An interview with Zvi Baum, President of Enterprise Interaction Solutions, NICE.

What is NICE SmartCenter? What is unique about NICE SmartCenter and how will it benefit your customers?
NICE SmartCenter is an innovative solution for the contact center that is designed to enable organizations to manage their operation in an insightful, proactive manner and take action at the right time. NICE SmartCenter leverages the synergies of the combined capabilities of NICE Perform, IEX TotalView and Performix, within an open framework based on services-oriented architecture (SOA) principles, together with a structured service and implementation methodology.
NICE SmartCenter combines the capabilities of compliance, quality management, workforce management, adaptive interaction analytics, coaching, customer feedback and performance management. It is the result of a joint effort undertaken by the domain experts of NICE, IEX and Performix.
Another aspect of NICE SmartCenter uniqueness is that it addresses performance issues at all levels, agent, operations/contact center, and enterprise:
At the agent level, organizations are better positioned to improve their agents’ adherence to schedule and scripts, attain better agent skills and higher levels of knowledge, perform according to KPI’s and improve overall agent motivation and effectiveness.   For example, agent skills, such as up-sell and cross-sell can be improved by automatically categorizing and flagging opportunities, identifying knowledge gaps to create customized coaching packages, and scheduling coaching sessions at the optimal time.
Contact centers are able to enhance operational performance by better planning and scheduling and improving first call resolution.  For example, cost reduction is achieved through hold time reduction.  Advanced interaction analytics provide an ongoing analysis of hold time and other parameters, dashboards reveal which agents have longer hold times on average, and workforce management enables optimal scheduling of coaching sessions.
At the enterprise level, organizations can gain competitive insights, improve customer loyalty, and gather customer intelligence. For example,  contact centers can classify calls in which competitors are mentioned, enterprise marketing personnel can then develop a new campaign to address competitive challenges, while supervisors can develop new coaching packages for effective handling by agents of new campaigns.

How does NICE SmartCenter relate to the recent IEX and Performix acquisitions?
NICE and IEX were working closely together for some time before the acquisition. Because of our joint experience and our understanding of the market and where it is going, we became convinced that the combination of these two market-leading companies would give us an even stronger leadership position. The addition of Performix contact center performance management solutions helped us strengthen our offering even more, with a company that was the pioneer in this field. Each company brought highly skilled R&D, services, marketing and sales teams with similar cultures of excellence, commitment to innovation and domain expertise.

How does NICE intend to optimize the opportunities that are offered by the acquired companies?
NICE has a global presence that provides additional channels and partners, which IEX and Performix are leveraging. Following the acquisition, NICE has a larger base of strategic customers, and NICE SmartCenter, with its openness and best-of-class solutions, offers significant added-value for these customers and greater opportunities for us. NICE SmartCenter offers a smooth and easy introduction of innovative operational and strategic tools to better manage their contact center while protecting the investment in existing systems.

What are the greatest challenges facing contact centers today?
Probably the biggest challenge facing contact centers is managing the increasing complexity of their environment. Today, even some of the smallest contact centers are running multisite operations with multiskilled agents handling a number of multimedia contacts (e-mail, Web chat and more), with video not far behind.
These new multimedia possibilities make understanding and managing the customer experience more challenging and more difficult. In this environment, being able to respond to customer needs in a timely manner is a distinct competitive advantage. Yet the information needed to make informed decisions is oftentimes locked in disparate systems and data silos. And with the barrage of daily management issues that need management’s attention, there usually aren’t enough hours in the day to aggregate the data – let alone use it to make insightful business decisions.

How is a NICE helping the contact center address those challenges?
NICE SmartCenter places the contact center at the heart of the enterprise. With NICE SmartCenter, contact centers gain a single view of their business and can improve efficiency, effectiveness and quality of customer service while better aligning their objectives with the enterprise.
For example, NICE SmartCenter improves up-sell and cross-sell possibilities by providing right-time indication of missed sales opportunities. Managers can focus accurately on top factors contributing to these missed opportunities and decide to take proactive action to improve future sales performance. Managers will identify a sales gap on their dashboard and then automatically classify and locate the interactions during which sales opportunities were lost. Why were they lost? The interactions analytics capability help identify the reasons a sale was not made. And still using NICE SmartCenter, a coaching package will be created to reinforce the key selling points and benefits. The sessions can be scheduled at optimal times for each agent’s schedule and make any necessary adjustments to agent skills and proficiency levels. And then the dashboard shows ongoing sales results, and how goals are being met.
So with NICE SmartCenter, we have now gone much further to meet these new challenges.
This open framework that’s based on SOA principles allows contact centers to benefit from the synergy between the entire spectrum of NICE SmartCenter best-in-class solutions. It uniquely enables information sharing and streamlines business processes, while allowing the solutions to evolve independently, protecting existing technology investments.
To ensure that customers can fully benefit from all the potential of NICE SmartCenter, NICE is leveraging its unique domain expertise, best practices and industry benchmarks to provide a structured service and implementation methodology as an integral part of the offering. This enables organizations to better focus people, processes and technologies around the company and its business strategy while achieving ROI in record time.

How is your approach different from traditional suites?
We’re taking an open solution approach. The drawback with creating a traditional, single, unified suite is that it prevents each underlying component from developing at its own pace. It forces customers to displace existing technologies in order to benefit from the synergy of suite components. An improvement in one element of the suite means that you will almost certainly have to replace everything and order a whole new suite just to benefit from this single change or development.