2024 is the year of AI, and NICE is leading the way with new capabilities using its purpose-built AI, Enlighten. Last week, NICE announced new CX-specific capabilities and use cases built specifically for agents, supervisors and CX leaders with purpose-built CX AI. NICE is responding to a growing market need for specialized, non-generic AI for CX. This is the next step in a series of groundbreaking CX AI innovations at NICE. NICE launched Enlighten Copilot in the summer of 2023. Copilot is the only AI purpose-built for CX organizations.Barry Cooper, President, CX Division, NICE, said, “The next gen NICE Enlighten Copilot is the industry's leading AI-powered employee assist purpose-built for CX. Built from thousands of models trained on CX-specific interactions, NICE Enlighten Copilot amplifies skilled labor, automating repetitive tasks and delivering faster access to knowledge. In combination with NICE Enlighten Actions, CX leaders can increase decision velocity and realize business goals faster, streamlining operations and ultimately driving exceptional customer experience.”
What does Enlighten Copilot solve?
AI use in the workplace jumped to over 40% in 2023, according to research from Metrigy. Organizations using AI to improve customer interactions reported a 30% reduction in interaction handle time, a 36% increase in sales, and a 29% reduction in agent attrition. Without CX AI, contact center employees and leaders don’t have the time or resources to devote to significantly improving personalization and the overall customer experience. Enlighten bridges the gap, enabling CX organizations to streamline and make operations more efficient.NICE recently announced a major CX AI milestone with Enlighten managing 100 million customer interactions per month. This surge manifests the growing demand that was highlighted in NICE’s 2023 earnings report with 300% year-over-year growth in the number of Enlighten AI deals signed in 2023.
How is Enlighten Copilot for agents and supervisors different?
A lot of the AI we see on the market today is not specifically made for CX. These solutions are trained on the open internet. That means the responses they generate will not be tailored to your brand-specific guidelines and responses. They could be inaccurate or inappropriate. For organizations looking to make their operations more efficient with AI, using generic AI for CX will not accomplish this for them.We’ve seen examples of AI gone wrong across industries recently. An airline’s chatbot promised a customer something the airline normally wouldn’t honor, leading to a court case, a payout and massive amounts of negative press for the airline. A lawyer was reprimanded when he was caught citing multiple fake cases generated by a bot. A car dealership’s bot recommended another brand’s car. These are clear examples of why Enlighten Copilot is the answer for CX organizations looking to do AI the right way.
How does CXone fit in?
CXone’s cloud platform is a key component to the effectiveness of Enlighten Copilot. CXone manages all interactions. This is where Enlighten pulls CX data to train itself. CXone breaks down data siloes and allows information to be shared across an organization. CXone and Enlighten together enable organizations to manage and optimize every interaction and boost employee and customer experience.
Enlighten Copilot capabilities
Turbocharge employees with Enlighten Copilot for Agents
NICE’s Enlighten Copilot for Agents enhances agent-assisted interactions, providing agents with needed, relevant content, eliminating the need for agents to manually search for answers. Real-time context from interactions is combined with content from an organization’s knowledge base to enable Copilot for Agents to deliver behavioral and technical next-best actions.NICE Enlighten Copilot for Agents powers agents to perform at the highest level by:
Monitoring customer sentiment and providing next-best responses to drive positive sentiment: Enlighten Copilot for Agents proactively notifies agents of real-time customer sentiment which is especially helpful when an agent is handling multiple concurrent digital interactions, improving the overall CX and customer lifetime value. This real time sentiment can also help an agent understand which next action is most optimal for the holistic state of the customer during that specific interaction, creating a more personalized experience.
Tracking for compliance and potential upsell opportunities: While listening to the conversation in real time, Enlighten Copilot is using AI to identify potential sales or upsell opportunities, and providing the agent with critical information that they need to know and may want to share with the customer. Enlighten Copilot is also using AI to identify potential regulatory requirements, required disclosures or compliance risks and providing the agent with critical information that they need to know and may need to share with the customer.
Creating a trackable to-do list for agents: Copilot’s Conversation Topics tracks which customer needs have been addressed during the interaction in progress, and which needs are in process. This enables agents to easily see what has been accomplished and what still needs to be resolved to achieve high CSAT or NPS, all while reducing cognitive load for agents. This is especially useful for agents handling multiple concurrent interactions.
Automating processes and handoff between systems seamlessly: Copilot’s Process Steps identifies when the generative content is procedural in nature and converts the available content into a series of discrete steps, each of which can be sent to the customer individually. This enables agents to ensure that customers are successful with each step in the series, providing a better customer experience and increasing the likelihood of resolution.
Generating a real-time summary during every interaction as well as a final summary after every interaction to enable seamless handoff between agents: Enlighten Copilot for Agents automatically generates a final summary after each interaction, drastically reducing wrap-up time for the agent and cutting out the repetitive task of notetaking. Enlighten Copilot also writes a real-time summary of the ongoing interaction so that if a customer is handed off between agents, or if an agent is toggling between multiple concurrent conversations, they can quickly remember or get up to speed on what's been covered so far and quickly take the most optimal action for furthering the interaction, improving the customer experience, reducing agent cognitive load, and speeding up handle time.
