NICE CXone CEO Talks AI, Contact Centers, Partner Advancement
The company’s hundreds of millions to billions of recorded calls, emails and chats provide a wealth of data for AI.
September 23, 2022
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CF: Besides being the first to the cloud, what are some details that you think a reader would want to know about what differentiates your platform from others?
PJ: At the end of the day, what’s really happening in our market is the world is going from running a call center to companies having to run all of the multiple interactions that they have with customers today. There are interactions on the website. There are interactions through self-services, interactions on mobile devices, there are interactions in a contact center. There are interactions from a Google search. What we’ve achieved makes every interaction point possible for a customer to manage. And it makes it easy. The problem in a lot of our space today is that they’re (our competitors) just selling a call center. They’re fixing one part of a multi-piece interaction strategy, right? We can now provide the solutions customers need on their website, on the Google search, and their cell service in the contact center, and all the tools that go with that. We do it for the Walmarts on one side and on the other side the 30-seat small center.
CF: Was the term CXi something that NICE coined or was this already circulating in the market?
PJ: We created the word. This is the idea that I just spoke about in which companies move from having a contact center strategy to an interaction strategy. In the new market we’re seeing CXi, or customer experience interactions. It’s important to ask who manages all the interactions for a company: what tools, what processes, what platform.
CF: How do you define the CXi market? And how is NICE helping businesses deliver on their CXi needs?
PJ: There are literally billions and billions of what I’ll call customer needs events happening every day. When those needs events happen with a consumer, in many cases it creates an interaction, right? A Google search website, an email or chat, a contact center call visit … all those things are creating interactions. Three or four years ago, everybody called the call center, right? Today, that’s not the case anymore. We try to interact in so many places and so many channels and so many different methods that companies need this comprehensive system to do that. And that’s really the core problem that we’re solving. We’re helping companies reach beyond the call center to manage all their interactions.
CF: So essentially what you’re saying is the market is everywhere?
PJ: It’s small, it’s big. It’s across the globe. I just worked on a deal this morning in Auckland, New Zealand, and another deal two days ago in Saudi Arabia, and another deal a few days ago in Brazil. It’s all consumers and it’s all over the world. We’re moving from a call center-centric customer service model to basically an interaction model.
The customer base has changed at least in the way they approach being serviced by a company. You’ve got millennials and they make decisions differently. They don’t want to talk to anybody. They want to interact through WhatsApp and other applications out there. Those are all interaction touch points. You have to gather all that data to make sure that you’re meeting the customer’s needs, through those experiences, and to measure that outcome. It’s very different now than what we used to do in the past.
None of us thought when COVID hit we’d wake up and the PBX space would be obsolete, right? We all thought that that it would take 10 years to move from [on premises] to cloud. The Vonages and some of the others would become really large companies. It didn’t happen, right? All of a sudden with COVID and collaboration, the Zooms and the Teams won the market because it was a different market. It wasn’t a PBX market anymore. It was a collaboration market. It’s an interactions market. And so, if people don’t make that change as a company or as a supplier or as a [technology services distributor] or as a subagent, they’re going to be less relevant. The same thing that happened in collaboration is happening in our space, too, as far as moving from call center to interactions.
CF: What is the CXi story that you’re trying to tell? Why is CXi really critical at this point in communications?
PJ: It’s not often that there are pretty large paradigm shifts in a market, right? There are two big paradigm shifts that have happened in our market. Like I mentioned, everybody’s moving to an interaction model versus calling a call center. The second one is that all companies now, because of social media, because of review sites, etc., have made the customer experience more important and they have less control about it than they used to in the past. All of us go on review sites and we make purchasing decisions based on other people’s recommendations and not from the company. I call it the reference economy. We make purchasing decisions based on references, or recommendations. And that’s driving companies that need to get better at their customer experience. In general, customer experience is far more important because consumers are far more likely to use third parties to make their decisions.
CF: What are the biggest unmet needs right now in the market?
PJ: I think it’s the need to help companies communicate with customers in the same way a customer does with their friends. We need a higher degree of fluidity.
CF: How do you get the technology up to speed with that kind of communication? I know you have to rely on AI and machine learning, but is there something in particular about these technologies that you hope to harness in the future to get to that point?
