NICE SmartCenter™ is NICE’s innovative solution designed to enable organizations to manage their contact centers in an insightful proactive manner and take action at the right time.  It helps your organization reach levels of performance never before possible. NICE SmartCenter does this by leveraging the synergies of the combined capabilities of NICE Perform, IEX® TotalView® workforce management system and Performix™ solutions from NICE within a unified SOA-based (Service Oriented Architecture) framework, all guided by a proven, business process oriented services methodology.

An integrated solution such as NICE SmartCenter presents opportunities to realize a return on investment greater than what can be obtained by using the individual solutions. These amplified benefits result from three primary areas: common administration, information sharing and process improvement.

Having a common user administration function across multiple solutions is the most obvious of the benefit areas. Administrative time savings resulting from entering and maintaining user information in one system, rather than multiple ones, provides a clear reduction in direct labor expense. It also removes the potential for differences in user definitions between solutions which results in greater information consistency.

Sharing information other than that related to system administration between solutions also provides a quantifiable benefit. The use of a common information portal such as MyUniverse across the solutions removes the need for learning how to navigate different user interfaces, thus reducing training requirements. A universal portal is also a much more efficient way of disseminating information. This results in time-saving benefits and improved communications across the entire user population.

Information from one solution can also improve the results in another. For example evaluation scores from the quality management solution can be used by the workforce management solution to automatically determine which agents should be considered when scheduling for specific skill groups. Removing agents that are struggling with a particular skill assignment can lower overall handling times and improve service quality. Evaluation scores can also be used in determining priority for schedule preferences or bidding order.

Benefits arise as well from sharing information in the opposite direction. Adherence results from the workforce management solution can be used to flag agents for targeted monitoring to discover underlying factors contributing to their sub-par adherence performance. Using the insights obtained to provide targeted coaching improves overall adherence rates and lowers associated staffing costs.

The third area of benefits from NICE SmartCenter results from an enhanced ability to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes. This is best illustrated through a specific example.

The director in a typical contact center observes on his performance dashboard that service levels are lower then forecasted. Even more importantly they are on a downward trend. The director assigns a task to the center’s analyst to investigate why this is occurring and how to reverse the trend.

Receiving notification of his assignment, the analyst uses his dashboard to drill down into information from the workforce management solution into the underlying operational metrics that impact service level performance. He discovers that wait times for a product’s service queue are significantly above forecast due to unexpected call volumes. This appears to be the major factor behind the service level issue. He passes the task on to the quality monitoring team to find out what is actually going on.

The quality monitoring team leader has defined categories in NICE SmartCenter application –  Insight Manager, for capturing interactions involving all the many different product types service requests. He selects those for the particular product in question and initiates another NICE SmartCenter application, ClearSight – to perform an automated root-cause analysis. The results show that a large majority of the interactions involve discussions on the product’s overheat prevention feature. Listening to a few of the interactions shows that a major heat wave occurring in the eastern area of the country is causing the products to overheat and driving the increase in calls.

The team leader transfers the task on to the marketing department with a suggestion to issue an emergency product bulletin. The marketing specialist agrees and issues an emergency bulletin to all product users explaining the correct operation of the products overheat prevention features.

In a matter of hours call volumes related to this specific product are decreasing, wait times are improving and service level is recovering. Early notification of the developing condition, quick discovery of its underlying causes and prompt action to correct the issue prevented this from becoming a major operational problem. Major staffing adjustments and agent overtime expenses were avoided as a result. Customers of this product were also very impressed by the company’s proactive communication involving the heat wave.

Reducing administrative overhead, sharing information and leveraging the functional synergies between solutions enables NICE SmartCenter to deliver benefits to the contact center operation beyond those of the individual solutions. With SmartCenter the sum of the parts truly is greater than the whole.