Digital Journeys: Contact Center Pros Share Their StoriesDigital Journeys: Contact Center Pros Share Their Stories

The theme of next-generation customer experience (CX) took center stage at NICE’s recent Interactions Live customer event, where CX leaders at Siemens, and Toyota Financial Services, among others, described how they’ve embraced NICE’s cloud CXone customer experience platform to better service customers — as well as agents.

Siemens Achieves Digital Transformation Success

During a keynote session— Defining a New CX Standard — Josh Jennings, global director of hub sales at Siemens, discussed how the global technology company is using NICE’s CXone cloud customer experience platform to digitally transform the journey of its manufacturing customers from pre-sales to fulfillment support and renewals. “We have to make sure we are ready to talk to those customers whenever they need us, however they need us — and we have to be flexible around their needs,” he said, noting that his job is to work with the business and figure out ways to apply skills-based routing, streamline handle times, and manage the workforce.

Before deploying CXone, blind spots across marketing, pre-sales, and sales made it difficult to understand a customer’s journey, Jennings said. Additionally, because Siemens had agents all over the world on different platforms, reporting was problematic, Jennings said. “Consolidation was key,” he said.

Now all the tools and definitions are the same, so everybody’s speaking the same language, said Jennings, noting that if he says the SLA is X, now everyone knows what that means.

The evolution to digital channels supported on a single platform “has really been a game-changer for us,” Jennings said. Previously, Siemens had a global model where U.S. agents would support American businesses, for example. With chat, Siemens has been able to remove boundaries. “We’ve got people sitting in China, creating opportunities for people in Brazil — and that never happened before and it was exciting to watch,” he said.

Moving forward, Jennings said he is looking to give customers the choice of even more channels. “One of those would be click-to-call — taking something like personal connection and proactive access and giving the customer the ability to say, ‘I want somebody to call me now’ — is something we’re excited to start to look at and deploy,” he said. Siemens is also exploring automation and AI tools for chat and voice, he added. “That's going to help drive us to scalability for the future.”

Toyota Financial Services Goes All Cloud

Toward the tail end of the Defining a New CX Standard keynote, Jyoti Ranjan Swain, national manager, digital information officer, Toyota Financial Services, shared how the company is handling its CX transformation to give customers “more choice, and more voice.”

With six contact centers handling 40 million inbound and outbound calls annually with outdated on-premises legacy systems, Toyota Financial Service had trouble delivering a seamless omnichannel experience, as well as providing real-time feedback to customer service representatives. Speed to market was of concern, too, Swain added. Now, with the modern CXone platform, agents can onboard a new supplier or add a new user in days or hours versus months or weeks like it did before, he added.

Migrating to the cloud-based CXone platform has allowed Toyota Financial Services to maintain call quality, scalability, and availability while allowing customers to navigate between voice and digital channels seamlessly, Swain said. Today, Toyota Financial Services is entirely in the cloud with 200+ virtual and physical servers. The CXone platform supports 17 different product applications, he said.

When it comes to actionable results, Swain noted that Toyota Financial Services is able to onboard its suppliers and agents “pretty quickly,” and folks in the back office can make changes “on the fly.” One of the things Swain admitted he’s most proud of is having been able to enable agents to work from home when the pandemic hit. “CXone helped us put forward five to six months’ worth of work,” Swain said. “Within one week, we enabled more than 3,000 users to work from home, and our call volume was [up] 200%.”

Learn more about digital transformation and visit with sponsor NICE at Enterprise Connect this September in Orlando, Fla. Register with promo code NJAL200 and receive $200 off your registration.