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My favorite part of NiCE’s annual Interactions event is the customers. My teammates and I work hard to make sure each and every attendee walks away with ideas, fulfillment, and smiles. When we finally arrive, and Interactions has its first evening happy hour, I’m always enthusiastically thinking how the hard work was so worth it! Each year I walk away with a richer understanding of what our customers want from us, and with a greater wisdom for how I can better serve both my company and our customers going forward.

Measurement provides a standard for how we understand the world. From weight, temperature, length, value and even time we rely on many forms of measurement in our daily lives. Measurement helps us get to work on time, bake the perfect cake for a special someone, ensure our finances are in order, and score our favorite game. Without measurement, we would have no way of knowing if something was right or wrong, fair or unfair, early or late, making progress or… you get the point! Measurement has become absolutely critical to compare and define progress.

Your customers are talking. Are you listening? Many of them speak volumes about their experiences with you but deny your requests to give formal opinions. They provide critical feedback about your brand, but they don’t want to talk to you about it. These customers are known as your “silent majority.” You won’t hear from them directly through traditional methods such as phone and online surveys. While sentiment scoring captures valuable interactions with live customer agents, the majority remains silent. They express the joy and pain of doing business with you through their journeys. However, they still fully expect for you to hear and respond to what they are experiencing. They are a majority. Are you listening?

In late April, NiCE convened Interactions 2019 and all roads to secure and convenient customer emanated from three foundational elements: “The Cloud, Analytics, ‘Digital & AI’ and Automation.” For more detail on the event see this post. Of these major components, the speech analytics resources developed by NiCE Nexidia, which was acquired three years ago, were of special interest to me, especially as I home into how analytics is being elegantly integrated with the company’s internally-developed, market leading voice-based identification and authentication capabilities.

My first introduction to the concept of speech analytics occurred with an on-site visit by a vendor about 12 years ago, when at a prior employer I was a user of digital recording primarily for QA purposes.  I’ll honestly admit that my initial impression and lingering thoughts following the meeting were something along these lines: “That seems pretty cool, but it’s an awful lot of money to just detect a couple of words in the calls.” and “How could this technology possibly help us?  We have monitoring teams in place who collect a bunch of data for us already, so what’s the big deal?”

Whether you’re addressing a room full of people or talking to somebody one-on-one, making a presentation can be a stressful experience as it is, and the behavior of your audience can throw you off your game completely, if you don’t know how to correctly interpret it.

The global contact center industry is standing on the cusp of a new era in the customer experience, bringing with it changes to the contact center industry that are unprecedented. The primary drivers behind these expected changes are the preferences, expectations, and demands of the next generation of customers; the Millennials and Generation Z.