Interview
The Gist
- AI enhances agent performance. Real-time coaching leads to better agent performance and customer satisfaction.
- Agent roles are evolving. The future will see contact center agents becoming AI overseers, where they will manage AI interactions and resolve issues beyond AI’s capabilities, making their roles more complex and valuable.
- Strategic AI adoption drives CX success. Adopting AI strategically within contact centers not only boosts efficiency but also plays a critical role in reducing agent turnover by automating repetitive tasks and improving the overall agent experience.
As a contact center leader, your ability to adapt to new technologies directly impacts your team’s success. In this episode of CMSWire TV's "Beyond the Call," CMSWire Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro explores the transformative power of AI with Barry Cooper, president of NICE’s CX Division, and Thomas Laird, CEO of Expivia.
They discuss how AI is reshaping the role of agents, enhancing real-time coaching and providing the tools needed to meet today’s customer expectations. This discussion provides you with the insights necessary to leverage AI for optimizing agent performance and achieving strategic goals in your contact center.
Table of Contents
- Greetings and Initial Thoughts (0:01)
- Background and Current Roles (2:00)
- AI in NICE and the Industry (4:10)
- Challenges and Early Wins for CX Leaders (7:11)
- Evolution of AI in Contact Centers (9:24)
- Modern KPIs and Their Impact on Agent Experience (12:16)
- Addressing Agent Turnover (16:14)
- The Future of AI in CX (21:00)
- AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement (24:48)
- Final Thoughts on CX and Technology (29:38)
Episode Transcript
Editor's note: This transcript was edited for clarity and brevity.
Dom Nicastro: Hello everybody, Dom Nicastro, Editor-in-Chief here at CMSWire for the latest CMSWire TV show, "Beyond the Call." We're here with two folks. We got a double interview today, our Vegas friends who I saw at the NICE Interactions conference. We won't get into that room and the technical difficulties we had, but alas, we're right here ready to go. Barry Cooper, he's the President of NICE's CX Division, and our fellow interviewee, Thomas Laird, CEO of Expivia. Tom, how you doing? We'll start with you.
Greetings and Initial Thoughts
Thomas Laird: I'm good, Dom, Barry, it’s good to see you guys again.
Dom: Nice, absolutely. Barry, what's going on in your world? How you doing, my friend?
Barry Cooper: Very good to be here. Good to see you guys once again. And yeah, things are great.
Dom: Yeah, awesome. Having fun. Sweet. So let's give the listeners some context. You know, this recording is in July, and we met up in June at the NICE Interactions conference at the beautiful Fontainebleau Hotel in Vegas. We had a great time. And of course, beyond the hoopla and all that is the users of NICE software and the practitioners that are out there, the integrators, the partners like Tom's organization. I was taken aback by the passion that some of these contact center leaders have, these customer service leaders, you know.
Dom: And the big takeaway for me was obviously, a, how is AI infused into technology like NICE, but also the passion for employee experience too, was a big theme. In other words, agent experience, right? How do you empower a multi-thousand seat, you know, contact center agent platform, to just be themselves, do their good work, and want to come back every day. So that was a really good, really good theme for me that I pulled out of there. Before we get into the nuts and bolts, let's start with Barry. Just give a little background about yourself, how you got into the position you're in now, and what you're doing lately.
Related Article: The Importance of Contact Center Agent Well-Being
Background and Current Roles
Barry: Sure, yeah, I've been with NICE for like, more than 13 years or so now. So I'm a lifer, let's say, at NICE. And I right now head up the CX Division at NICE, so responsible for all things CX, which is the vast majority, 80% of what we do at NICE. So based here in Hoboken, despite the accent, I'm actually based in America.
Dom: Sound just like you come straight from Hoboken streets. Real Jersey-ish there. But Tom Laird, you're with us. We met up. We had some great conversations out there in Vegas, you know. And it sounds like your company is doing some exciting things. How did you, how did you get into that role, and what's the latest and greatest?
