WFO Leader NICE Evolves Into Analytics TrailblazerWFO Leader NICE Evolves Into Analytics Trailblazer

NICE helps companies like eBay Enterprise understand, and improve on, the communications between contact center agent and customer.

NICE Systems and Verint have long been the two dominant leaders in workforce optimization (WFO), each having started with expertise in call recording and adding the workforce management piece largely through acquisition (with the purchases of IEX and Blue Pumpkin, respectively).

As the call center market morphed into the contact center space and, more recently, into customer experience management, WFO is changing as well. NICE itself has transitioned over the past 10 years from a company focused on compliance and recording to one that is "creating customer experiences," as Miki Migdal, president of the NICE enterprise product group, described during a presentation at the NICE Interactions user group meeting held early this month in San Antonio.

Embracing Analytics
The requirement for simple VoIP call recording has become a need for multichannel recording, including not just agent screens but video sessions as well. Quality management and workforce management -- in the past scheduling agents and scoring agent interactions in order to provide feedback -- is expanding to a fuller employee engagement application, including agent desktop analytics and gamification.

But the biggest evolution in NICE's strategy is the addition of a strong analytics practice, one part of which -- customer journey analytics -- is highlighted in the slide above. With multichannel recording, NICE had been collecting data on every customer interaction; with workforce management and surveys, it added the ability to collect information on agent performance. It had all the data, but making that data useful had been a big challenge for NICE, like it has been at most businesses.

Positioned in 2012 as a big data play, NICE's emphasis over the past few years has centered on creating "actionable analytics." This is in keeping with industrywide recognition that analytics needs to move closer to the point of action, from systems that primarily aggregate and compute structured data toward analytic systems that not only correlate and relate the data but also deliver prescriptive advice based on it.

eBay Enterprise Engagement
At the NICE event, several customers delivered sessions on the results they have achieved using NICE analytics. eBay Enterprise, which provides retail-optimized commerce solutions, was among them. As Robin Gomez, director of operational excellence at eBay Enterprise, described, the company has a 24/7 outsourced contact center operation with 2,200 agents who handle 17 million interactions a year. It offers customer support over voice, email, chat, and social media.

The key objectives for deploying NICE's analytics solution was to lower average handle time (AHT); deliver consistent, high-quality service; and enhance the consumer experience, Gomez said. How did the analytics solution do this?

eBay Enterprise used analytics to gain insight into how new hires performed against tenured agents and improve its onboarding and training processes. By using speech analytics, the company could identify the reason for silence during a contact center conversation and recognize in which areas certain agents needed additional support. How did this translate into improvement? One eBay Enterprise customer was able to move from a 3-1 ratio to a 10-1 ratio for its Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 agent staffing, based on the improved performance of Tier 1 agents -- an improvement that dramatically lowered the overall cost associated with agent salary.

Customer journey analytics is certainly still an emerging solution area, and the industry needs companies like NICE -- working with the most sophisticated businesses in the world -- to break new ground. In 2014, NICE spent almost $150 million in research and development. The company's passionate focus on customer engagement analytics is allowing it to remain on the forefront of this burgeoning market.

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