Selecting the right technology to manage customer data can be difficult. A brand needs to understand the exact features it requires to be able to adopt the proper solution. Recently, Loyalty360 spoke with Chris Bauserman, Vice President of Segment and Product Marketing at NICE inContact, to discuss one of his company’s AI-powered solutions, CXone Packages for Salesforce.
In 2016, NICE acquired inContact, bringing together the former’s and analytics solutions and the latter’s cloud contact center. The resultant company has unique abilities to enhance the customer experiences that brands can offer. For example, the merger has made the CXone Packages possible.
When asked about the new CXone product, Bauserman said, “We see brands looking to get a complete view of the customer so they can service the customer consistently. The things that go into that are customer feedback, the voice of the customer—really being able to track that across all channels and parts of the brand. Understanding the customer experience is very important.”
He continued, “What we’re able to do with these packages for Salesforce are really good examples of the things that we can do to help our customers that both offer a complete solution and make it simple for them to buy, integrate, and maintain it in way that would take a half-dozen other companies to piece together, without the power of that combined CXone.”
NICE inContact also sees another need for brands: “being able to operationalize a common way that you can treat customers.” Bauserman said, “We’ve seen a number of large companies embark on a digital transformation project to boost MPS by 15 points across the business, and they knew the only way they could do that was by no longer treating their customers in silos, by line of business, by whatever geography that contact-center or that line of business happened to be in.”
Bauserman noted that this need is felt most by large companies, but smaller brands encounter similar challenges on a smaller scale. “Even a mid or small size business is a very important friend, because they’re hungry for a common operationalization,” he said.
When asked about the future of AI in customer experience, he indicated that the notion that AI occurs in a single unit that handles all issues and manages all data for consumers. “It’s not about one HAL2000 but 50 HAL2000s, each for their own purpose,” he said. “All learning and training off a common, large pool of data that encompasses the whole customer experience, and being intelligently orchestrated to work together and pass information acts off between each other.”
He continued, “You have to optimize the AI for a specific purpose for it to be fully effective. Some good examples are being able to have AI for virtual-assistance (chatbots, voice bots). We’ve got a customer of ours, a fast-fashion, e-commerce retailer, and they achieved some tremendous results, in terms or lowering their operating costs by 25 percent, cutting labor costs, as well as improving their speed-of-resolution dramatically by incorporating five different AI bot technologies, all stacked into our CXone platform.”
Undoubtedly, a brand’s success in the customer loyalty space often hinges on the technology that brand adopts. As we’ve seen from our interview with Bauserman, NICE inContact’s CXone Packages have enabled several companies to achieve success.