Thomas: So we've actually been a NICE customer for almost 15 years now. We started as, actually, a startup, right? A startup BPO, which, you know, you don't hear too much of. So we've really grown with the platform, about five, 600 seats on the CXone platform, doing a lot of different things, trying to innovate on that, trying to push, really, the platform to do different things, which I think has been really exciting for us, as we roll out some new tools like Expivia Digital, where we've done, you know, some integrations into Discord and looking at other digital communities, and now starting out with our OttoQA platform, which is an AI startup that, you know, we're utilizing, coming up with our first CXone integration.
So, you know, a lot of really cool things I think we've done on the platform, and it's been, really, a godsend for us, as we've been able to really scale and do some really cool things for customers.
Dom: Nice, real original, Tom, to put an AI platform out there, something new.
Dom: No, but seriously, I mean, you jump in at the right time, obviously, and taking advantage of that. And Barry, I want to keep on that track, because, you know, my takeaways from the keynote at NICE were, you know, let's take AI interventions and implementations to the next level. Let's get better at prompt engineering, and let's not, let's empower the people that are using it first. So give me your sense of, you know, where NICE is going, where the industry is really going with the implementations of AI into software like NICE.
AI in NICE and the Industry
Barry: Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, AI is not new for NICE. So we, we were, you know, we come from a background of having, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of labeled interactions. And back in 2019, 2020, we launched Enlighten, which was the first few models based on those kinds of labeled interactions. They were mostly around agent behaviors and CSAT, that kind of stuff, you know.
So we've been doing this now for—this is our fourth year going full out, full swing on AI. Last year, we were able to integrate and include Gen AI into our AI solutions to give a nice semantic front end, AI making very NICE Copilot, autopilot interfaces, whatever.
But first thing, this is not new for us. So you probably heard at Interactions, you know, we have over 1,500 customers that use our AI now, billions of AI interventions on our platform happening already. So this is good. And so the whole theme of Interactions was CX AI realized because we get a little bit miffed by all of the hype that's out there that's not real. So if you were at Interactions, you heard from many of our customers that have deployed AI for self-service, for knowledge, all that kind of stuff, and achieved great results from that already.
Related Article: NICE Unveils CXone Mpower: A Leap in 'CX-Aware AI'
Barry: So, you know, for us, we're in kind of stage three of our AI adoption. It's very, very exciting for the company. It’s, you know, I created a couple of years ago a separate AI division within NICE, which is now a huge burgeoning division. We have almost every enterprise deal we close now includes AI of some kind, and really, at a really, really high level, our AI solutions focus in really three domains, three personas. First of all is kind of automated intelligence.
So that's AI for the consumer, kind of replacing agents on some of the activities, some of the use cases with bots that actually work, that sound like people, that act like people, that do things very, very efficiently. This is category number one.
Category number two is what we call augmented intelligence. So this is AI for the agents, or for the supervisor or for the administrators that superpower those people, allow them to do things they couldn't do before.
And finally, we have, like, AI for the CX leader. And if you've seen it, Enlighten Actions, that's exactly what that is, a solution that allows CX leaders to query everything using AI, using a generative AI interface, to find out what's going on, get, you know, make skill changes, all that kind of stuff on the fly. So that's really, really high level, kind of the three categories of solutions that we have.
Dom: And Tom, where do you come in with that? Because, you know, Barry mentioned the CX leaders, and that's a huge focus area for us. What are their concerns? The Chief Customer Officer, the VP of Customer Experience, the Contact Center VP. I got to believe you talk to these people all the time. What are their challenges that are leading them to implement something like AI in CX? Like, what's those big early wins for them that they need now?
Challenges and Early Wins for CX Leaders
Thomas: I’m a big fan of what Barry just talked about, kind of that box number two. You know, for us, what I see is really the most mature, and again, I think that first touch point, chatbot, customer-facing technology is evolving. I think it’s there for a lot of different use cases.
But, you know, for a lot of us, I think the most mature tools right now are becoming these agent tools, right? Like, you know, Copilot, which is kind of Agent Assist, right, looking at real-time sentiment that’s happening, where a supervisor can see if a call is going south, right? Those types of things, I think, can really enhance what is happening.
