The growth of cloud computing is affecting technology developers, suppliers, resellers, and industry observers left and right. The pervasiveness of cloud computing is undeniable in this day and age, and those software providers in the workforce optimization industry are taking a unique approach to its development.

In an interview with TMC, Matthew Storm (News - Alert), director of Innovation and Solutions from NICE Systems, discussed the effects of the growth of cloud computing on the development of NICE’s services and its outlook on the market and potential changes. As a supplier of workforce optimization software, NICE works with various partners, a subject on which Storm gave more detail.

“The demand for world-class solutions remains the same; however, the means of delivery can now vary from the premise to the cloud,” Storm noted in the interview. “For most NICE customers, that may happen within their own IT goals, or could also take shape with a partner such as Five9 (News - Alert).  NICE and Five9 recently announced a fully-integrated product suite that delivers NICE to customers that are already taking a service-based model and still need the same level of sophistication for quality monitoring, PCI (News - Alert)-compliant call recording, screen recording, optimized agent desktops and workforce management,”

As customers are presented with more channels and ways in which to interact with businesses, be it in person, over the phone, or the Web, organizations need to be prepared to monitor and process these interactions to leverage the data from these operations.

Storm continued, “At NICE, we believe that this model is expected to grow and NICE has already formed many key strategic partnerships to prepare cloud-friendly customers with the same great products and services they’ve had from NICE for years.”

As he noted, customers often do not understand that one interaction they have might have occurred over multiple channels of communication, and these processes can become increasingly difficult for businesses to manage without the proper cloud-based system. “As organizations continue to create a complexity of touch points for the customer, it’s important to realize that customer expectations are based on interactions with businesses across stores, contact centers, interactive voice response (IVR), mobile devices, social media, and the Web. In fact, often what a customer considers a single interaction actually takes place across multiple channels and multiple contacts,” said Storm.

Workforce optimization providers have to evolve to adjust with the changing communication channels available to customers as businesses have to work to streamline their marketing and sales efforts just the same. Storm mentioned, “Workforce technologies will evolve to view the customer experience as an aggregate of multiple channels.  At NICE, we call this view of the customer a cross-channel interaction hub.  The scheduling, monitoring and insights from this hub will transform the contact center and help companies compile information available about consumer behavior, from any given channel, to reveal the insights that allow the company to make the greatest customer service impact possible.”