1. NICE Systems made two major acquisitions in 2007, IEX, and Performix Solutions, providers of workforce management and performance management software respectively. Are you integrating your three product lines under the NICE umbrella? If so, how?
NICE SmartCenter leverages the synergies of the combined capabilities of NICE Perform, IEX TotalView and Performix, within an open framework based on services-oriented architecture (SOA) principles, together with a structured service and implementation methodology. The SOA framework uniquely enables information sharing and streamlines business processes, while allowing the NICE SmartCenter solutions to evolve independently, protecting existing technology investments, and focusing on being the best in their class.
2. Will there be separate sales and R&D operations for the new application sectors?
Reflecting our strategy of an open solution, we maintain each group’s core competency while leveraging synergies and expertise among the teams.
3. NICE has been a major provider of monitoring systems for many years. Is there anything new that we can expect in the monitoring area in 2008?
We are seeing monitoring moving from being a tactical activity to one that is strategic. It has become a broader initiative, leveraging interaction analytics to enable advanced agent coaching and customer feedback, for example, and providing the full cycle of quality, customer satisfaction, and training. This enables executives to make better informed decisions and be proactive about making customer driven product modifications, improving customer retention, agent coaching, and improving operational efficiencies, for example.
Furthermore, we are seeing more and more a move towards precision monitoring vs. traditional random monitoring. Performing precision monitoring in parallel to random, enables them to hone in on specific call types, i.e. relating to key issues such as first call resolution, churn, upsell/cross-sell, or technical knowledge.
With this new approach, in parallel to having a fair evaluation based on random sampling, customers are also enabled with timely handling of issues that are strategic to the enterprise.
Precision quality monitoring is made possible by NICE’s advanced multi dimensional analytics. For example, contact centers that handle collections can hone in on specific customer interactions relating to strategic company goals such as increasing agents’ ability to locate and speak to the right party in order to increase the chances of getting a payment, promise-to-pay or some type of action on the account. NICE’s adaptive interaction analytics enables supervisors at these contact center to better understand how agent behavior impacts the rate of collections, create customized coaching packages for improving their capabilities in locating debtors quickly and easily, and fine-tuning soft-skills and negotiation skills, to optimize collections and increase revenues.
4. Many of the economic pundits are predicting a recession in 2008. Some have said it is already here. How do you expect that the economic slowdown to affect NICE?
In times when organizations are looking to decrease operational costs while improving their revenue, NICE is uniquely positioned to help them achieve their most strategic goals.
NICE SmartCenter enables organizations to extract vital insights from customer interactions, delivering critical information to their contact centers and the enterprise.
This is a solution that enables data-driven decision making, which results in improved performance on three key levels – agent, operational, and enterprise.
We are seeing a growing number of customers leveraging NICE SmartCenter as a strategic asset for gathering action-oriented insight and for addressing key business issues such as improving quality of service, improving customer retention, operational efficiencies, compliance with regulations, and protecting enterprise assets from threats such as fraud.
5. What do you anticipate will be the “hot” applications in 2008?
One of the “hottest” applications in 2008 will be interaction analytics, which offers a very high degree of accuracy and efficiency in analyzing 100 percent of the interactions. This capability leverages customer interactions to proactively identify trends, anticipate opportunities, adjust processes to meet business objectives and take action at the right-time.
In today’s business world, many enterprises make their performance impacting decisions based on inputs which are not backed by data, nor are quantifiable, e.g. via productivity reports (which do not correlate to the customer experience, providing only a partial view of performance), by evaluating a random sampling of customer interactions which come into the call center (which often miss out on critical customer interactions that contain inputs about products, services, and the competition), via customer satisfaction surveys (which are not tied to specific interactions, providing a one-sided view), and industry research (which is too generic). By implementing an advanced interaction analytics solution, which has a multi-dimensional approach, an organization can overcome these barriers to making data-based business decisions and gain quantifiable, accurate and immediate insights into key business issues such as operational efficiency, customer loyalty and retention, and marketing/sales effectiveness. A multi-dimensional approach should include a range of speech analysis engines (e.g. word spotting, emotion detection, transcription) which are combined with advanced rules engines capabilities that can determine what and when to analyze according to the wealth of information available from telephony and other data sources.
Another hot application is for a Customer Feedback solution, which enables correlating post-call IVR survey directly to the actual call. This allows a direct link between the customer’s evaluation of agent performance with the supervisor’s evaluation. Such a comparison sheds light on the relevance and accuracy of the contact center’s QA processes. It helps identify whether the parameters upon which the contact center determines an agent’s performance level are in line with those by which customer’s determine their level of satisfaction, e.g. a company parameter may be adherence to scripts vs. a customer’s parameter – how long it took to get the relevant information.
An additional benefit to above is that when an agent receives the direct feedback from the customer the impact is great and lasting.
We are also seeing more requests for a solution with a portal, which provides agents direct access to calls prior to meeting with the supervisor. This prepares and empowers them with information that was previously unavailable.
Agents can receive coaching packages in the portal that includes the actual call, plus any other relevant enterprise/call center documentation, presentations, and training materials. And all of this is delivered directly to the agent’s desktop in real time. They can perform self-evaluations and compare self-scoring with the scores provided by supervisors, as well as with the scores of their team-mates or overall team scores, to gauge how well they are doing.
This is a tool that empowers both agents and supervisors, enabling agents to profoundly improve quality of service.
Another hot application is performance management which provides KPI-based (key performance indicators) management tools for setting performance goals and objectives for employees, and for monitoring them on an on-going basis using dashboards, scorecards, and workflows. This helps improve employee satisfaction and performance. Moreover, a performance management solution enables the creation of a set of integrated reports derived from various operational systems for a unified view of their business operations.
6. What do you consider will be your major challenges in 2008?
As our customers face greater challenges, we must step up to the plate and continue to provide them with outstanding solutions to help them improve their business performance and competitiveness with the best solutions and world class services. Furthermore, we aim to anticipate trends and develop solutions ahead of these trends, so that our customers can remain ahead of the curve.
7. How have the users’ requirements changed over the past year?
Over the past years we have seen our customers’ requirements reflecting three key trends: contact centers are becoming more and more customer-centric – necessitating better tools and process for improved agent effectiveness; the contact center aims to be a profit center vs. cost center – necessitating better tools for improving operational performance and increasing efficiencies; the contact center is a strategic focal point for customer interactions which can be leverage to advance and support enterprise initiatives.
8. What do you anticipate will be NICE’s high growth areas in 2008?
We see three primary growth drivers: organizations are continually seeking to improve the performance of their contact centers in an environment that is becoming more and more complex; they are also looking to gain more insights into customer and market dynamics through advanced interaction analytics; and the emergence of branches.
To address these needs NICE offers NICE SmartCenter which enables organizations to manage their contact centers in a more insightful and proactive manner and take actions at the right time. Furthermore, NICE’s adaptive interaction analytics enables them to leverage a full suite of multi-dimensional analytics, such as word spotting, emotion detection, talk analysis, call flow analysis, and more, to better understand customer and market dynamics.
Finally, NICE offers a range of VoIP recording solutions that enable cost-efficient, reliable recording at the branch level.