TMCnet covered NICE System’s news a few weeks back about its recent acquirement of Fizzback, a provider of real-time voice of the customer solutions, and how that agreement is part of NICE’s growing cross-channel interaction analytics offering. From a larger point of view, NICE and Fizzback’s union will bring much more than a heightened voice-of-the-customer experience.

Anna Convery, vice president of Corporate Portfolio Marketing for NICE, recently shed some light on what exactly the NICE, Fizzback partnership means for both companies and the industry. According to Convery, Fizzback’s feedback services will “empower” the quality management process for users helping the supervisor’s evaluation to properly calibrate the “internal view of quality with what matters most to the customer.”

“With the acquisition of Fizzback, NICE will enable enterprises to tie the Voice of the Customer directly into agent coaching, training and performance management.  Consumers will provide direct and detailed feedback on the quality of service received, which will be associated with the agent and interaction.  Fizzback stands out among feedback solutions in its unique ability to engage the consumer, leading to very high response rates. Because of these response rates and the validity of the feedback data, organizations build feedback directly into performance management systems.  This results in highly motivated, customer-centric employees who know their efforts are likely to be recognized,” said Convery in an interview.

The explosion of social networking has significantly influenced this milestone partnership between the two companies, in the regard that organizational approaches to customer service are drastically changing every day with the proliferation of social technologies. Convery commented, “Social networks have raised the criticality of customer experience to the most senior levels of organizations. Every customer-facing company is looking to capture and act on the voice of the customer to ensure they understand and are responding to customer sentiment before they get hit with social ‘surprises.’ NICE is building out the most robust capabilities in the market to capture direct, indirect, and inferred the voice of the customer in all channels. Fizzback is a major step in that development.”

Yet, as a world-renowned provider of customer relationship strategy solutions, NICE is always looking towards the future of the industry, and realizes that the notion of “real time” is changing every day. CRM providers and their clients must stay in close contact to provide the most accurate and quickly-applied service in order to stay ahead of competition in the enterprise area.

Convery concluded, “All of this ultimately means that providers must help organizations take advantage of every bit of context and data to impact the interaction while it is happening, as well as learn from the interactions for continuous and sustainable improvements.”

Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.

Edited by Jamie Epstein