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What the Acquisition of Causata Means for NICE and Customer Interactions
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What the Acquisition of Causata Means for NICE and Customer Interactions

 
August 09, 2013

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By Rachel Ramsey, TMCnet Web Editor
 

What the Acquisition of Causata Means for NICE and Customer Interactions

On average, today’s consumers use six different channels for interaction with their service providers. It’s likely that while these consumers are on the phone with a contact center, they are simultaneously on their website as well. The importance of delivering multichannel service to today’s customers cannot be understated. As more platforms, devices and methods to communicate with organizations continue to make their way into everyday life, organizations need to realize how to meet these demands and make the most of the multichannel customer.


NICE recently announced its acquisition of Causata, a provider of real-time big data analytics technology, to offer solutions for greater visibility into a customer’s activities on the Web and apply the insights from that data in real-time across other touchpoints, such as the contact center. In today’s multichannel world, customers are getting in contact with organizations through whatever medium is convenient for them at that moment, so being able to monitor and manage those interactions is critical toward providing superior customer service to today’s tech savvy and demanding customers.

“Causata provides NICE with important technology, domain expertise, and legal intellectual property. The vendors are not competitors so there are no conflicts between the product lines and little overlap in customer bases. As a private, venture capital-backed startup the acquisition of Causata will be quicker to execute than a public company,” said Carter Lusher, chief IT analyst at Ovum (News - Alert). “For NICE customers, this acquisition is a very simple ‘business as usual.’ The Causata acquisition has no particular downsides for NICE customers, with the potential upside of new fast and big data functionality. For Causata customers the situation is much more complex. While NICE will continue to sell and support Causata products in the short run, there is no guarantee that it will remain as a standalone product. Causata customers and prospects should seek clarification on NICE’s roadmap for Causata and try to inject contractual protections for their investment in contracts.”

Causata provides Web-based predictive analytics and machine learning technologies that allow organizations to improve real-time decision making and guidance. NICE is a big advocate for providing solutions that help impact “decisive moment” – that make-or-break moment in a customer interaction that agents can help shape with real-time feedback.

The new technologies from Causata’s Hadoop-based technologies will integrate into NICE’s Customer Engagement Analytics platform, which generates new capabilities. Users will be able to create dynamic customer profiles based on real-time analysis of current and past activities over multiple channels, converge self-service digital channels with assisted-service channels, provide contact center agents with the complete context of an interaction, based on a customer’s activities prior to and during that interaction and improve real-time decisioning, using predictive analytics and machine learning to guide employees to the next best action.

NICE introduced its integrated big data solution last October, which set out to improve the customer experience by enhancing their analytics-based customer service applications and help companies leverage big data gathered from customer interactions that take place across multiple communication channels. The solution incorporates IBM’s (News - Alert) big data software, including InfoSphere BigInsights, which supports the collection, integration, and transformation of large volumes of data, with data structures ranging from simple to highly complex. InfoSphere BigInsights uses Hadoop technology, which stores the data on a distributed file system (HDFS), utilizing commodity servers that provide linearly scalable and reliable storage at a lower cost.

“Many of our customers interact with consumers in a siloed environment, leading to a disconnect between different touch points such as the company website, mobile app, stores and contact centers. These organizations are looking for the ability to tie together Web-based and contact center interactions for better and more efficient customer service,” said Zeevi Bregman, president and CEO of NICE, in a statement. “The acquisition of Causata is another important step in executing on our strategy to help organizations get closer to their customers by providing real-time solutions which address the entire customer journey across touch points.”




Edited by Blaise McNamee

Workforce Optimization Homepage





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