NICE was founded in 1986 in Israel to address the compliance recording needs of the financial services industry. Today, NICE has approximately 24,000 customers globally, about half of which are in the Americas. That includes such big names as AAA, American Airlines, AT&T, Nationwide,T-Mobile (News
- Alert), and US Bank. In the past 25-plus years the company has evolved into three distinct business units: NICE Enterprise, NICE Security, and NICE Actimize. The company’s Enterprise Offering enables organizations to impact every customer interaction with targeted solutions for enhancing the customer experience, increasing service-to-sales revenue, streamlining operational efficiency, and complying to policies and regulations. Driven by real-time, cross-channel analytics – including speech analytics, text analytics, feedback analytics, web, and social media analytics – and coupled with real-time decisioning and guidance, NICE Enterprise solutions are implemented by contact centers of all sizes, branch networks, retail stores, trading floors, and back office operations.
CIS magazine recently spoke with Yochai Rozenblat, president of NICE Americas, about actionable intelligence and how it fits into the company’s strategy.
What does the term actionable intelligence mean to you?
Rozenblat: NICE’s mission to help our clients Impact Every Interaction. We work with our clients to understand how customer interactions relate to business objectives such as driving efficiency, improving customer experience, increasing revenue, or reducing risk. We help them extract relevant insights and drive action to ensure they are addressing customers in a real-time, contextual, and holistic manner. While many software solutions end with the delivery of insights to decision makers/business analysts, our approach is to close the loop and embed insights into business processes.
What specifically is NICE doing to deliver actionable intelligence to its customers?
Rozenblat: Our solutions are based on a three stage methodology – to capture all customer interactions, transactions and surveys across all channels; analyze this data to reveal insights; and drive appropriate action to both impact interactions in real time, and drive improvements throughout the organization based on the insights. Our core capabilities [that] enable this process [are] multi-channel capture, cross-channel analytics, real-time speech analytics, interaction-based survey, real- time decisioning/guidance, quality management, workforce management, and performance management.
NICE recently bought Fizzback. Why?
Rozenblat: The Fizzback solution is highly complementary to the NICE offering, and will significantly enhance NICE’s Customer Experience Management portfolio and Workforce Optimization offerings. [It will allow us to introduce] a complete Customer Experience Management offering by combining multi-channel capture and cross-channel analysis with Fizzback’s real-time multi-channel feedback (direct, indirect and inferred). With the addition of Fizzback, NICE is the first and only vendor to offer all three feedback dimensions in a single platform – the NICE Cross-Channel Interaction Hub. [It will allow us to deliver] VoC-driven Workforce Optimization – operationalizing the VoC by combining multi-channel, event-driven customer feedback with contact center WFO applications, including quality and performance management, interaction analytics and real-time process optimization. [And it will allow us to add] more touch-points – providing the ability to gather feedback at the point of sale (retail stores, branches, walk-in centers), then view and manage it as part of the overall operational and customer experience picture, complementing NICE’s existing capabilities for capturing, analyzing and managing workforce and interactions at the branch.
What other M&A activities has NICE been involved in to date?
Rozenblat: NICE has continued to expand our impact on organizations by building and acquiring solutions that further the power of interactions. In 2010, NICE acquired eglue (News - Alert), which provided a solution for real-time decisionmaking, agent guidance, and process automation.
What does NICE have in the pipeline?
Rozenblat: We are working on a major solution in the area of mobile customer service. We expect to be announcing in early 2012.
If there’s just one thing NICE would like the CIS magazine readership to know about what value it brings to the market, what is that one thing?
Rozenblat: NICE is making dramatic strides in the market! We are building aggressively on our legacy in recording and contact center operations to deliver solutions that help companies grow the top line while carefully managing the bottom line. Our domain expertise in customer interactions environments enables us to help improve customer experience in practical, efficient and highly effective ways.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