PJ: Well, it’s a combination of two. You need the right AI … which helps you to make it smart. But the second thing is if you have a disjointed solution; you create disjointed journeys or interactions. Most companies when they buy this call center piece, this website piece, this cell service piece, this Google piece, this WhatsApp part, they rely on like nine different vendors. The journey is all broken up. The consumer gets involved and gets all garbled up in the company’s inability to make the process seamless because they’re using so many suppliers. Part of what we did — when you really look at what CXone is and does — is that we made all the pieces work together. We own all the pieces so they can work together so that the consumer journey is seamless. Without that, most consumer journeys are disjointed. I’m sure you felt it thousands of times in your own life where you tried to use self-service, but get routed to an agent, and they know nothing about what you did in the system prior. They’re all separate systems that don’t work together into a seamless journey, which is what has to be fixed. That’s what we fixed in CXone.
CF: What kind of growth are you seeing with CXi at the moment? You have various contracts that you just engaged in in Brazil and Australia and elsewhere, but are you experiencing growth in other areas of the market?
PJ: We’re seeing growth everywhere. We’re seeing it in the big companies and small companies in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America. You know, it’s all it’s all over the place. We think our market in the next five years will go from about 8 billion in cloud to managed interactions to over 20 billion.
CF: I don’t want to harp on the technology too much, but a lot of companies have AI. So how does a firm like yours differentiate themselves with AI from another company’s?
PJ: At the end of the day, AI has two components. There’s a process or a system and then there’s information. In most cases, the system itself is OK, but the information in this system is not smart. And so most competitors out there have a system that’s just not smart enough. And the reason it’s not smart enough is because they don’t have the data and the intelligence to feed it. And what the competition does is they all get in a room and they put little sticky notes up saying, ‘If someone wants to return something, how do you say it? What’s the intent? What’s the process that someone would normally do?’
The difference is that we’ve been in business for over 20 years, and we have literally hundreds of millions to billions of recorded calls and emails and chats. And with all that information, we can make these systems smart. We took our API and our model data and we ran it against our competitors’ data. We found almost 1,000 ways to return something, versus their 30 words.
CF: When it comes to channel partners, how does CXone help them thrive in the market? What advantages does the CXone platform provide to channel partners with respect to solving a wide range of customer problems?
PJ: We’re giving the channel partners a unique product to go talk to their companies about. They’re not just talking about a call center. They’re now able to have a much more strategic conversation, which is how to manage all your interactions. The second thing is that not all competitors are in the channel. We are a product and a company that can actually help them beat other competitors that might be competing for that business that they don’t get paid from. The third thing is that it basically gives partners a really sticky revenue string. Retention rates are in the mid to high-90s. When they can win a deal, it can create very sticky, reoccurring revenue.
CF: I don’t want to harp on the technology too much, but a lot of companies have AI. So how does a firm like yours differentiate themselves with AI from another company’s?
PJ: At the end of the day, AI has two components. There’s a process or a system and then there’s information. In most cases, the system itself is OK, but the information in this system is not smart. And so most competitors out there have a system that’s just not smart enough. And the reason it’s not smart enough is because they don’t have the data and the intelligence to feed it. And what the competition does is they all get in a room and they put little sticky notes up saying, ‘If someone wants to return something, how do you say it? What’s the intent? What’s the process that someone would normally do?’
The difference is that we’ve been in business for over 20 years, and we have literally hundreds of millions to billions of recorded calls and emails and chats. And with all that information, we can make these systems smart. We took our API and our model data and we ran it against our competitors’ data. We found almost 1,000 ways to return something, versus their 30 words.
CF: When it comes to channel partners, how does CXone help them thrive in the market? What advantages does the CXone platform provide to channel partners with respect to solving a wide range of customer problems?
PJ: We’re giving the channel partners a unique product to go talk to their companies about. They’re not just talking about a call center. They’re now able to have a much more strategic conversation, which is how to manage all your interactions. The second thing is that not all competitors are in the channel. We are a product and a company that can actually help them beat other competitors that might be competing for that business that they don’t get paid from. The third thing is that it basically gives partners a really sticky revenue string. Retention rates are in the mid to high-90s. When they can win a deal, it can create very sticky, reoccurring revenue.
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.
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