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Nice inContact CXone Summer Release Showcases Analytics Strength

This week Nice inContact announced general availability of its CXone Summer 2018 Release. There are three major components to the release:

  • New Options to Support GDPR Compliance -- Interesting, I'm sure, to people who care a lot about security, but I told Nice inContact during our briefing that I didn't need a deep dive on it. If you wish I was offering an in-depth analysis on that, you'll be disappointed.
  • Support for Two New Social Media Channels, Instagram and Viper -- Again, I'm sure there are brands out there that will welcome this feature with open arms, but we've all been a bit burned thinking that social media customer care was going to take off any day now... and we're still waiting. To be fair, Nice inContact said it is the first contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) vendor to support these two social channels (and they don't even appear to be on the laundry list of channels that Twilio Flex will support). Even still, I'll take a wait-and-see attitude with this one.
  • Nice inContact CXone Quality Management Analytics Pro -- For me, this is the big news in this release and I'll dedicate the rest of this post to it. (See related No Jitter coverage from Nemertes analyst Robin Gareiss here.)

When inContact was acquired by NICE and Interactive Intelligence by Genesys in 2016, both were deemed solid plays, but they were different. On the far side of its acquisition, Genesys is working to bring new functionality to three different software platforms using microservices as a unifying theme. For example, the Genesys acquisition of Altocloud brought solid technology and a great (Irish!) artificial intelligence (AI)-proficient team. It was demonstrated first working on the original Genesys platform, PureEngage, and additional work is ongoing to have it work with PureCloud and PureConnect.

In contrast, Nice plus inContact merged two strong, complementary portfolios. While Nice too has its challenges -- e.g., moving a best-in-class premises workforce optimization suite to the cloud -- there is less "retrofitting" work.

CXone Quality Management Analytics Pro is a great example of continuing to grow a solid small and medium contact center platform -- suitable for up to 500 or so agents -- to meet the needs of organizations with thousands of agents.

In its briefing deck, Nice inContact describes how the new CXone QMA Pro fits into a quality management maturity model. Most companies start using Excel spreadsheets or other homegrown tools for quality management (QM), primarily based on agent evaluations. A formal QM solution like CXone QMA provides more automated administration and includes additional features for agent coaching.

CXone QMA Pro is described as allowing companies to link their QM processes to the strategic objectives of the business. Company initiatives can drive which interactions are selected for review, or 100% of interactions can be automatically scored. Nice inContact also defined, under NDA, an even more advanced, next generation QM being built.

CXone WFO Pro can be implemented by both CXone contact center customers and customers of other ACD and contact center platforms -- both cloud and premises-based. This particular attribute should make it an attractive solution for companies that are not quite ready to move off their existing ACDs but want the benefits of enhanced quality management. Nice inContact says that CXone WFO Pro supports integration with over 40 PBX and ACD recording configurations, including Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, ShoreTel and others.

portable

Just as some companies initially choose a hybrid configuration, with contact center in the cloud and a premises-based WFO product, Nice inContact now fully supports the reverse.

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@McGeeSmith

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