Empower supervisors to become strategists with NICE Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors
Analyzing data insights from NICE Enlighten Copilot for Agents, Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors gives supervisors an informed, real-time outlook on agents pinpointing exactly where they should focus to maximize their team’s performance.Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors upgrades supervisors’ abilities by:
Delivering a 360-degree view of agent performance in the moment and over time: Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors gives supervisors a more strategic outlook on their agents, uncovering trends, patterns, and risks to track their teams' performance over time, as well as allows supervisors to proactively inquire for data in a conversational manner, creating a more proactive approach to managing a contact center and empowering supervisors to be strategists.
Providing targeted assistance and real-time alerts with context to help with faster and more personalized assistance: Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors provides targeted assistance every step of the way, guiding the supervisor as they assist their agents, making them more effective. Instead of "spot checking" agents or reactive, post-interaction follow-up, supervisors can now deploy their attention and resources where they are most needed at the exact moment they are needed, both for coaching and improvement work as well as to praise or highlight agents that are excelling. Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors also provides much-needed insights behind the real-time alerts that supervisors receive, giving them additional context and critical background information as to why the alert was prompted, and a summary of the call up to that point to get them up to speed, enabling them to make smarter decisions and provide more targeted assistance to their agents. This removes the "why" from an alert and immediately provides everything a supervisor will need to know to take action without delay or further research.
Enlighten Actions capabilities
Equip CX leaders with Enlighten Actions
Accessing an organization’s CX data from NICE Enlighten Copilot and CXone, NICE Enlighten Actions delivers a conversational interface to generate and respond to what CX leaders need in the moment, with no additional coding required.Actions gives CX leaders 100% visibility into operations to make the most informed decisions by:
Eliminating the time and resources involved with pulling data reports, analysis is automated for instant viewing: Enlighten Actions enables users to access the data they need to manage their business conversationally. Users no longer need to submit their data requests to analysts or chase down a report or status dashboard. They don't need to learn SQL or some other query language. They can simply interact with and interrogate their data using everyday, conversational language. This accelerates the pace by which the business can understand, take action, and meet its goals.
Identify automation opportunities: Enlighten Actions, through the use of KPIs from Enlighten, can help leaders identify areas for automation. Then, leveraging data for Enlighten XO, Actions can identify all the utterances customers make in describing their intent, as well as all of the steps and tasks that must be built into a virtual agent to successfully automate those interactions.
Re-skilling agents, adjusting staffing and initiating workflow changes and automation automatically: Enlighten Actions enables leaders to quickly identify agents who are performing significantly outside of the average on various KPIs, KPIs that may reside across numerous CXone applications. By bringing together data from all CXone applications, leaders get quick visibility into holistic agent performance, can quickly identify agents in need of additional training or performance management and automatically assign them to the appropriate training or coaching activities. Enlighten Actions also integrates with native and third-party applications and data in the CXone suite to automatically initiate workflow and staffing adjustments and automation.
Measure organizational KPIs against industry benchmark data: Enlighten Actions gives CX leaders an industry comparison for individual metrics to ensure standards meet industry benchmarks, generating dashboards and reports for tracking the progress of newly identified KPIs, allowing them to share that industry comparison with their team and have better visibility into where they stack up against the competition and how their standings change over time.
Improving Enlighten Copilot and Enlighten Autopilot with new workflows based on learnings from Actions
The impact of CX AI in 2024
AI has been a top priority for CX stakeholders across every industry in 2024, and the impact of AI-powered employee assistance purpose-built for the most impactful uses cases brands face today cannot be understated.Robin Gareiss, Metrigy CEO and principal analyst,said: “Our research validates NICE’s approach with Enlighten Copilot: Business leaders find significant value in leveraging CX-specific AI to both automate manual functions and augment mission-critical work of employees. Among those already using AI for CX, 66% rely on AI for quality management and 55% to review open-ended feedback from customers. I can’t stress enough the competitive advantage companies will realize by using AI to automate analysis of customer feedback and workflows, as well as elevating supervisors from tactical to strategic roles.”“NICE continues to bring CX AI solutions to market,” said Jim Lundy, Founder and CEO of Aragon Research.“NICE’s Enlighten Copilot, Autopilot and Actions solutions enable CX organizations to improve the experience for all stakeholders including employees, supervisors, CX leaders and customers.” “Harnessing AI technology to improve and upskill the workforce in today’s evolving contact center workplace is a key objective in delivering excellent and consistent CX. NICE recognizes GenAI's potential to help achieve this goal. Its NICE Enlighten Copilot solution provides supervisors with tools and actionable insights (e.g., data visualization dashboards) to manage agents and the overall contact center better, ensuring a consistent CX,” said Valentina Barcia, Best Practices Research Analyst, Frost & Sullivan.“For almost 40 years, NICE has consistently adapted to changes in the market, expanding and enriching its solution portfolio to address customers’ needs and stay at the forefront of the rapidly changing contact center industry. With its steadfast investment in R&D, particularly into advancing its Enlighten AI, coupled with its keen acquisition strategy, NICE is well positioned as an innovation leader, driving next-generation CX a nd EX with market-leading, cutting-edge technologies,” said Nancy Jamison, Senior Industry Director, CX Practice, Frost & Sullivan.
NICE AI awards
NICE has already been recognized for its leadership in AI on a global scale, proving early impact with its CX AI approach.
NICE was named a Leader in the 2024 Aragon Research Globe™ for Conversational AI in the Intelligent Contact Center. Read the full report here.
NICE was recognized for European AI Product Innovation Industry Excellence by Frost & Sullivan. Learn more here.