Case Study: Open Network Exchange

Open Network Exchange (ONE), a leader in the travel and loyalty sector, has elevated its customer experience strategy by deploying an integrated suite of NiCE solutions. Facing the challenge of reducing costly live-agent interactions for payment processing, ONE leveraged NiCE’s AI-powered CXone platform to drive a seamless, automated customer experience. By combining natural language understanding, omnichannel routing, and workforce management tools, the company reduced not only operational costs but also increased agentless payment processing by 252%, setting a new benchmark for customer experience innovation.

01 Before

Complexity and Costs of Live-Agent Payments

Prior to NiCE, Open Network Exchange relied heavily on live agents to manage payments, resulting in 30- 40% of service calls focused on payment issues alone. With an average handle time of 15-21 minutes per call, the costs quickly escalated, draining resources that could have been deployed more strategically. Digital self-service channels existed, but gaps in user adoption and system limitations meant customers still heavily leaned on voice support.

“It was clear we were spending too much time and money on something that should be seamless and self-service,” said Ryan Romero, Senior Vice President of Global Technology Strategy and Innovation at ONE.

02 Desire to change

Driving Customers to Self-Service Through AI Innovation

Recognizing the urgent need to cut costs while maintaining a premium guest experience, ONE sought to shift more customer interactions to self-service. The goal was to create an intelligent, conversational IVR experience that could handle complex payment flows securely and seamlessly.

Key to this vision was leveraging NiCE’s AI capabilities to understand customers naturally and anticipate their needs. ONE needed a platform that could handle authentication, secure payments, and adapt dynamically to customer inputs, accents, and behaviors without human intervention.

03 NiCE solution

AI, Automation, and Deep System Tuning

ONE deployed a blend of NiCE solutions from the CXone platform, including Omnichannel Routing, Interaction Analytics, Quality Management, IEX Workforce Management, and more. The team used Autopilot to build an agentless conversational IVR using NLU, trained the system with real customer interactions, and finetuned elements like response timing, speech-to-text translation, and accent recognition.

This entire strategy was born from insights surfaced by CXone XO, which revealed a startling volume of support calls centered on payment issues.

“XO showed us that 30 to 40% of our calls were payment-related, which was the lightbulb moment,” Romero explained. “It helped us see exactly where to focus our automation efforts first.”

By surfacing intent and sentiment data, XO enabled ONE to target a specific, high-impact use case where conversational AI could immediately improve efficiency and customer experience. Key challenges like misinterpreted alphanumeric booking numbers and payment authentications were resolved by calibrating STT models and adjusting for older demographic speaking patterns.

“We learned a lot from listening to how our customers speak, how they pause, even how they pronounce letters and numbers,” Romero explained.

The implementation also integrated omnichannel routing to adapt to user behavior across phone and digital channels, while real-time analytics helped the team identify and fix system drop-offs. WFM provided the ability to align staff schedules with peak call times and adjust support coverage more dynamically.

“These details sound small, but they made a huge impact on success rates,” Romero said. “And by having a conversational IVR that actually reflects how our customers talk, we made automation feel less robotic and more helpful.”

“Reducing payment-related call volume by 10% while doubling autonomous transactions has transformed our business. With NiCE, we ’re not just automating our services—we’re redefining the customer experience.”

RYAN ROMERO

Senior Vice President
Global Technology Strategy & Innovation
Open Network Exchange

04 Results

Massive Operational Impact and Customer Adoption

Through this transformation, ONE achieved a 252% increase in agentless payments from 2023 to 2024 and expects to surpass $65 million in the facilitation of secure autonomous transactions in 2025. Opt-out rates for live-agent transfers dropped from 60% to just 7-8%, with customers becoming increasingly comfortable with automation.

“Once customers try the automated flow, they tend to stick with it,” Romero noted.

The streamlined payment process also reduced the originating department’s volume by nearly 10%, equivalent to saving the workload of about 78 agents globally. Agents, relieved from mundane payment calls, are now better positioned to focus on upselling and delivering value-driven interactions.

05 Future

Predictive, Personalized Service at Scale

Moving forward, ONE plans to further enhance CX by integrating predictive AI capabilities. The vision is to authenticate customers instantly and anticipate their needs based on historical data, offering a hyper-personalized experience from the first interaction. Solutions like CXone Autopilot and CXone Copilot are being considered to support real-time agent assistance, ensuring even deeper, proactive engagement. As AI capabilities continue to evolve, ONE aims to lead the next wave of CX innovation in the travel sector.