In today’s market, all contact center vendors have great technology, so it’s getting harder to differentiate on that basis. There will always be vendors who compete on price, but long-term, that’s not a winning strategy. Technology will always be fundamental for contact center vendor success, but for too long, the value proposition has been built around the technology itself. This would be sufficient if solutions were deployed solely for automated forms of customer service, and there was no need to support human agents.
That day could very possibly come, especially once all consumers and all workers are digital natives, and they are entirely comfortable with AI-driven experiences, including customer service. We’re probably another generation away from that time, and until then, humans will remain central, both for experiencing customer service and delivering it. That’s the CX reality in 2022, and for the value of technology to really resonate, the focus must be on its interaction with humans, rather than what the technology itself is capable of.
Branding challenges for vendors with today’s digital-first CX
Contact centers are increasingly technology-driven, and to achieve great CX, agents must be comfortable using today’s technology, and when they interact with customers, the experience needs to measure up to the customer’s digital expectations. As such, digital CX is as much about all the cool things today’s technology can do as it is about how the outcomes make customers feel, and for that matter, agents as well.
In that context, a key factor that distinguishes technology vendors as market leaders is their ability to make an emotional connection with customers and end users. This is particularly challenging in the contact center space, where adoption of cloud and AI – the most current technologies driving CX – has lagged, and the learning curve to become comfortable is still steep.
Not only must contact center vendors somehow create that emotional connection with front line users – agents and supervisors –but ideally extend that across the full value chain. This would include the channel partners who want their customers to embrace these new technologies, along with all the key stakeholders making the buying decisions. With CX becoming a business-level imperative, emotional connections must now extend beyond the realm of IT to also include C-level executives, for whom CX is much more than just improving CSAT scores.
Without going any further, that’s a pretty wide range of people to create emotional connections with, and wearing my marketing strategy hat, I’ve written this post to explain how NICE has effectively done this with its new branding.
How NICE’s branding connects with all contact center stakeholders
The power of branding comes from distilling the essence of both the company and its offerings into a simple, concise message. Considering the range of stakeholders outlined above, this is no easy task, especially when some of these constituents have not traditionally been part of how contact center vendors have gone to market.
From NICE’s perspective, connecting with this broader group is reflected in the thinking behind CXi – their vision to help customers adopt the cloud, become customer-centric, and deliver a digital CX that goes beyond the conventional approach to customer service. Given that this thinking remains well-entrenched – for a variety of reasons – CXi may seem highly aspirational, but the company is in fact, executing on this today.
That’s why the new branding is so important, as this conventional approach is exactly the reason why so many contact centers cannot meet today’s customer expectations. They’re still viewing technology as the solution to the customer service problem set, but CX is more than that, and this is where the emotional connection is so important. Great CX isn’t just about what technologies can do, but also about how everyone along the value chain feels when good outcomes are achieved by using these technologies. Until contact center stakeholders are ready for this broader vision, the pain points will only become greater.
Central to this is the idea that CX is now grounded in all things digital. Today’s customers engage both with your products/services and your brand via digital channels. Aside from using digital channels with the contact center when they have an issue, customers rely on them when visiting your web site, in your stores, on mobile devices, and on social media. The range of touchpoints is now much wider, and that takes CX well beyond the four walls, so to speak, of the contact center. All of these interactions must be connected and filtered through a singular CX, and that can be a radical departure from the status quo that has defined contact centers for so long.
NICE’s CXi ties all this together by looking holistically at the entire customer journey, especially for engaging at the “digital doorstep” - the starting point of the journey. These initial interactions are so critical for understanding customer needs, and with AI-driven analytics, companies can amass rich analytics for agents to have more intelligent, personalized interactions with customers.
Technology-wise, this involves a lot of orchestration to make everything happen seamlessly and in real time; and without breaking down all the moving parts, NICE calls this CXone. While the IT team needs to know what all those moving parts are, and how they interwork with their existing infrastructure, the strategic buyers and contact center leaders really just need to know that NICE can provide all this with one integrated platform, hence the branding name CXone.
Translating this into a branding message
The narrative above is just a bare-bones outline of the challenges faced by contact centers, as well as the components of CXi, and how NICE addresses these challenges with CXone. A key element of the CXi vision is not just enhancing the customer experience, but the agent experience as well. Customers are already empowered by digital technology, and the only way agents can deliver great CX is by empowering agents in the same way. That’s the essence of CXi, and I think NICE’s brand messaging has largely succeeded in conveying that.
Let’s start with the tag line and how it communicates all of this in three simple words that contact center stakeholders will relate to. The first word - “make” - is empowering for all those in the contact center, especially agents, as it means that they are in control to make all these good things happen. NICE is doing all the hard work behind the scenes, but so long as they trust the technology and its implementation, they can now take agency for addressing the customer’s challenges.
The second word in the tag line is “experiences”, and that should resonate with contact center leaders, especially on an emotional level. When CX is better, so will all the associated metrics, including those that C-level management cares the most about. The CXi vision is about pulling data from across the whole organization – not just the contact center – to deliver better experiences, and when that happens, IT leaders will know they made the right buying decision.
For those still steeped in “conventional” customer service - where operational performance and agent-centric KPIs are the most important things - this messaging around “experiences” will not resonate. That’s alright actually, since those types of buyers really aren’t ready yet for NICE and CXi. As their pain points intensify, however, they will have an “aha” moment, at which point they will be more than ready.
Finally, the third tag line word – “flow”. This relates to so much of what CXi is about, especially around all the orchestration required for seamless “experiences”. All contact center leaders want to see their operations work like a well-oiled machine, and that was fairly easy to do when customer service was telephony-centric, and the volume of inquiries was manageable.
Today’s environment is very different, and contact center operations have more chaos than order. Flow is about removing friction from interactions, processes, outcomes, etc., and the less you have of that, the more you want it. NICE clearly understands how important this is, and that’s why “flow” is in italics – so contact center leaders know that NICE knows that. Follow?
A picture is worth a thousand words, but three in particular
To wrap up, let’s now tie this tag line to the image for the full resonance of NICE’s brand messaging. The simple visual should speak volumes to contact center leaders. The two squares and curve show a smiling face, which is what end customers will have when you “make experiences flow”. When the customer smiles, the agent smiles, and with that so will contact centers leaders, C-suite included.
On a more subtle note, the visual implies that the finger pointing at you is making the smile happen. That finger is “your” finger – the contact center leader – when you go with NICE, “you” make those experiences flow between agents and customers, and then just watch as all those smiles happen at both ends of those interactions.
That’s a very empowering message – and by extension, makes a strong emotional connection – so, in the visual, note how the two square eyes in the upper right are the same as the blue squares in the NICE logo in the upper left, connecting the company brand to the outcome.
Not only that, but notice how it’s the index finger being used. Aside from that being the natural digit to use when emphasizing something, it also ties into NICE’s product branding. The “i” in CXi is reflected using the “index” finger, and the “one” in CXone is reflected using the first finger, which is universally used to signify the number “one.”
These references may seem obtuse to some – but intuitive for marketers – and they certainly align with the core messaging NICE is trying to get across with CXi.
