February 02, 2010

 

NICE Systems, a provider of advanced solutions for companies to capture, store, retrieve and analyze customer interactions for contact centers and enterprises, and AnswerOn, which sells customer retention, acquisition and loyalty products to telecommunications service providers, have announced that Cincinnati Bell (News - Alert) has selected the joint NICE-AnswerOn Customer Churn Reduction product.

It integrates NICE Interaction Analytics and transactional data analytics from AnswerOn. 

The end-to-end product helps Cincinnati Bell create more accurate churn prediction models by integrating multidimensional analysis results into their churn reduction models. 

“It cross-references customer interaction and transactional data, and alerts customer retention personnel in near real-time,” company officials said. 

It helps Cincinnati Bell build offers for at-risk customers, deliver the offers and basically measure, monitor and fine-tune the effectiveness of churn models and retention offerings. It's deployed in a hosted model via a managed service.

Jeff Baker, director of Planning and Support at Cincinnati Bell, says to provide service to our customers and ensure customer satisfaction, “we need to be able to use insights from both customer interactions and from transactional data.”

 For instance, he explained, “if we see highly emotional calls, combined with a drop in phone usage, this requires our immediate attention or a change in the service package.” Indeed. More red flags in one place would qualify as a Communist march. 

“Retaining subscribers is vital, where a mere two percent monthly churn rate can result in many millions of dollars lost on a monthly basis, even for mid-sized service providers,” said Barak Eilam (News - Alert), president of Interactions Business Applications at NICE.

In November, Gartner selected NICE for its leader quadrant in its workforce optimization report. At the same time, the company announced its financial results for the third quarter. 

The company reported non-GAAP net income of $24 million, down 10 percent year-over-year from $26.7 million in the third quarter 2008. Sequentially, however, NICE’s third quarter net income was up from $22.1 million.

“Overall, we need to take [the results] as part of the global environment,” said Dafna Gruber, corporate vice president and chief financial officer with NICE Systems (News - Alert). “We had a good quarter because our ability to accumulate the booking was high and were much higher in revenues.”