NICE Touts Single-Platform Design at Interactions

LAS VEGAS -- Three prominent technology waves— cloud, digital, and artificial intelligence—are fundamentally reshaping the enterprise software market, creating an overarching generational movement, NICE CEO Barak Eilam said during his keynote that opened the NICE Interactions 2024 conference.

For Eilam, this will be the last Interactions event, as he announced late last month that he will step down as CEO of NICE, a position he's held for the past 10 years, at the end of this year.

"Cloudification" is driving a "grand refactoring" throughout the entire enterprise software market, forcing the re-writing from scratch of billions of lines of code natively in the cloud and compelling all software players to rebuild their tech stack, according to Eilam, citing this as reason for the software market transitions, with new leaders emerging and some once-dominant firms falling behind.

"The ages-old struggle between best-of-breed and best-of-suite is now obsolete," Eilam said. "The true sign of riding the grand convergence wave is when you master the art of leveraging the most complete and most connected platform, bringing together all your data, knowledge, channels, and applications, treating it as one single converged entity. When this platform becomes the answer to any relevant business challenge you throw its way you are seeing the grand convergence in action."

AI is enabling companies to realize a "grand fusion," successfully align people, processes, and technology in a natural, effortless way to enable companies to provide enhanced customer service and better CX, Eliam added.

"If you look at every single project across your entire company through the prism of these changes of perspective, you will realize that every initiative is being driven by these three forces - grand refactoring, grand convergence, and grand fusion. But this change of perspective is even more critical when it comes to the world of CX, where both the starting point and the desired outcome are ripe for monumental transformation," Eliam said. "Never in the history of the CX industry has the need for a change in perspective been more vital or more urgent.

Even though companies have added cloud and other new technologies over the last several years, the goal of exceptional experiences remains as elusive as it has ever been, according to Eliam, who said the problem stems from the traditional process of different departments within an organization handling different parts of the customer journey. This, in turn, leads to information silos. While this at a basic level might seem to make sense to the organization, it doesn't make sense to the customer.

Eliam touted NICE's newly announced CX1 Mpower, as a solution to solve this challenge.

CXone Mpower, which NICE introduced at the conference, is designed to bring together all of the company's CX features, including Copilot, Autopilot, and Actions, in one platform. CXone Mpower uses proprietary AI, including continuous experience memory and CX awareness.

Among the features of the new CXone Mpower platform are the following:

• Immediate augmentation: The memory-driven AI provides copilot and automation capabilities, with augmented intelligence across employee workflows.
• Advanced skillability and reverse-prompting that infuses automated intelligence into CX operations, enabling virtual agents to better understand consumer intents, remember their preferences, and resolve issues with even greater cognitive awareness and efficiency.
• Fully aware proactive service that connects to every touchpoint and application in an organization; providing scalable personalization by proactively recommending actions, optimizing processes, and devising creative solutions.

"CXone Mpower is the holy grail of CX," said Barry Cooper, president of NICE's CX division. "This is a culmination of the relentless innovation NICE has driven in the last decade, bringing all our solutions together in a single, transformative offering. CXone Mpower is a rich convergence of CXone's interaction-centric platform, our best-of-breed solutions and Enlighten's purpose-built AI for CX."

"While the fusing of AI and CX is undoubtfully revolutionary, its impact is quite different than commonly held perceptions," Eliam said. "Everything considered simple in CX, such as checking your account balance, password resets, returns and refunds, as well as thousands of other services and inquiries, has already been automated. Today's 15 million CX agents around the globe are dealing with the most complex and unconventional service scenarios, almost all of which are non-repetitive tasks,"

A generic copilot isn't enough, Eliam said. "For real augmentation, you need an AI environment that is equipped with a continuous CX memory, supercharging agents, and making them 10 times better."

CX AI needs to include skillability to enable the seamless crossover between human agents and automated agents, according to Eliam. "Gradually, your human agents will become the copilots, assisting and guiding your AI agents injecting themselves at critical CX moments, providing them with consultation and collaboration using the unique capability of reverse-prompting. Ultimately, your top agents will be able to unlock a new career path trajectory, evolving their role into AI orchestrators, managing and mastering hundreds of AI agents across the entire CX organization."

AI enables companies to improve efficiencies and returns in a number of different ways, not the least of which is simplifying an enterprise's technology stack, according to Eliam. "A staggering 83 percent of IT resources are typically invested in internal CX maintenance and integration efforts just to keep the operation going."

The right way to create a nourishing habitat for AI is by adopting a truly converged platform, which enables companies to spend 45 percent on integration and 55 percent on optimizing knowledge and data unleashing the full potential of CX AI.

NICE also used the conference to introduce 1CX, a unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solution for rapid implementation and fast ROI, priced at $5 per user per month.

Combined with the CXone platform, 1CX provides an all-in-one cloud communications solution. It provides a full-featured omnichannel cloud PBX and full-featured workforce collaboration tools across all devices and channels. With UCaaS and CCaaS, NICE provides a single end-to-end communications solution.

1CX is designed to enableconnect workforces, providing full-service voice, messaging, and video collaboration, live chat, SMS/MMS, and audio and video conferencing with standard CRM integration.

"1CX is the communications solution of the future," Cooper said. "By bringing NICE's leading CCaaS offerings together with UCaaS, we are making communications across an organization effortless and efficient. 1CX is the next-generation, professional-grade UCaaS and CCaaS combination that is required for organizations to be able to manage the complexity of the digital era both for customer- and internal-facing communications."