NICE seems to have found the perfect contact center M&A jewel for 2013.
Recording giant NICE Systems announced this week the acquisition of Causata, a 4-year-old, 40-person firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. Causata is described in the press release as "a leading provider of Customer Experience Management (CXM) software. Built on an HBase big data architecture, the company's predictive analytics and real-time omni-channel offer management applications that enable B2C companies to create meaningful customer experiences through data."
There are a lot of buzz words in that description, but they are buzz words that are at the core of the technology that contact centers most believe can positively impact them in 2013. As reported by Dimension Data in their survey of several hundred centers globally, improved analytics is the number one innovation area that respondents believe can benefit their contact center. That makes analytics a big positive check mark as an investment area for any contact center company this year.
Next is "big data." Big data has been a hot buzz term for about a year, and the contact center has latched onto it in a big way. NICE competitor Calabrio was the first company I spoke to that put a big data spin on the goldmine that is the unstructured data of contact center recorded calls. There is perhaps no better proof point for the value that analysis of big data can bring to a business.
Predictive is another word getting its share of attention in 2013. The notion of using analytics to understand things that happened in the past is interesting. Using big data to predict what a customer will do next, and create a custom offer at the perfect moment of truth--that is compelling.
Omni-channel is another term of art that began popping up in 2013. Omni-channel tries to connote creating seamless, unified channel interactions for the customer. You might think, isn't that what multi-channel was supposed to mean? The difference between the two is that in reality multi-channel often means a customer being able to use different channels (e.g., email, web chat, SMS) but those solutions are operated as silos. Omni-channel can be thought as the next logical step--ensuring that each channel has knowledge of the customer interactions that may have occurred in other channels.
Finally, let's look at "customer experience management." Avaya is probably the best example of a contact center solution vendor that has latched on to customer experience as the best term to use in marketing their solutions. They even published a book on the topic this summer, a 200-page anthology of articles written by the best and brightest in the contact center world.
Net-net, NICE has found a company that four years ago was smart enough to understand an unmet need in the market. That was no accident, as the company's founders have deep domain expertise in CRM, big data, machine learning and digital marketing. With a history of success with 10 major customers and 30 employees in research and development, NICE seems to have found the perfect contact center M&A jewel for 2013. (Did I mention it works in the cloud or as CPE?)
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