How a focus on soft skills empowers agents and boosts CX

In today’s fast-paced contact center, success isn’t defined solely by how quickly calls are resolved or the number of escalations avoided. The human element—specifically the soft skills agents bring to each customer interaction—plays a crucial role in creating a positive customer experience. However, soft skills like empathy, active listening, and rapport building are often overlooked or are not measured effectively because they are subjective. Highly manual QA processes compound the challenge—making it difficult to gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey and drive advancements in quality and sales.

With the right tools, organizations like Open Network Exchange (ONE) can analyze and coach these soft skill behaviors systematically, improving outcomes for agents as well as customers. By leveraging NiCE’s Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Enlighten AI for Sales Effectiveness, and Interaction Analytics AutoDiscovery, ONE automated the analysis of customer interactions, gaining a deeper understanding of agent behaviors and customer sentiment. These AI-enabled solutions offered an objective, data-driven approach to coaching agents on soft skills, which have enabled ONE to consistently deliver a high-quality customer experience.

How ONE transformed agent coaching and CX

Before implementing NiCE, travel solutions provider ONE struggled with a manual quality assurance process that evaluated just a small fraction of interactions. This limited the company’s understanding of its customer journey and agent effectiveness.

With Enlighten AI for CSAT, ONE gained the ability to measure nine critical soft skill behaviors that directly influence customer satisfaction. From active listening to building rapport, Enlighten AI gave supervisors actionable insights, allowing them to coach agents based on their actual performance rather than deliver subjective evaluations based on a few randomly chosen calls.

The shift to data-driven coaching delivered immediate results. Supervisors could monitor 100% of customer interactions and quickly identify areas for improvement. Instead of waiting for QA to evaluate a few calls, agents received immediate feedback on how they could improve. With objective insights, agents saw the system as fair and supportive, rather than punitive.

When ONE implemented Enlighten AI for Sales Effectiveness, it realized similar benefits quickly. ONE discovered that agents who demonstrated strong rapport-building skills were more likely to close sales and improve cross-selling outcomes. By focusing on these specific behaviors, ONE was able to increase upsell opportunities while maintaining a positive customer experience.

ONE also gained the ability to analyze customer interactions more holistically with AutoDiscovery. Insights into customer language patterns and emerging trends in customer inquiries enabled ONE to proactively address common issues and improve both agent coaching and the overall customer journey. By understanding why customers were reaching out and the language they used, ONE was able to adjust its agent scripts and self-service options to better align with customer expectations. This not only improved the overall customer journey but also helped reduce call volume and escalations by providing agents with the insights they needed to improve.

Results: Measurable improvements in coaching and customer satisfaction

The results of implementing NiCE Enlighten AI and AutoDiscovery at ONE were profound. By focusing on soft skills and automating the quality assurance process, the company realized a wide range of benefits:

• Analyzed 100% of customer interactions for soft skills
• Achieved a 12% reduction in coaching time, saving more than 23,000 hours annually and allowing supervisors to spend more time on higher-value initiatives
• Decreased escalations by 20% by better equipping agents to handle issues on the first call
• Significantly improved CSAT with data-driven coaching

With these solutions, ONE not only improved efficiency but also created a workplace where agents felt more supported and empowered. By aligning agent behaviors with customer expectations through soft skills, the company transformed its approach to customer service and sales—setting a new standard for CX excellence in the travel industry.

ONE’s experience with NiCE Enlighten AI and AutoDiscovery showcases the benefits of focusing on agent soft skills to turn subjective behaviors into measurable data that can drive real business outcomes. Read the case study or watch the on-demand Why AI-Powered Analytics Enables Companies to Cruise Ahead in CX webinar to learn more about how ONE improved CX with NiCE.