1. NICE has been promoting the optimization of “Customer Dynamics”. Please explain this approach. How is it different from your previous offerings?
Customer Dynamics is the complex, multi-faceted exchange of information and transactions between customers and organization across all touch points. Since this exchange involves people, it is by nature complex and messy, as well as difficult to manage. When handled efficiently and optimally, it can solve the dual challenge of today’s enterprises – make customers loyal and happy AND make the business efficient and profitable. It is a business imperative for companies to understand and take charge of Customer Dynamics to generate tangible business value.
The increase in complexity is caused by three factors: more demanding customers and a much more competitive environment, an explosion in terms of the number of interactions, and the multiple channels of communications that have ‘critical mass’ (voice, web, chat, text, email, social media).
As compared to previous offerings, Customer Dynamics is a multi-dimensional approach that addresses agent, customer, channel, and interaction context simultaneously to improve compliance, operational efficiency, customer experience and sales and marketing effectiveness. It’s a much more holistic, impactful approach than WFO, which looks solely at the agent, or CRM, which is focused entirely on the customer.
2. There are many applications included in NICE SmartCenterTM. What do you anticipate will be the areas of highest growth in 2010?
Capturing the myriad of customer interactions across channels to understand customer intent is just the start to optimizing Customer Dynamics. In order to gain a comprehensive view across contact center channels and truly understand their relationships with customers, businesses need the proper tools to capture and analyze customer intent to gain valuable insight that can be used to drive action to make an impact on both the customer experience and the organization’s operational performance in real time.
As companies begin to recognize the importance of optimizing Customer Dynamics, we will see growth in the capturing platforms (to capture intent) and in the intent-based applications (that include WFM, PM, QM) and our interaction analytics business solutions in the areas of compliance, operational efficiency, customer experience and sales and marketing effectiveness.
3. Many vendors offer what appear to be similar optimization suites. How do you differentiate your “suite” from your competitors?
We consider our packaged business solutions to be what most differentiates SmartCenter from competing solution suites. These end-to-end solutions, based on our unique cross-channel analytics capabilities, are targeted to the issues most pressing in today’s environment. They encapsulate best practices, pre-built content and closed-loop workflows to allow rapid implementation and deliver tangible business value. Solutions are available to address such common issues as first contact resolution, average handle time reduction, decreasing customer churn, and improving customer satisfaction.
The NICE solution also adds another layer of intelligence on top of our cross-channel analytics by offering Real-time Guidance. This provides “next best action” recommendations to the agent in real time during a phone or chat interaction. NICE is the only suite that delivers Customer Dynamics optimization encompassing the customer, agent, channel and interaction context dimensions.
4. The economic downturn has caused companies to more closely scrutinize their investments in contact center technology. How does this change in the buying environment affect your revenue projections for 2010?
There’s no question that the downturn has caused companies to take a closer look at how they invest in technology. That doesn’t necessarily mean companies aren’t spending – it means that they are looking for ways to streamline their operations and reduce churn while still achieving a level of service that keeps customers coming back and drives greater return on each interaction. Optimizing Customer Dynamics is the key to balancing those seemingly conflicting goals, and will be a major competitive differentiator as the economy begins to turn around.
Due to the downturn, companies have taken a step back and realized that long term operational costs often significantly outpace those of an initial technology investment. We help our customers reduce those costs by improving the efficiency of their quality process by automating the efforts required to select interactions for evaluation, manage the evaluation process and track quality-related business KPIs. In addition, NICE’s offerings provide a significant reduction in TCO via virtualization.
5. Has user buying criteria (what users are looking for) changed over the past few years? If so, how?
Over the last few years we have seen a shift in buying priorities due to three key drivers:
• Data center consolidation – in a recent Ventana Research study, participants expressed that economy of scale opportunities for larger multi-site operations are being considered as they are migrating to VoIP, increasing home-based agents and monitoring more interactions at branch offices.
• Cross-channel solutions -- we see that it is critical for any contact center to build a multiple interaction chain that can link interactions of any kind based on a common factor such as email, customer number or phone number. With this in place, call recordings can be analyzed alongside any other form of interaction – email, SMS, social media, or chat. In the past contact centers are have evaluated the cradle-to-grave phone experience. Today, it’s vital that organizations bring silo-based interactions points together to visual all touch-points in one view. Visualization of first “call” resolution drivers become first “contact” resolution drivers and service levels on the phone transform service levels at any channel.
• Optimizing/impacting interactions in real time -- speech analytics solutions of the past were always based on processed interactions from the past. Today, real-time guidance solutions to the agent desktop for the “next best action” are transforming our industry and are driving a shift in buying priorities to maximize the ROI of interaction analytics.
6. NICE has been trying to penetrate the back office with many of its offerings. What applications are companies most receptive to for their back office operations? What roadblocks are you encountering in implementing your back office solutions?
We are seeing companies most interested in using Desktop Monitoring, Workforce Management, Performance Management and Quality Management applications in the back office.
Customers are seeing significant value in having their contact center WFM solution integrated into their BO solution. The reason is that there are more and more processes that cut across the contact center and the back office as well as a significant impact of back office activities on the contact center operations and vice versa. NICE, being the leading contact center WFM solution in the market, sees a significant need among customers to also deliver our integrated BO solution.
The main roadblock is change management. Since these are new applications for the back office, more training and consulting is required to help management understand the staffing needed to run these applications and the processes that must be created, communicated and deployed along with these applications. This is quite different from implementing these applications in call centers because call centers have been using these applications for a long time and have built well-defined processes around them.
They also have knowledgeable staff that has worked with these processes for years. The fact that back office operations are hardly measured and managed for performance presents the real opportunity, but also requires true change management on the customer side.
7. NICE has been a major supplier of quality assurance systems for many years. Your company is perceived by many contact center professionals as providing offerings at the high end of the price scale. Some of your competitors have priced their systems at the lower end of the market and claim that many centers do not need all the functionality that your systems provide. Please comment.
NICE is committed to providing solutions that address the needs of businesses of every size and level of complexity. Over the years we’ve invested significant resources on both the product development and distribution sides to deliver compelling solutions for large enterprises as well as Small-to-Medium Business (SMB) market. Our NICE Perform Xpress solution for call recording and quality monitoring has been recognized by the market as a very cost-efficient, easy to implement solution that meets the needs of branches and small contact centers.
NICE also offers flexible off-premise deployment models targeted towards the SMB market, such as hosted delivery, and managed services, that help SMBs gain the powerful functionality of our Workforce Management and intent-based business solutions at an affordable price.
8. What are the biggest mistakes people make when going through the selection process for buying technology?
Organizations sometimes make sales decisions to address current business and technical challenges and tend to gravitate around niche solutions instead of evaluating a suite approach to holistically address Customer Dynamics optimization. Organizations should look beyond the pressing problems of today and try to build a more strategic path towards achieving their business and technology objectives. While doing that, companies need to consider the depth and breadth of the solutions they evaluate, the vendor viability and the long term, total cost of ownership of the proposed business or technical solution.
Buying solutions from different vendors will impede an organization’s opportunity to enjoy the benefits a holistic solution can provide in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as business performance.