And again, we’ve had these tools, and so many tools have been just customer-facing, where AI is really the first kind of platform or group of technologies that we can really go down the funnel to improve agent experience. You know, if you look at even things like auto-summarization, right, while that can be, you know, kind of a handle time and then kind of just making some things a little bit easier on the KPIs, it’s also making things a lot easier on the agent, right?
No more memoing, no more mistakes when you’re memoing, being able to maybe take a breath instead of working for that 15 seconds or 20 seconds or 30 seconds of after-call work. Even looking at, you know, looking at OttoQA, right, looking at those types of platforms, where before, we would score two calls per agent per week, and if they failed one, that agent was maybe not going to get their bonus.
But now we have the ability to score multiple calls, up to 100% of calls, and that really paints a better picture, I think, for the agent, for that agent experience. But I think, you know, Agent Assist and the Copilot, Enlighten Copilot—those are the tools that really excite me, especially when you have a customer, maybe they’re a toy company, and they have a ton of different SKUs, and you’d have to go into KMS to find out what that red wagon was with the broken wheel and what part that was.
And now to be able to just have that information at your fingertips being popped up—these are the tools that I think agents are starting to be like, Okay, this AI thing is pretty cool, right? It’s not this big, giant, scary monster that’s going to come take everything away, but it’s going to be and have an impact to make my job better, easier, and hopefully it has an impact on customer experience as well.
Related Article: AI in CX: The Shortcut to Customer Satisfaction
Evolution of AI in Contact Centers
Dom: Yeah, Barry, almost a decade and a half at the company, you said, right? With all that history and experience talking to customers that are doing this day to day, this contact center work, this customer support work, can you recall some of those major challenges 13 years ago, when you first started, versus now? Like, what’s on their mind then versus now? It’s got to be fascinating to look back on.
Barry: Everything's changed. It’s like technology. You know, all technology in any industry basically enables people to elevate. So 13 years ago, people were focused on bolting—our customers were focused on bolting things together. They were, you know, deep in the trenches of getting technology to work, to maintain it, all that kind of stuff.
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And you know what we have now, our approach at NICE over the last 13 years is to come to the market with, first of all, a platform, so a single platform that covers all the different applications that you need in CX, from, you know, the digital entry points, you know, through to mobile apps, through to bots, through to IVR agent experience, supervisor experience, attended, unattended, digital voice, synchronous, asynchronous, all in one place.
So immediately, by coming to the market with a platform, those customers are no longer in the trenches trying to integrate all this stuff together. We’ve done it already for them.
Barry: The second thing is that we did is to converge all of those solutions together on a single platform, so they all interplay with each other. Again, that allows our customers to elevate. You know, they’re not trying to line up processes between two different solutions from different vendors. It’s already kind of done.
You know, you coach in CXone, you set a coaching session in CXone, either an attended coaching session or an AI-driven coaching session. It can automatically go into the workforce management schedule for that agent. There’s no kind of, you know, the customer relates above that. And then the third piece, of course, is AI. And AI is allowing our customers to elevate even further.
And Tom gave a great example than it used to be that, you know, QA was a very manual process where QA managers would go in and touch maybe a half a percent of the calls that were going on. You know, an agent would always complain, saying, “Well, you rated me on the one call I did poorly on, you know, what about all the ones I did great on?”
Now, Enlighten AI is evaluating every single interaction. When it finds a behavior the agent's not doing quite right, it will send that agent an example of another agent demonstrating that particular behavior on the same queue really, really well. So it lets everyone elevate.
So I’d summarize, Dom, and say that, you know, you compare where we are today to 13 years ago, and all of our customers are out of the trenches, and they’re thinking strategically of how to, you know, grow CX and do a better job of it, rather than how to, you know, nuts and bolts, everything together.
