Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS was firmly established as a top enterprise software category in 2019 when Gartner swapped out its Magic Quadrant for contact center infrastructure for its new CCaaS Magic Quadrant. The term refers to modular and cloud-hosted contact center solutions that allow companies to provide inbound and outbound services on a per-feature, pay-as-you-go model.
It works across devices and locations, providing both organizations and agents with greater flexibility. For this reason, the CCaaS market has witnessed a massive boom in the era of remote work. By the end of 2022, Gartner predict that 50 percent of solutions will have adopted the technology, and the industry will be worth $28.6 billion by 2025. Established providers like NICE have pivoted towards the cloud to take advantage of this.
NICE launched the current version of CXone in 2017, although the platform has existed in some form or the other for over a decade. It brings together omnichannel routing, workforce optimization, analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence under one roof.
NICE CXone Review: Features
NICE is one of the world’s leading software companies in the contact center and customer experience space. It is best known for its AI-powered CX software, and, in 2021, it was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS. Notably, it was one of only three leaders for the year, alongside Genesys and Talkdesk.
The unified cloud platform provides inbound and outbound contact center capabilities, self-service, guided customer journeys, and much more. The technologies center around five core features:
1. Digital Entry Points
These allow organizations to build intuitive digital customer journeys, enabled by intelligent knowledge management and smart experience design in search, websites, and mobile apps.
2. Customer Journey Orchestration
It creates and executes personalized customer journeys through AI-powered routing for both self-service and human-assisted experiences.
3. Powerful Self-Service
NICE CXone embeds artificial intelligence into its self-service propositions that enable automated conversations and generate conversational insights.
4. Agent Assistance
It offers real-time guidance and contextualized information so that contact center agents can quickly resolve customer queries. The knowledge also allows operations to upskill agents for the future.
5. Enlighten AI
Enlighten AI is NICE’s proprietary artificial intelligence engine that intervenes at crucial points in the customer journey and agent experience.
At the core of NICE CXone is an open cloud foundation, which makes it easy to integrate into your existing customer handling systems with third-party solutions across the enterprise. The company also runs a robust DEVone developer program to improve the platform further and drive extensibility. RESTful APIs – which support a versatile range of enterprise needs – are integral in this strategy.
In addition to the five core features, NICE CXone customers can expect:
- FedRAMP compliance for more robust cloud security
- Optional Voice as a Service (VaaS) extension
- A range of Unified Communications (UC) integrations
- A marketplace of third-party apps by NICE partners
- Stringent security, backed by the NICE CXone Trust Office
- Integrations with all leading CRMs
NICE CXone Review: Benefits
NICE CXone offers the following key benefits to its users and their end customers:
- Omnichannel Experiences – NICE CXOne offers channel integrations, paving the way for seamless channel shift, maintaining customer context across the contact center experience. For example, customers can quickly escalate a self-service interaction to human support at the click of a button. The context of that journey will pass through to the agent handling the query, enabling them to pick up from where the customer left off. Also, thanks to a singular interface, agents can move conversations across channels themselves to speed up interactions and enhance customer satisfaction.
- Digitize Customer Journeys – NICE CXone provides CX teams with the tools to digitize end-to-end customer journeys, starting from an open web search. It supports voice, 30+ digital channels, and continuously improves performance based on journey analytics. Further, CXone will gather customer data at every step to drive personalization.
- Grow With a Compliant and Scalable Cloud – NICE CXone is an elastic and pay-as-you-go solution that scales at the organization’s pace. It guarantees 99.99 percent availability with zero downtime for maintenance. The cloud solution is also certified for PCI Level 1, GDPR, HIPAA, and FedRAMP.
- Discover a Futureproof Solution – The CCaaS platform applies artificial intelligence and automation to reduce manual effort, standardize processes, and generate predictive insights that anticipate and protect against future challenges. It uses an AI engine purpose-built for customer experience, and 25 more pre-integrated AI tools are available in the market.
Who Needs NICE CXone?
While NICE CXone primarily targets the mid-market to large enterprise space, any company can gain from its features and capabilities. It has specially designed solutions for healthcare, financial services, governments, retail, and telecoms. It also caters to contact center-centric sectors such as business process outsourcing (BPOs) and collections firms.
In terms of systems, there is a NICE CXone for small businesses and NICE CXone for enterprises. Small businesses can start with the Essentials Plan and slowly scale to bigger plans – including the company’s Core and Complete Plans – as they grow.
NICE CXone Review: Verdict
NICE CXone is a comprehensive solution that addresses virtually every contact center need. While its top priority is to improve CX, it also has capabilities that optimize internal operations, improve agent performance, and enhance business outcomes.
For example, companies can keep workforces engaged through data-driven performance evaluations. The solution’s automation studio also makes it possible to reduce manual effort and headcount to grow the bottom line. Indeed, NICE is highly-regarded for its workforce management (WFM) capabilities, now embedded within its CCaaS platform.
Yet, its full capabilities are wide-ranging, with NICE CXone commended by many for its comprehensiveness and flexibility, consistently ranking as one of the best CCaaS solutions in the market, trusted by companies like Accenture, Visa, Toyota, and several others.
Learn about the analytics capabilities within the CXone platform by reading our article: NICE Real-Time Speech Analytics Review: Faster Performance
