Foundations of the CX Continuum

By Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research

If there is a single concept or takeaway from NICE’s recent Analyst Summit in Peru, it is the idea that an “interactions-centric cloud platform” is foundational to every enterprise’s plan to improve customer experience (CX) and employee engagement in the digital age. Over the past decade, NICE has transformed itself from a call recording specialist to a powerhouse in speech analytics that successfully moved its center of gravity to the cloud, while acquiring and integrating leading-edge Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Conversational AI resources.

NICE differentiates itself from direct competitors in the CCaaS world by providing enterprises with access to a Large Language Model (LLM) trained specifically on conversations and interactions between companies and their customers in order to optimize CX and agent experience. An LLM that embodies the content of 20 billion annual conversations between agents and customers is better suited for generating highly relevant, domain- or brand-specific responses to inform live agents, their supervisors or virtual counterparts than the foundation models that have ingested all the worlds knowledge, like the complete works of Shakespeare or scripts from Mexican telenovelas.

At a time when awareness of and expectations for LLMs and Generative AI (GenAI) are riding the crest of the wave of AI hype, NICE’s CXone “suiteform,” infused with Enlighten AI, provides a simple point of ingress for virtually any enterprise. As customers and prospects interact with brands over dozens of channels, the move to the cloud has made it possible to recognize or anticipate the purpose of a conversation and complete tasks with great accuracy.

A lot of the value of NICE’s long-term investment in the Enlighten neural network has been manifest during the year since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world in November 2022. Hundreds of millions of individuals have gained experience with Generative AI and have built their own expectations and performance requirements. Most importantly, they have grown comfortable conversing with a generative resource, refining their prompts until they get their desired results. They start with permissioned, verified, relevant content and continue to use interactions to train future interactions. Very little effort is required for initiating a new app or updating output. That’s part of the CX Continuum.

As John Wilcutts, VP and general manager of NICE’s Digital Solutions Group, explains, it takes a centralized platform to support this approach. It has to be “open” to working with multiple channels, LLMs, and architectures. That’s another attribute of CXone offering: a cloud-based platform designed to support multiple digital channels and infuse every app with a shared AI.

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Orchestrating Proactive CX

By Derek Top, Research Director, Opus Research

Another topic featured at the recent NICE Analyst Summit included a discussion about the swinging pendulum between self-service automation and agent-handled assistance. To be clear, NICE executives emphasized this is not an either/or question in the customer service market. But rather a fast-evolving continuum (an “Experience Continuum”) creating a tight handshake between augmented and artificial intelligence, attended and unattended experiences, and all leveraging Enlighten Actions for blended digital and voice interactions.

NICE’s impressive interaction-centric platform, as mentioned above, in analyzing 20 billion annual conversations between agents, is enabling purpose-built AI for self-service. Workflow orchestrations can be built to improve proactive experiences by learning intents and processes to preempt customers’ needs before they contact a business.

As Barry Cooper, president of NICE CX, mentioned at the NICE Summit, this convergence of rich CX capabilities will finally fuse people, processes, and technology with AI used as an accelerant for successful business outcomes. NICE is already seeing the interest in AI-driven optimization with more than six times growth in year-over-year deals with Enlighten and 100% of all new deals now involve AI.

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What’s Good for the Agent is Better for the Customer

By Pete Headrick, Managing Director, Opus Research

NICE’s Analyst Summit, at its core, was focused on CX — a term that is used somewhat loosely but oftentimes is focused on the direct relationship between how an enterprise interacts with customers via a technology provider. What I don’t hear enough of is how it impacts the consumer. For a long time I’ve been asking how I can’t get a transcript of my call when I know the call is being recorded. Call summarization, including Enlighten Copilot, provides the agent with an overview of the conversation and next best actions and it should provide the consumer something similar. Why can’t the caller be afforded the same service?

NICE’s Enlighten Copilot helps with live call suggestions that the contact center agent can use to respond immediately to the inquiry or edit a generative response. Copilot can be activated in one click saving agent time. Benefits include instant, next-best action recommendations based on a combination of analytics, knowledge management, and the company’s own guiding principles.

In addition to helping with the live voice calls, Enlighten Copilot also enables call summarization that feeds into an organization’s system of record or CRM system. In the past year, we’ve noted a push by many technology providers where call summarization is becoming a “table stakes” offering instead of a “nice to have.”

I believe voice and digital need to be treated the same, period. When chatting with an organization via webchat or messaging or email, I can often get the chat transcript from a company that I’ve interacted with. By definition, I have a history of the interaction via all email interactions. But why aren’t the transcripts of voice conversations customers have with businesses – which, by the way, are frequently “recorded for quality assurance” – not made available to customers? This seems like a perfect use case for call summarization to directly benefit the customer experience.

“Press 1 if you’d like a text summary of this conversation texted or emailed to you.” That’s what I want to hear the next time I call my bank, airline, doctor, hotel etc. Firms like NICE have the opportunity to push the market forward with the mentality of building superior customer experience. Providing transcripts or call summarizations for every voice interaction is clearly already possible and directionally correct.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Mobile + Location, Articles