Related Article: No More Hold Music? AI in the Contact Center Is Here
Modern KPIs and Their Impact on Agent Experience
Dom: Tom, are we doing a good job as an industry here with the KPIs that Barry was talking about, you know? Because to me, it’s like I’ve had a 27-minute interaction with the contact center that was positive, you know. And if you’re looking at the raw KPIs of resolution time, like, no, 27 minutes doesn’t seem good, does it?
But where are we with the KPIs and measuring these agents? Because that’s such a big part of the job, as Barry brought up, and it probably leads to a lot of turnover if you’ve got some really unfair ones.
Thomas: I’ve spoken a lot about this, and I don’t know, maybe I’m a crazy advocate on it, but once analytics came out, right, and we could then look at sentiment, right? I saw a direct correlation with sentiment scores compared to CSAT and NPS, right.
So like even in our contact center, right, we incentivize our agents off of interaction analytics and off of customer and agent sentiment, right? So we’re proving that our agents, you know, are using proper word choices.
And I think that there’s, there’s two levels of KPIs, right? There’s efficiency KPIs, which normally we would stop at, right, average handle time, SLAs, right? Those, those types of metrics which are important from an efficiency, from a working standpoint, right, especially if I BPO, I’m an outsourcer, right? We, we have to have those metrics within a certain level, but then we would kind of stop at quality metrics. Maybe we’d have scores. That’s about it. Maybe we do some after-call surveys.
But now we’re starting to get into real-time, right, really understanding what is happening on calls from, again, like we talked about with, with real-time agent sentiment, with looking at at what is happening as an intent and an outcome during, during interactions. And I think that’s the biggest change. Instead of looking the day after on a sheet of what your skills were in your KPIs for those metrics, you know, to really dig deeper. I think it’s really cool when we talk about OttoQA before, when you looked at QA, you kind of look at keywords, and you look at more that analytic-driven keyword bubbles, where now with you can look at that intent, you can look at these outcomes.
You can train agents on a deeper level, because with AI, you can score at a deeper level. And I think that we’re starting to evolve that and think that through as an industry. I post a ton about that all the time as we’re kind of thinking about, how do we evolve those metrics to make it more customer experience and actually make a difference? Because with all this technology throughout the years, we’ve still seen customer experiences kind of gone down, and I think this is our first real opportunity to change that and have things go up with the two that we have if we can kind of think that through the right way.
Barry: I’d add to what Tom said, and sorry to interrupt Dom, but it’s really important—like that real-time sentiment. It used to be that people coached to sentiment. Now, you know, customers of NICE are coaching to the behaviors that drive sentiment. So, you know, the behaviors, things like, you know, active listening or effective questioning that goes on.
And so in real time, you know, Enlighten Copilot is actually telling the agent, “Look, you’re not listening. You need to pause and listen to the customer.” And that, you know, it’s not telling them the sentiment is going down, it’s telling them the reason the sentiment is going down, and giving them advice on how to behave differently to drive the sentiment up. So we’re coaching in real time to the behaviors, not just to the outcome, which I think is incredible.
Thomas: Can I just add one more quick thing on that? Like, so many times, right, I’ve seen QA forms with our customers that say things like, you have to say the customer’s name four times in the first 60 seconds, right? Like, that’s kind of insane now, right? You don’t have to do that. You don’t need that. And, and it’s kind of, as an industry, talking through to maybe, you know, other CX leaders that say, “Hey guys, the tools are there that we can see the outcome of that without having to do these kinds of manual processes that we didn’t know how to score before.”
Dom: I get a little uncomfortable if someone says my name four times in a minute, right? “Well, Dom, we know this stuff. Hi, Dom, thank you, Dom, yeah Dom, I’m gonna help you out here.” I’m like, we’re not friends. Let’s get that straight right off the bat. We’re not friends. We gotta solve a problem here.
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Addressing Agent Turnover
Dom: But, yeah, going back to Barry. I mean, you know, I heard at the NICE Interactions conference, a lot of concerns about agent turnover. It’s just still an issue, you know, with the advancements of technology, with AI, you know, what’s the big problem here, that we’re still seeing high turnover rates in some instances, and how do we address that? Like, you know, it’s, it’s a constant concern, according to those folks that I caught up with.
