Customers’ expectations are increasing day-by-day. Now, your products, services or an easy-to-pay pricing strategy are not enough for your success and performance. The thing that matters more than anything to your customers is the experience you deliver whenever they need your support or come across any problem.
Companies that focus on CX (customer experience) generate 80% more revenue than their competitors. Delivering the best customer experience isn’t an effortless task in this competitive landscape, particularly as consumer expectations evolve.
To retain your customers and earn their loyalty, you need to deliver convenient and personalized support across multiple channels.
The only way to achieve this is the right contact center platform. Vendors like NICE are leading innovators in the CCaaS space. Combining artificial intelligence with unified digital platforms and rich CX capabilities, NICE’s contact center gives businesses a revolutionary way to distinguish themselves from their competitors.
Through this post, you will learn about NICE and its contact center features that help businesses satisfy their customer pool by improving CX.
The Top NICE Contact Center Features
Let’s explore some of the best features of NICE:
1. AI-Powered Omnichannel Communication
Nowadays, customer expectations have changed, and they want immediate solutions, automatic routing, and consistent replies across all channels without repeating themselves a single time. With these expectations, data silos mean lost customers.
NICE’s AI-powered omnichannel communication system integrates voice, email, chat, social media, and messaging apps into a unified interface. So, it lets customers contact support via whichever channel they want, yet their history and data remain consistent and organized.
When a customer contacts support, AI or virtual agents reply to it 24/7/365 and clarify the queries, like password reset, order status, basic troubleshooting, account info, etc.
In case of a complex problem, AI agents automatically route the call to the most related human agent. AI agents also assist human agents during conversation by providing them necessary information about customers, what to do next, sources related to the query, etc. so they can give the most appropriate service.
Their system also helps companies track all customer interactions across channels and spot trends, improve quality, and keep excellent service.
Such flawless transition among communication channels with appropriate and on-time solutions leads to cohesive and frustration-free customers and higher loyalty.
2. Conversational AI and Smart Chatbots
When customers require support, they expect prompt responses and round-the-clock assistance with minimal waiting time. Human agents can’t keep up these expectations alone. Therefore, automation in the form of AI chatbots and conversational AI is essential for businesses to maintain their customer pool, and NICE’s conversational AI and chatbots are at the forefront of this innovation.
These bots understand text or spoken language. They are smart because they don’t just respond to keywords or give already-generated stiff answers; rather, they use AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand what the customer means, even if phrased differently. This lets them answer a broad range of user questions automatically.
For repeated or simple requests like checking account status, resetting passwords, order status, FAQ answers, etc., the bot can fully resolve the issue without human agent involvement. This saves the time and effort of human agents and reduces their burden.
Moreover, these chatbots are not static but keep on learning and improving based on their past replies and conversation data. They use AI analytics to remember what worked best previously, and over time, they get better at understanding customers and predicting issues.
As NICE’s chatbots and conversational AI system are cloud-based and part of a unified platform, the same chatbot system integrates with reporting, analytics, workflows, and live-agent hand-off tools. As a result, nothing stays disconnected, and all tools share the same data. Consequently, work flows smoothly.
3. Advanced Self-Service Solutions
NICE has self-service options for those who want to solve their issues quickly without talking to agents. NICE’s self-service tools allow customers to do this by using smart IVR, automated steps, and help articles.
Traditional IVRs are rigid. They only work if the caller presses the exact number or uses the exact keywords and phrases. On the other hand, NICE’s AI-powered IVR employs artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language understanding (NLU) to understand the meaning behind the words. It can actually distinguish between the different types of questions asked on the same subject.
For example, you, as a customer, ask the IVR system three different questions: “I want to check my bill,” “I have a billing issue,” and “Why is my bill high?” NICE’s system understands all of these as billing help. It then automatically adjusts the menu to guide the caller to the correct option.
Besides smart IVR, NICE also offers a comprehensive knowledge base, where customers can read instructions, get answers to their queries in the form of FAQs, and watch troubleshooting videos
4. Enlighten AI for Customer Experience Optimization
Enlighten AI is a kind of toolkit designed specifically for customer-service interactions. This toolkit includes automated self-service, agent assistance during live interactions, analytics and insight tools to analyze all conversations, routing customers to the right agent, and complaint management.
