With NICE being one of the most widely recognisable cloud Customer Experience (CX) platforms on the market, we thought it would be a good idea to have a sit down with their Consulting Director, Ed Creasey, and find out what it was that brought him to the company, what he has achieved there and what his goals are for the future.
With over 25 years of experience working in customer service, Creasey explained how he first began his career analysing customer interactions at a research company that carried out mystery shopping for various types of organisations.
However, after realising that capturing these interactions manually was non-scalable and only allowed him to scratch the surface of his potential for helping businesses learn more about their customers, he decided to look for opportunities elsewhere.
For this reason, he joined Nexidia, a company that had developed innovative speech analytics technology that was capable of capturing and analysing millions of interactions. Creasey was then able to identify opportunities for business transformation for organisations that take high volume or high value interactions, using analytics and big data.
According to Creasey:
“This technology transformed a number of things. Organisations were now able to truly understand their customer and identify where they were having a bad experience, where there was high cost or missed sales opportunities, or where people were breaking regulations”
Unlike before, as a consultant using speech analytics technology, he was now able to help businesses resolve big problems within the contact centre sphere and had gone from being able to analyse less that 1% of interactions to 100%.
Yet, in an age of DX where the omnichannel was becoming more and more prevalent, it was clear to Creasey that speech analytics, though highly effective, would not be enough and the need to find a solution that would look at every part of the customer journey – not just phone calls but Text, Web, IVR, Apps, Chatbots – was vital to stay relevant.
Considering this, five years ago Creasey then took on the role of Consultancy Director at NICE – a well-known cloud contact centre solution developer that, alongside speech analytics, had also invested heavily in a number of innovative technologies designed to help improve the customer experience on numerous levels.
Firstly, as well as using analytics to understand the Customer Journey in depth, NICE possessed a set of market leading Workforce Optimisation tools. These addressed the issue all modern contact centre environments face, such as the challenge to engage and motivate employees, particularly with a hugely changing demographic within the contact centre world. With this technology, it was now possible to meet the evolving demands of the agent to ensure they are comfortable in their role and are able to deliver the best possible service to each and every customer across multiple channels.
Moreover, with NICE Robotics and AI, a lot of the repetitive and mundane manual processes in contact centres could now be automated so that human agents are no longer bogged down with menial tasks and are able to focus their attention exclusively on the customer.
In essence, by switching from Nexidia to NICE, Creasey went from being able to offer incredible analytics to having the ability to allow businesses to change every element of their customer experience, and after NICE acquired Nexidia two years ago, he can now sell all of these features as part of the NICE family.
Finally, in a world where most organisations are looking to have all of their software in the cloud, as a cloud-first solution NICE is perfectly positioned to meet these demands and will continue to thrive in the future and help businesses get the most from their digital transformation (DX).
Having already acquired InContact and Nexidia two years ago, when asked where NICE will go from here, Creasey believes that the company will continue with their plan to build a customer experience platform that, as well as providing an abundance of market-leading native cloud apps that provide the best software NICE has to offer, they will also establish partnerships with other blue-chip software, for a more complete, all-round cloud Customer Experience platform.
