NICE Given Frost & Sullivan Leadership Award for Contact Center Agent Performance

NICE Systems, a company focused on delivering solutions that extract insight to impact business performance, has announced that it has received the Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) 2010 EMEA Market Share Leadership Award in Contact Center Agent Performance Optimization (APO).

Not only was NICE recognized by Frost & Sullivan, the company took the No. 1 position in the analysts firm’s 2010 report on the EMEA APO Market. Frost & Sullivan defines the APO Market as made up of the key segments of quality management (QM), such as contact center analytics and workforce management (WFM).

The report actually shows that NICE leads in QM with a 42 percent share. When considering WFM, a 30 percent share of the market is owned by NICE. All findings in this report are based on the full-year 2009 performance. 

Keith Dawson (News - Alert), principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan said in a statement, “NICE's continued strong position as the leader in the APO market is due to its consistent record of technological innovation and its ability to demonstrate how important workforce optimization tools are for running more efficient and effective contact centers.

NICE has fashioned its workforce optimization tools into a suite that offers significant business value to end users. The quality monitoring and workforce management components are very effective in helping contact centers establish better processes for customer interactions,” added Dawson.

The Best Practices Awards established by Frost & Sullivan identify companies, products, processes and executives that have achieved performance that are considered to be world-class. NICE was selected for recognition due to its expanding its addressable market through an expanded product footprint and broader geographical reach; an expansion in SMB markets across EMEA; a deep push into analytics with a solution approach that can address specific business problems known to arise in the contact center space; and for driving WFM growth. 

Dawson continued, “NICE has been particularly effective at integrating workforce management software into its mix. In EMEA, where WFM is relatively under-used compared to the North American market, NICE has helped articulate to the market the strong business case for using automation to better allocate labor resources.”

Frost & Sullivan also notes in its report that NICE’s solutions optimize for Customer Dynamics and therefore make a significant and positive impact on the performance of agents, the contact center and the overall enterprise.

The report also highlights that NICE offers high business value in its cross-channel Interaction Analytics as it provides contact centers with a holistic view of the customer’s experience, and for understanding what kinds of channels work best for particular types of customers or issues. The company’s WFM solution uses patented algorithms for forecast accuracy and uses multi-skill simulation. Its IEX (News - Alert) WFM is designed to handle complex scheduling environments.

“We are pleased about the results of the new Frost & Sullivan report. These results further validate our clear market leadership,” said Shlomi Cohen, President of NICE EMEA. “Our #1 position reflects the strategic value-add we bring our customers in EMEA, and worldwide. We are proud to provide business-focused solutions that help improve QM practices for increased customer satisfaction, more effective WFM processes for a more efficient operation, and cross-channel analytics for enhanced business insights. We are also delighted to provide the value of our market leading contact center offering to back office operations with our new Back Office Suite, which combines NICE WFM with real-time guidance and automation for increased operational efficiency and effectiveness.” 

NICE recently introduced NICE Back Office Suite targeted at improving workforce compliance, and quality of service in back office operations.A comprehensive set of integrated solutions, NICE Back Office Suite combines the company’s NICE IEX WFM solution with real-time capabilities such as Real-Time Guidance, Process Automation and Compliance in addition to solutions for Quality Management and Performance Management.