NICE Sets a High Customer Experience AI Bar at Its Interactions Event

NICE unveiled a customer experience (CX) platform, CXone Mpower, which harnesses exclusive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as continuous experience memory and CX awareness. This platform offers invaluable insights into customer-business interactions, leveraging connected data and applications to bolster organizations in a customer-centric environment. It addresses three pivotal areas.

First, CXone Mpower enhances employee performance. It remembers past interactions and streamlines tasks using AI. Second, the platform improves how skills are shared between humans and AI. Virtual agents can understand customer intents, remember preferences, and resolve issues with cognitive awareness. Third, the platform proactively links all parts of a business. It provides personalized service on a large scale by recommending actions, optimizing processes, and developing solutions.

NICE CEO Barak Eilam referred to CXone Mpower as “the holy grail of CX” during his keynote speech at last week’s NICE Interactions 2024 conference in Las Vegas. Eilam said CXone has been integrated with Copilot, Autopilot, and Actions to create “the world’s first and only CX-aware AI platform” that achieves complete sensory perception by connecting to every organizational touchpoint and system.

While it's true that numerous contact center vendors now integrate AI, CXone Mpower distinguishes itself by its unique ability to comprehend customer needs through the analysis of billions of past interactions. Unlike human agents, who require training and work limited hours, AI agents leverage extensive historical knowledge and operate 24/7. However, the platform's primary objective is not to replace human agents. It envisions a future where agents can evolve into AI orchestrators, overseeing virtual agents and setting new standards for service quality. This emphasis on human-AI collaboration ensures that the platform is designed to enhance, not replace, the role of human agents in customer service.

Data feeds the AI engine

For AI to be effective, it requires a well-organized environment with massive data. One of NICE's unique attributes is pulling data from many areas adjacent to the core contact center platform. Most other CCaaS providers partner in workforce engagement management (WEM), journey orchestration, and quality management. One interesting data point from the company is that they typically pull through five other products when they replace a competitor. This gives them a much larger base of data for which to apply their AI engines.

During the keynotes, Jeremy Markey, director of workforce experience at Hunter Douglas, discussed his testing of different AI vendors. Hunter Douglas loaded their information into 26 contact vendor providers and ran them through a test. From there, the company narrowed it down to three. The three finalists were then given 20 questions to answer, of which NICE got 19 correct, and no one else got more than six.

This unified approach also makes it easier to move to the cloud. Organizations often spend a large portion of their IT resources on integrating CX systems. A platform like CXone Mpower allows for better use of these resources, maximizing the benefits of AI-powered CX.

“Our commitment to CX is as strong as it has ever been. We’re not really all in the same boat. But we are all facing the same storm, so the choice of vessel rests with you,” said Eilam.

The platform launch marks a significant leap forward. As Eilam noted in his keynote speech, everyone has unique needs regarding CX (different boat). CXone Mpower will be a vital tool (vessel) for organizations navigating existing customer service challenges (storm).

This event and narrative from Hunter Douglas provide a great best practice: test any AI solution, including contact center, on your own data. Most vendors market AI, but there’s no way to know how far along they are. NICE’s release of CXone Mpower addresses a wide range of contact center use cases and sets a high bar for the industry to follow.

Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research.

Read his other Network Computing articles here.

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