Barry: There are some organizations that still are experiencing that kind of agent burnout, let’s say. You know, I think there’s different, there’s a few factors at play here.
So first of all, some of that turnover is kind of post-COVID and a lot of work from home. So it used to be the top-performing agent, you know, who was working from an office. They could only work for the two or three companies that lived in that area.
Now, agents are working hybrid. The top agents are available to any company in the world. So we do see, and I talked to a few kind of heads of contact centers and a few leaders for our customers, that retaining top talent is more difficult in the remote world because they can work for any company in the world. This is one factor.
I think another factor is, and many organizations come to us asking us to help fix this for them, is they have agents doing a whole bunch of boring, repetitive, low-value work that really should be automated. And so quite often we’ll come in with Enlighten Autopilot, and we’ll go in there and automate a whole bunch of stuff. Take that kind of the bot containment from like 2% to sometimes 50, 60, 70% which means all that really boring kind of password reset or checking your balance type stuff is taken away, leaving the agents to do much more interesting work as well. And we’ve seen in some of those customer cases, you know, not just massive efficiency gains for organizations, but also increase in agent retention, because agents are now doing more interesting work as well.
Barry: I think the third thing is getting the right resources and training to agents also. And so by having things like Copilot and having kind of like what Tom was talking about before, behavior-based training, you know, increasingly agents are getting the right tools that make them feel like they can do their jobs better. And so, like I say often, we’re brought into an organization, not only to drive efficiency, but also to increase kind of the agent experience, to drive retention, because top talent is available to anyone in the world.
Dom: Yeah, yeah. Behavior training. Tom, is there, you know, is there an effort you think that needs to be, that needs to happen, to move towards more, “This is how you interact with another human being,” like, if you’re, if you’re training an agent, versus “You need to know every product spec of the company,” and focus in the training there. Like, what’s the balance with training on the company, but training on also just how to be a good human being and converse with another human being?
Thomas: We’re in a weird spot as an industry, because I think when I look out at where even my company will be in, say, three to five years, we’ve turned from a contact center outsourcer that supplies agents to answer calls, so now really a CX technology partner that specializes in contact center outsourcing, right?
Meaning, I think that the contact center associate that now is maybe that entry-level person is about to become one of the most high-valued employees in your organization, because they’re not going to handle that stuff. As to Barry’s point, AI is going to take 30, 40% of all the tasks away, and it’s going to leave us with these really difficult tasks that maybe 10 years from now, it starts to take care of.
But right now, I think that there’s, we’re trying to figure out what that line is, and as in, technology is just going so fast, right? Sometimes it can be hard to figure out really where that is at the same point. Like, we do have to do that. We in our initial education, even how to talk, right? Like, there’s different, everybody texts now. Like, if we have younger employees that are 20, 30 years old, right, they’ve grown up with a cell phone their whole life, they’re texting more than they’re talking.
So you do have to do a lot of that. From a contact center agent standpoint, I think AI is trying to help with that a little bit as well. But again, I think we’re in a bridge point right now that if we have this conversation in a couple years, I think you’re going to see that contact center agent position elevated, much higher pay, doing much more difficult tasks because of what’s happening on the AI standpoint.
Related Article: AI in Contact Centers: Leveraging Lessons From the Past
The Future of AI in CX
Barry: 100% agree with Tom. But one thing I want to reiterate here, and at Interactions, we showed something from our labs. And the really interesting thing is, today we talk about Enlighten being the Copilot to the agent. You know, pretty soon the agent’s going to be the Copilot for Enlighten.
And that is, you know, the bots are going to be handling a lot of the interactions, but every now and again, a bot’s going to run into trouble, and the bot’s going to put its hand up, and it’s going to be the agent that gets in there and helps the bot out, you know, kind of.
So it’s this role reversal that we see is going to happen over the next few years or so. So we’re creating solutions that are actually going to enable that. So I truly believe that, you know, come three, four, five years from now, the role of an agent is going to be turned on its head, and they’ll be overseeing kind of all these AI bots doing different things. And it’s going to be a very, very interesting future.
Thomas: One of the things too, maybe not to take over, but ask you a quick question that I thought, I just want to make sure that I have the name. Wait, it was re-prompting, right, which I thought was extremely cool.
Barry: Reverse prompting. We have it today in Copilot. So, you know, basically, reverse prompting is where an AI runs into trouble or gives a solution which isn’t quite right, and it provides the agent or the human the ability to tweak that and say, “Look, this was quite good, but you need to do this, this, and this next time in natural language.” And the AI takes that on. And the next time that Copilot makes a similar suggestion, it will take on board the suggestion that came from the agent. We call that reverse prompting.
Dom: Yeah. Well, it has to figure out what to learn, how to learn, but yeah, I did take that away too, Tom, from the keynotes at NICE, that reverse prompting, you know, kind of putting the power in the hands of the—it’s kind of like a dual coaching session. Yeah, right? They’re coaching each other. The agent is coaching the bot, and the bot’s coaching the agent. So I think that can work really nicely.
Barry: This is something that’s only really possible because the way you have a platform that both the, you know, the augmented intelligence, and the automated intelligence, the humans and the bots are on the same platform. If they’re on separate solutions, there’s no way they can interact like this. The benefits of having a platform for CX.
Dom: Tom, I gotta hold you to something you said about two years from now, you’re going to see agents with great paying jobs. Now I’m going to spread that all over the world to all these agents as “Thomas Laird says you’re all getting a raise.”
Thomas: That’s right, but, but, but for real though. I mean, that’s, I think that’s kind of a bold statement. I mean, these are traditionally low-paying jobs. So what’s going to change to make these jobs high-paying?
Thomas: I think the expertise of what they’re gonna have to have, right? Again, we’re gonna have the AI tools from an Agent Assist at a different level. But again, these, these menial tasks, I mean, they’ve been going away, right? Password resets, if we’re still doing, if you’re still doing password resets, then call me, right? Let me help you automate that.
But, but there’s still a lot of organizations that are doing that, right? So all of those tasks are evolving. And as AI keeps getting better and better and better, integrations keep getting better and better, people start to figure out, “I need a KMS that’s really good, right?” And more companies start to build on what the building blocks are.
We’re going to start to see more of that. So, you know, the agent will become really the expert, right, from a really difficult standpoint of what’s happening. And I think they’re going to be experts in a lot of different aspects because of what I think, what the pay will be, what their tasks are going to be asked to be. And again, to Barry’s point, I think they will be almost like an AI, I don’t know, buddy, right? Like they’re going to be together working through a lot of those tasks. And I think that skill is going to be really sought after.
AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement
Dom: Yeah, it’s like an intern. AI can be just a good intern, you know. It’s, well, it’s almost like I clap an editorial in my world. I say, Yeah, of course, I use AI. But I’m having it, you know, dissect my own content. I’m not just saying, “Create an article for me,” you know. Right? I’m saying, “Take this interview that we’re having with Tom and Barry and give me five takeaways.” That’s the power. Am I double checking it? Sure, because I guess you with the intern. That’s what you say with the intern, right? Like, “Hey, have him do that, but check after.” You know.
So let’s close this up, because it’s been such a fascinating conversation. Let’s think future talk. You know, future things. Barry, what excites you about the future of technology in this space, but also, just as a CX leader like yourself? I mean, you’re talking to CX leaders all the time. You just mentioned, you know, a contact center head at a big organization. So, you know, what’s exciting for those kinds of folks, you and also with the technology part of it, you know?
Barry: If anyone’s listening to this, you’re probably in the CX space, and CX has never been as important as it is today. You know, we like to say that CX is no longer just part of the business. CX is the business now in so many industries. You know, many industries become commoditized, and the products, there’s only so much you can do with pricing, and many of the products become the same.