This system can understand, analyze, predict, and optimize customer interactions and backend workflows. It can perform deep analytics, sentiment analysis, and pattern detection based on data. With the help of this analysis, managers get insights on why problems happen, where inefficiencies are, and how to improve them.
Moreover, it is designed to handle large-scale interactions and learn over time. As the AI model interacts more with customers, it learns which strategies were most effective in the past, allowing it to reduce future mistakes and enhance its intelligence.
5. Comprehensive Analytics and Performance Reporting
NICE’s contact center performance analytics tools gather data from all types of customer-center interactions, like calls, chats, email, social media, self-service bots, etc. Based on the collected data, the analytics system performs analysis and shows KPIs like how many calls are received, what the durations of these calls are, how many chats are handled, first-call resolution rate, wait times, queue lengths, and more.
Reports and dashboards showing KPIs are customizable. Organizations can pick which KPIs matter the most and keep them on the dashboard to follow them properly. They can also export reports to teams or decision-makers.
Moreover, managers can see live as well as past data, trends, patterns, or problem areas. This helps managers get a clear idea of how operations are running and whether performance is improving or not. Over time, they can analyze seasonal spikes, repeated complaints, and common issues and plan resources or improvements proactively.
6. CXone Mpower
CXone Mpower is NICE’s CX-aware AI platform. It is backed by AI to remember customers’ previous interactions, understand their context, and guide them from first contact to final resolution.
CXone Mpower is a full-service AI platform. Their module CXone Mpower Orchestrator serves as a command center that allows businesses to link tasks, data, AI agents, human agents, and backend systems. Because of this linkage, a customer request can automatically trigger the correct path from start to finish.
The system keeps a record of customer history, previous issues, etc. When the customer returns, Mpower remembers them and adapts to give personalized service.
It’s not just a feature but a complete call center package that provides omnichannel support, AI automation, self-service, agent assistance, performance insights, and optimization.
7. Intelligent Workforce Management
NICE’s Workforce Management includes forecasting, scheduling, intraday adjustments, and agent management to ensure the optimum number of agents with the right skills are working at the right time.
Their WFM uses machine-learning forecasting to predict, on the basis of data from omnichannels, how many calls will come in at a particular point, hour, or day and then automatically generate staff schedules.
Using WFM, agents can bid for shifts, request time off, swap shifts, or self-schedule depending on company setup and rules.
WFM also monitors intraday management and if call or chat volume fluctuates suddenly, the system can suggest adjustments so staffing stays optimal.
NICE’s WFM helps manage tasks, backlog, resource capacity, and productivity for back-office functions, too.
FAQs About NICE’s Contact Center Features
1. Why do businesses need an AI-powered contact center like NICE?
Customers’ expectations are rising daily, and the market is saturated with competitors. Data silos and delayed responses mean customer losses that impact the overall business. So, to keep up with the expectation and avoid queues, long wait times, and smooth support across all communication channels, businesses need automated contact centers like NICE.
2. How does NICE reduce customer frustration across channels?
NICE keeps customers’ data updated and consistent across all communication channels. So customers do not have to repeat their issues and queries again and again. Moreover, it reminds the customers to provide customized experiences, and in case virtual agents are unable to handle any issue, they route the call automatically to the most relevant and skillful agent. Besides this, customers get a 24/7/365 instant and immediate issue resolution service. All these features reduce frustration and enhance loyalty.
3. Can NICE’s conversational AI handle complex customer questions?
NICE’s conversational AI is not static and keeps on learning with time, yet it won’t handle complex customer problems like a partial refund because of any unique situation. For complex issues, the virtual agent automatically routes the call to the agent of the concerned department.
4. How does NICE improve overall customer experience over time?
NICE has tools like Enlighten AI. It has subtools that help companies to analyze every single interaction and detect trends, patterns, mistakes, sentiment, and bottlenecks. It keeps the past data and tells companies which of their actions previously generated the best and which generated the worst results. Over time, this helps companies fix weak spots, reduce errors, and train their agents and employees better. All these actions improve the overall customer experience.
5. How does NICE help companies manage their support teams better?
NICE’s Workforce Management includes forecasting, scheduling, intraday adjustments, and agent management to ensure the optimum number of agents with the right skills are working at the right time. NICE’s WFM works across all omnichannel channels. WFM also offers intraday management, and if call or chat volume fluctuates suddenly, the system can suggest adjustments so staffing stays optimal.
