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One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is to change jobs. My old job was great, the company was successful, the people were fantastic – but sometimes you need to make a change to challenge yourself. When I sat with my now boss and talked about my future, it was really clear that NICE had a lot to offer. I talked it through with my wife over a glass (bottle) of wine, and after tucking my baby girl into bed I decided to make the change.

When it comes to a contact center queue, the reality is that wait times need to be brought to a minimum to truly satisfy customer expectations. By maximizing self-serve in the customer journey, reducing customer effort with IVR optimization, and using analytics and Quality Management in the contact center, it is possible to find out where wait times are causing negative sentiment and the call reasons causing higher volumes and thus longer wait times. Additionally, using predictive behavioral routing can make conversations more productive when they do get through the queue, to hopefully mollify heightened emotions. But moreover, the goal should be to create personalized customer experiences that delight customers, so that queue times are left far behind in the customer's mind.

A contact center research commentary co-authored by Paul Stockford and Abby Monaco

Organisations are now recognising they have a gap between the service customers expect and the service they can deliver. To close this gap, companies are searching for a single unified Customer Experience (CX) platform that includes the industry's most complete and best-of-breed CX applications to deliver:

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.

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.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a winner is defined as one that is successful, especially through praiseworthy ability and hard. At NICE, we define winners as those who take customer service excellence and innovation to the next level.