistants using both voice and text. NICE featured a series of demos of custom-made intelligent assistants for use cases such as choosing a new healthcare insurance provider or scheduling doctors’ appointments.

Core to NICE’s intelligent virtual assistant strategy is CXone Smart Agent Hub, letting customers and prospects point to the “AI of their choice” (or really the NLU of their choice, like Dialogflow, Lex, Watson, etc.) By recognizing discrete silos of expertise on a contextual, per-bot basis, NICE customers can apply labels, pull information, and continue the conversation using any intelligent assistants. With integrations into backend transactional systems, clients can develop persistent, asynchronous customer conversations and interactions across any channel.

The winners in the Conversational AI space will need access and tight control of the data in that journey, either from open APIs with cross-platform capabilities, or they’ll own the whole stack. That’s the proposed power of the NICE Enlighten AI solution, they have all the data. If you own the stack and you own the data, you’re ahead of the game.

As bot-fronted contact centers become the norm, the bot itself and its starter pack of NLU models will become commodities, we’ll be splitting hairs to compare their baseline performances. The innovation and opportunity lies in the quality of Conversational Intelligence that propels the bot with context, improved containment options, and measurably improves customer and agent experience.

NICE is defining CCaaS 3.0: a digital-first, omnichannel, real-time solution to intelligently meet customers, manage the entirety of interaction, and successfully resolve needs events – even beyond the contact center. NICE straddles some of the voids that are presented depending on what you think is in a “full-stack” of solutions for CCaaS and whether it spans UCaaS and elements of a CPaaS. Either way, it’s transcending that choice by taking a customer-centric (or journey-centric) approach.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles