Have your cake and eat it too with a complete AND open CX AI cloud platform

Who doesn’t want to have their cake AND eat it too? Wouldn’t it be great to both savor the taste of a delicious chocolate cake, but then also save the same cake for that 3 p.m. coffee break? All diets aside, that would be an ideal situation for tempting cakes and many other life situations where we are forced to choose between two mutually exclusive scenarios.

You could be forgiven for thinking the same is true for CCaaS platforms that organizations use to manage their contact center and customer interactions. Many CX leaders believe that they can either have a complete platform that provides many integrated apps—best-of-breed or not—to attend to their anticipated CX needs, OR they can cobble together functionality via a highly composable platform which allows them to bring in any app from just about any vendor—yet full interconnection among them may be a stretch.

“Have your cake and eat it too” is an English idiom that means you can’t have or do two good things at the same time that are usually impossible to have together. In fact—with the right CX AI cloud platform—it IS possible to have both completeness in functionality and openness for customization. In the CX world, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can have a platform that deftly manages all your customer experiences yet also the flexibility to shift as expectations change. One platform can connect all the relevant CX data, but at the same time, its open framework allows companies to fine-tune the platform’s functionality to their specific needs and preferences.

Advanced functionality inside and out

Imagine a luscious chocolate cake—moist texture with a deep, rich flavor. In between layers of cake is smooth chocolate buttercream, and on the outside, creamy chocolate ganache. Decadent and delicious! Companies can have this cake with complete, advanced functionality through best-of-breed applications in a CX AI platform. And, a CX AI cloud platform with an open framework can let companies eat their cake too, by allowing them to customize the platform by bringing in third-party apps and data critical to their business success.

NICE CXone features its complete suite of best-of-breed CX solutions, all natively available, on one complete cloud platform to master every type of customer interaction—from voice calls to messaging on digital and social channels. It’s a grand convergence of first-class CX applications with all communication channels, data, and knowledge to transform every interaction into an amazing customer experience. The CXone applications cover every CX need, from routing, workforce engagement management, analytics, knowledge management, and digital.

With these advanced applications interconnected, CXone manages interactions and conversations of every type, from voice to digital messaging, chatbots, and social media. And this is how the CXone platform solution really shines over point solutions with a limited scope, or other CRM or ticketing platforms, which are built to handle simple transactions and not the sophistication of customer interactions of today.

CXone ensures a seamless customer experience across more than 30 voice and text-based channels. It’s an interaction-centric platform built to master 100% of interactions and orchestrate sophisticated, satisfying customer journeys—no matter the touchpoint.

But what if an organization needs something more? Such as a very specific application for a very specific need? That’s where the power of a composable platform comes into play. Companies can eat their cake too with CXone’s open cloud foundation and framework, which provides endless customization options with pre-built no code/low code integrations. The NICE CXexchange offers a diverse range of hundreds of applications and services tailored to your needs, however niche.

Check out the Surfly app that enables co-browsing sessions between customer support personnel and customers. With this tool, your customer agents can see almost instantly an issue a customer is having on their desktop. The app enables easy screen sharing, video chat, file sharing, and drawing to interact with customers—as if the agent is right there in the room with them.

Omilia offers another powerful app for seamless integration into CXone with its voice biometric authentication. The app authenticates customers via their unique biometric voiceprint as they speak freely with a customer agent. The omnichannel solution can reach a 96% semantic accuracy and can create a caller voiceprint with only 10-20 seconds of audio.

CXone provides the tools your in-house developers need to enhance existing apps. In the CXone Developer Community, developers access no-code/low-code tools, like SDKs, and online forums to connect with other developers. NICE DEVone Ecosystem developers also have the opportunity to sell their app to others through the CXone Developer Community.

Unified data layer…and additional bonus layers

Let’s turn our attention to a yummy vanilla cake with white cake on the inside and vanilla buttercream frosting on the outside. Between the cake layers is a slab of cream cheese frosting. Would you like a slice? With CXone, you can have this cake with the unified data layer for a 360-degree view of customer data. And brands can eat the cake, too, by employing APIs to connect even more customer and business data from other third-party apps for more AI insights and impact.

Exceptional customer experiences start with having the right information at the right place at the right time—otherwise service can’t be fast or personalized. CXone’s unified data layer ensures that information flows freely across the platform and is available when a customer engages the brand via self-service or an agent. Should the agent know why a customer called the last time, and what was promised to them? Yes, absolutely. A unified data layer helps makes sure the agent has full context during a call, not after, when it’s too late.

This is just the beginning of the advantages of a unified data layer. By consolidating all communication channels, applications, data, and knowledge on one platform, CXone eliminates silos and promotes streamlined workflows. Agents can work from a single consolidated interface and switch channels on a single interaction, just like their customers. A unified data layer opens opportunities to shift customer service from a reactive approach to proactive outreach. Brands can better anticipate customer needs and reach out to them on their channel of choice with convenience that builds loyalty and increase sales. Read more in Lose the Baggage! Accelerate CX Innovation in the Cloud for more on the imperative to move to a cloud platform and consolidate the customer experience.

A company will often have more customer information that’s in databases external to CXone. And here companies can eat their cake, too, by connecting those external databases via APIs. CXone APIs provide an advanced technical framework with a unified endpoint architecture to streamline the experience for developers (both customer and partner alike).

NICE CXone customer LanguageLine captured all the advantages of a consolidated CX AI cloud platform and customization via APIs with CXone. As an innovation language access service providing real-time translation, LanguageLine needed specific, robust integrations to customize CXone. Linguists needed desktops tailored to language translation, so APIs allowed the company to bring in their preferred third-party interface.

The nation’s largest residential solar storage and energy services company set out to fully automate the inside sales process with CXone. They accomplished it by setting up APIs to integrate customer data from their CRM. Unique information about each lead is captured and used to determine which sales representative should receive the lead. Leads are automatically assigned to the correct sales representative in the appropriate geographic region, which has increased the sales team’s closing rate.

Do you love your CRM? You can keep it and integrate it into CXone with its pre-built CRM integrations, the largest offering of pre-built CRM integrations in the marketplace. They consolidate your customer context and contact center controls into a single interface for more efficient agents and exceptional experiences. Your CRM data can identify customers and connect them to the ideal agent, improving a range of contact center metrics.

AI power extends to all data and applications

How about a slice of carrot cake? A traditional favorite that’s not too sweet, frosted with a rich cream cheese frosting. If carrot cake represents AI power, then you can have this slice of cake and eat it too with CXone.

Enlighten AI is the brain, if you will, of CXone—a highly-specialized AI infused across the entire platform and embedded in CXone apps. Enlighten AI, with 1,000+ pre-built AI models, is trained on the industry’s largest labeled CX dataset in the industry—billions of real customer interactions across a variety of domains, like sales, insurance, and travel. This makes all CXone interactions that much smarter and better prepped for customer experiences.

The full integration of Enlighten AI into CXone creates something even greater—a dynamic and powerful synergy that supercharges every application and process, driving value from day one. Enlighten AI does more than augment capabilities, it redefines them, creating smarter, more efficient systems that enhance customer experiences and reduce operational costs—at scale.

Enlighten AI incorporates every piece of data on the CXone platform, and it harnesses generative AI combined with conversational AI to offer incredible personalized customer experiences aligned with your brand messaging and goals.

The AI power doesn’t have to end with CXone applications. Once again, you can eat your cake, too, by extending AI power to third-party data that you bring into the CX AI cloud platform. CXone automation and AI hubs streamline deployment and administration of third-party applications, along with CXone capabilities. This radically simplifies the integration and use of multiple advanced solutions for your agents, providing consistent, functional desktop experiences for employees.

The virtual agent hub manages all your customer self-service bots, whether they’re from CXone or other vendors. The agent assist hub streamlines the management of agent assist capabilities—both native (like real-time guidance with next-best-action coaching) or third party (like Google apps). The interactions hub identifies and mitigates compliance violations for every interaction, whether generated via CXone or brought into the platform.

Cake to have and eat

CXone empowers you to have all the advantages of two seemingly impossible options of complete and open—you can truly have your cake and eat it too. On its own, CXone is a complete, connected, intelligent CX AI cloud platform that can deliver on any CX need. It masters and orchestrates 100% of voice and text-based interactions using best-of-breed applications. CXone drives value from day one with Enlighten AI—the world’s first and only AI built specifically for customer experiences—embedded across the platform.

Yet CXone is highly composable and customizable as an open cloud platform. It integrates with any data source or system using generic APIs, pre-built connectors, and custom integrations. NICE CXone provides extensive no-code/low-code tools for your developers to enhance apps to integrate into the open framework. With automation and AI hubs, custom integrations are made easy with tools that simplify integration and administration of advanced solutions. Once these third-party apps and data are brought into the CXone domain, they too generate more CX data and refine the AI insights and analytics of Enlighten AI.

So sit down at the table and enjoy your CXone cake—to have now and enjoy later. Would you like sprinkles on top of your cake slice? Check out our new CXone Mpower—the ultimate CX-Aware AI offering.