So the only way that organizations can differentiate themselves and win new customers is CX. And you see how hot the space is right now, the amount of dollars being invested, our growth, you know, we’re double-digit growth now for years and years and years. You know, we’ve come from being a half a billion-dollar company just a few years ago to approaching $3 billion now, you know.
So just the amount of investment, the amount of excitement. What I love is what the, you know, I get to look at some of the lab stuff we’re doing that’s maybe two or three years away. That stuff is incredible, guys. It’s going to be game-changing when it comes, you know. So it’s, you know, anyone loves to be at the forefront of revolutions? This is a revolution in CX. The amount being invested is huge, and the space is going to transform, because CX is so important.
Dom: Let’s give your PR folks at NICE some anxiety. Barry, what’s coming out in two or three years?
Barry: Well, no one gets anxiety about that. But you know that the example I gave before, and (NICE CEO) Barak showed that on stage as well. But the, you know, the human overseer of the different AI bots, and the human Copilot to the AI bots, is the kind of thing we’re having, the extension of kind of what we call actions, into all aspects of CX. Everything that touches CX, these kinds of things, you know, CX reaches out way beyond CX, into systems of records, into workflows, into fulfillment. These are the kinds of things you can expect from us. And, of course, AI throughout the most complete platform that exists on the planet. So it’s, it’s, it’s great times.
Dom: And Tom, what’s exciting for you, except for, you know, applying for jobs as a contact center agent, because you said they’re getting such big bank?
Thomas: We’ve been using the phrase here, you know, “just happens,” right? And I think with AI, we’re looking for things, and customers are looking for things just to happen, right? Without having a human being there. And we’ve been kind of using it as a tagline, right?
So QA, we just want QA to happen, right? We don’t, we don’t want to have to go in there and do specific things. Self-service. I think I’m a huge analytics person. It’s been one of the biggest drivers of our business, not just from a cultural aspect, but even from a monetary aspect, with other customers, being able to really dissect and give marketing data, right? Where nobody thought that that could happen.
So, like, Enlighten Actions, for me, is like, “How?” Right? It’s like, you know, I don’t want to look at dashboards anymore, right? I want to ask specific questions and get those answers. And I think that’s the stuff that’s really cool, that’s really exciting, that, you know, you don’t have to be that giant, smart, PhD analyst, right, to do analytics, to get really deep insights into what’s happening.
So the customer experience is—I don’t want to say it’s going to take care of itself, but, you know, we’re working on that. The agent experience is being worked on, and I think also this analytic piece, right, of really digging deep into data, because now it’s not just, it’s not just CCAs or telephony data, but it’s your sales data, it’s your marketing data. It’s having all these different data sources together, and how do we really utilize that as a business-changing opportunity, instead of, again, that’s where the contact center really starts to take off as a driver of business, instead of just that, the thing that answers the painful calls from customers.
Final Thoughts on CX and Technology
Dom: Yeah, I agree, Barry and Tom, I agree with the take, Barry, of CX being so important now, because when you talk about a company to your family, do you talk about the product itself? No, you talk about how you were treated, you know, on a phone call with an agent. That’s what’s memorable. It’s good. I like that. You know what I mean? Because it’s never like, “Look at my phone, it’s so amazing.” It’s always like, “No, they took, it took 30 minutes to answer a question about my app.” You know. So I totally get that.
Gentlemen, this has been great. I enjoyed meeting you out there in Vegas and Barry, I enjoyed meeting so many customers who were just so passionate about the work they do. I love it. I mean, you’ve had—you have people like that have been 20 years in a contact center, and they—a lot of the fun things for me was that they started as agents, and now they’re leading the ship. And that evolution is cool to see.
Barry: It’s very strange. Many of the leaders, many of the very senior executives we deal with, started life as an agent.
Dom: Yeah, yeah, and I can only get—it’s like having a coach in the NBA that’s a player, right? You like that. But Barry Cooper, President of NICE’s CX Division, and Thomas Laird, CEO of Expivia and OttoQA, thanks for joining us on “Beyond the Call.” Looking forward to many conversations down the road.
Thomas: Thanks, Dom, appreciate it.
Barry: Have a good one.
