NICE CXone CEO Talks AI, Contact Centers, Partner Advancement

Known for its contact center software, telephone voice recording, data security and more, NICE serves a variety of industries. Those include financial services, telecommunications and retail. NICE, which stands for Neptune Intelligence Computer Engineering, was established in 1986 by former Israeli army members. Their initial focus was security and defense technology before changing business models. By the late ’90s, the company was one of the earliest adopters of cloud computing in its market, officials said.

Fast-forward more than 15 years later. NICE acquired inContact, creators of cloud-based software for call centers, for $940 million. The deal set the stage for NICE to target both SMBs and enterprises. It also meant a transition for Paul Jarman, then inContact CEO, who has since taken the role as CEO of NICE CXone (formerly known as Nice inContact). NICE, which landed in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS as a “leader,” can partially attribute that to last year’s launch of CXone SmartReach. It’s a technology that came about from NICE’s acquisition of a conversational AI firm whose machine learning algorithms produced human-like conversations.

In this interview with Channel Futures, Jarman discusses the advantages of the technology behind CXone. He also talks about CXi, or customer experience interactions, as well as the benefits of “good” data for artificial intelligence. Finally, he addresses how this new product landscape benefits NICE CXone partners.

Channel Futures: How long has the CXone been in operation? And was it a unification of existing technologies?

Nice CXone’s Paul Jarman

Paul Jarman: There are a lot of pieces to that answer. So let me just give you a couple easy ones. First, CXone began as a cloud platform with inContact. … We’ve been building a cloud platform in inContact for over 15 years. That includes all of the omnichannel, the digital channels, voice, all the things that go with what I’ll call the digital and voice contact center. They are on the same platform. Then, about six years ago when the acquisition with NICE happened, we also added on the same platform a couple of other products that we made native to it as well. It’s built to work together to be seamless on the same platform.

CF: And how does the platform work? I mean, if I were completely a novice, how would I approach using the platform?

PJ: So first, think about it as cloud. Basically, we provision you and then you access it and then we help you configure it. An internet connection helps users either configure it or, if it’s the agents in a contact center, to run it. Then, once it’s configured and once you connect to a contact center agent through the internet, you don’t run any equipment. You don’t buy any equipment; you just use the services. 

See our slideshow above to continue the conversation with Jarman.