October 30, 2024
Last week, NICE held its annual industry analyst summit in Zambia, Africa. At the beginning of the event, we were told that no slides were being presented under non-disclosure. The audience was free to post any content on social media.
One slide showed new customer advocates - nearly one hundred well-known global brands, including Disney, Ikea, Marriott, and Sony. How did NICE define advocate? These are customers that have recently gone live on CXone, are reference customers and issued a case study or provided a testimonial about that experience. I posted a photo of that slide on LinkedIn.
As was true of many of my live LinkedIn posts from the event, there was a significant amount of engagement, but especially for that one post. In less than a week, that slide has been re-posted by twenty-one connections and viewed by 35,000 members of the contact center community. Clearly, there is a high level of interest in what NICE has to say during its industry summits.
As was true at previous events, the highlights of the NICE program are its panels with customers and partners. Following initial introductions by each of the participants, the one-hour discussions were driven exclusively by participants’ answers to analyst questions. This is an indicator of the unparalleled level of transparency and trust that NICE fosters with the analyst community.
Customer Panel: Stories of AI Progress
NICE vice president of corporate communications Christopher Irwin-Dudek moderated the customer panel. The participants were members of NICE’s customer advisory board: Laura McMurniman, Guest Services, Carnival UK (P&O Cruises & Cunard); Brian Stoner, VP GPGS Americas, Hyatt; and Alan Lowden, CIO, H&R Block, seated left to right in the photo below.
During a similar customer panel at the NICE Analyst Summit in 2023, an analyst asked where each company was on its contact center AI journey. While one of the three customers talked about being involved in testing several Enlighten CXone features, the other two discussed their CX AI initiatives as “nascent “and “embryonic.”
This year was different. The stories of CX AI progress of the three customers who participated in this year’s panel clearly show the progress AI initiatives are making with NICE’s market-leading customers.
H&R Block: Using AI to Automate “Mundane Tasks”
According to Lowden, H&R Block began experimenting shortly after the explosion of ChatGPT (November 2022). By the fall of 2023, the company started building direct consumer use cases for customers. One application was to make online help better through a Gen AI- powered chatbot. That was launched to the company’s eight million customers who use H&R Block software to do their own tax returns.
Lowden described several additional projects in customer service that the company is working on - some quite interesting - but the company is not discussing these publicly. As an organization, however, Lowden said H&R Block believes in the power of AI in the longer term. “We fully believe that in a heavy human-based business like ours, AI could offload mundane tasks that can be handled by automation.”
Hyatt Hotels: Using AI to Improve the Experience for Both Customer and Employee
Stoner responded to the question about the use of AI at Hyatt by saying that at a corporate level, the company is investing in how Gen AI reframes the future of hospitality. “Gen AI is going to be a game changer for hospitality.” He specifically cited changes to front desk training. As the role has traditionally suffered with high attrition, it is believed that Gen AI will be able to walk a colleague through complex systems and processes, and perhaps cut training time by 75 percent.
From a contact center perspective, Stoner said that Generative AI is going to play a part in every step of the guest journey, from calling us and making a reservation to helping customers at the property having issues. Hyatt deployed CXone Expert, NICE’s knowledge base solution, in the past year. We have seen some good wins with that, specifically to average handle time (AHT).”
Why the improvements in AHT? Before CXone Expert, if agents could not find an answer in the knowledge base, they made a call to an internal resource for help – and the rate for internal help was quite high. After the implementation of CXone Expert, Hyatt found a substantial decrease in the internal help call rate. Stoner said that Hyatt saw an AHT decrease of approximately four and a half seconds. Hyatt has calculated what the savings are for each second of AHT is on a global basis, and without sharing that number, suffice it to say that with thousands of agents globally, the number is meaningful to Hyatt.
Stoner also shared that Hyatt is in the process of rolling out Enlighten Autopilot (conversational AI) and Enlighten Copilot (agent assist).
Carnival UK: First the Cloud, Then AI
Carnival UK began its contact center transformation from a premises-based system to NICE CXone in January 2024. McMurniman described that soon after deploying voice and email interactions on the platform, Carnival UK began to deploy NICE AI products. In a very logical first step, Carnival UK began with NICE Interaction Analytics, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze 100 percent of customer interactions, including voice calls, text messages, emails, chats, and other digital conversations. Its primary purpose is to identify trends, root causes, and actionable insights from these interactions to drive improvements in customer experience and operational efficiency.
Additional NICE AI solutions were described as in various stages of deployment, e.g., Enlighten AutoSummary is in pilot, and Enlighten Copilot is set to be deployed in first quarter 2025.
Though Carnival UK has only been on the CXone platform for a brief time, McMurniman said Carnival UK is, “moving at pace to get these products in and learn as much as we can from them.”
Content is Key: Knowledge Management Is Part of AI Deployment Now
Each of the customer participants referenced the importance of knowledge management to AI deployment success. One panelist said, “The first thing we learned was content is key, and the quality of our content was not very good. That pointed to other problems because a lot of that content was used by our agents.”
In a recent contact center conference panel, a closing question was about where companies should start when considering deployment of AI in the contact center. This customer, and the panel in general, reinforced my answer at the time: start looking at the source material being used by your agents to respond to customer queries and how consistent it is across various sources. Before you can automate delivery of information to agents, make sure your manual processes are producing consistent results.
Postscript: It’s Not Where You Are, It’s That You’re There at All
Let me conclude with my thoughts on the exotic African setting of the NICE analyst summit. Since the new era of these meetings began in 2021, with summits in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Marrakech, Peru and now Zambia, there has been much discussion in the contact center community about NICE’s seeming extravagance. It is purported by many that these events are designed to “buy-off” analysts.
Let me say, unequivocally, that I go to NICE analyst summits for the content. As is typical, content is delivered in formal PowerPoint-driven sessions. But understanding of NICE’s products and messages is also delivered in one-on-one interactions and small group discussions the analysts have with the NICE senior product and marketing executives that are part of the event. And, as described above, much is learned from the NICE customers and partners who join the event.
I spent seven years at AT&T early in my career and my husband was a sales executive there for 20 years. I compare NICE analyst summits to the customer advisory meetings that we participated in over that period. NICE treats analysts like it treats its very best customers. In addition to explaining their products and services, NICE wants to listen to and learn from the analysts. This 3.5-day event gave more than ample opportunity for that information exchange.
Would I attend the next NICE analyst summit if it were in the company’s headquarters location, Hoboken, New Jersey? Yes. With a new CEO coming to NICE in January, this is certainly a possibility. But will I go if the 2025 event is in Bali or St. Petersburg? The answer is also yes. There is no substitute for being “in the room where it happens.”
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