FAQ

A new software category introduced by Gartner called Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) refers to the suite of products that helps companies manage and improve employee engagement.

The primary areas of focus for WEM include:

-Onboarding and recruitment

-Quality evaluation and improvement

-Time management

-Task management

-Employee recognition

-Voice of the Employee surveys

In the context of NICE CXone software, these items are included in the categories of Workforce Optimization and Customer Analytics.

Learn more about WEM.

A chat bot is designed to interact with a customer over text and would offer self -help before requesting a live agent for assistance. NICE CXone provide chatbot interactions for text based channels/contact that route using Studio. This is currently done though partners.

Learn more about a chat bot.

Call centers and contact centers are both focused around providing interactions for customers. The primary difference between the two are the modes of interaction. Call Centers are focused on taking inbound and/or placing outbound phone calls to their clients. Contact Centers employ a broader range of options to communicate with their clients, including (but not limited to) phone calls, chat, SMS (text), e-mail, social media, and other self-service channels. While a call center agent may be able to take calls for a variety of skills, they are typically limited to one call at a time. A contact center agent may have the capacity to handle a phone call, two chats, an SMS, and three e-mails at the same time - making them a much more utilized employee!

Learn more about the difference between a call center and a contact center.

With the rise of messaging and social networks, digital engagement couldn't be more important. With over 90% of Millennials and 77% of Generation X using social messaging services today, there is a paradigm shift of how these generations prefer to communicate given the ease of use and expansive adoption not only by individuals and businesses alike. Customers are increasingly turning to ways to engage with companies in a messaging environment and often asynchronously. Consumers are increasingly on the go and connected to mobile devices and as such, require channels that offer flexibility to service their needs. CXone helps you fully engage your contact center agents with the ability to provide world class service with contextual, intelligence across the digital interactions to best service customers on their preferred method of communication.

Learn more about interaction channels.

In an age where consumers of all stripes are informed, smart and have limitless options; companies are now looking to differentiate themselves on delivering an exceptional user experience to stand out above competitors. We live in a largely digital, experience-driven economy. So finding ways to create meaningful experiences for customers is the new currency for success. What made companies successful 10 years ago will not make them successful for the next 10 years. Adopting new ways to create a frictionless customer experience where customers engage your business on the channels of their choice and enjoy a personalized experience will reward companies with their loyalty, advocacy and business.

Learn more about customer experience.

Speech Analytics is the process of using recorded calls to gather information about the terms and phrases being used in a conversation for both the agent and customer. These terms and phrases identified can be used in many ways to categorize interactions in a meaningful way, and used to identify ways to improve processes, procedures, customer retention, etc.

Learn more about speech analytics.

We detect the specific issues that can drive problematic interactions – broken promises, process inefficiencies, product issues, highly negative statements, and so forth can produce customer irritation. That's the linguistic rules. We then use machine learning to see whether the type and number of issues exceeds as business-as-usual level of negativity that we expect when people call contact centers, because callers usually are reaching out because something has gone wrong somewhere along the line or they have a problem they can't solve by themselves.

Learn more about reporting analytics.

Interaction Analytics Pro uses speech recognition to find the terms and phrases in context of the conversation to detect what agents and customers are talking about. Top occurring keywords, phrases, and entities are surfaced in IA Pro in many ways. A trending category of “Sound Quality” could emerge if several calls are being analyzed and found interactions where a spike in speech has been detected around categories that match speech about “can’t hear” or “can you repeat that”, and can be an indicator of an issues around sound quality for customers. Another example would be a company releasing updates to its website, and negative keywords or phrases are being detected that are about “website”, such as “I can’t log in to my account”, or “I can’t reach the URL”, “links are broken”, etc., and this could surface in the keywords chart or entities chart and the sentiment chart, indicating a trend about the new website updates that are negative, and something that needs to be investigated. Trending issues are surfaced in many ways to not only alert users about emerging issues, problematic products and services, but also trends that are positive, such as customer satisfaction with a new product or new process.

Learn more about analytics software.

NICE CXone Feedback Management can deliver surveys through the main channels that your customers use to engage with your organization.

Deliver surveys via IVR phone systems, SMS text messages, web chat, website forms and pop-ups, and email. SMS messages can be conversational (one question at a time) or a one-time link to a web survey.

Surveys can be sent following an inquiry or transaction, as well as periodically as relationship survey. Transactional surveys focus on customer satisfaction (CSAT) and ease of effort (CES). Relationship surveys focus more on loyalty (intent to purchase again) and promotion (inclination to recommend) as measured by the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS was co-created by NICE Satmetrix, which powers NICE CXone Feedback Management.

Learn more about customer satisfaction surveys.

The practice of customer service is at the heart of every business today. But how do you deliver on the best practices of customer service that will truly distinguish your business from those of your competition? There will be some variations depending on whether your business primarily services consumers (B-to-C) or other businesses (B-to-B), but here are some customer services practices that will help any organization.

Make it easy for your customers to reach you. Reducing customer effort is an important practice of modern customer service and offering customers the convenience of reaching you how and where they want to plays an outsized role in reducing customer effort. For many customers today that means offering customer service on dozens of digital messaging and social media options, in addition to traditional chat and email, is critical.

Focus on speed and personalization. Resolving customer issues fast – and on the first try is one of the most important customer service attributes that customers regularly state as a top priority. Personalization is a related goal that practitioners of great customer service know is important. This means that customers never have to repeat information about their accounts or prior purchases because agents have a complete profile in front of them during a customer service conversation, which also helps speed, but it also enables personalized offers and different tiers of service for your most valuable customers.

Establish agent experience as a priority. One of the most important drivers of great customer service is great agent experience. If you practice the mantra of happy agents = happy customers this will go a long way to aligning your customer service organization for success. Formally tracking agent experience programs and scores can identify the areas that are most important to your team.

Use analytics and AI to target continuous improvement. Behind every great customer service agent is a supervisor who can coach their team to improve their skills and deliver even better results for customers. Of course supervisors cannot listen to every call or read every chat to provide insightful feedback and specific coaching opportunities. However, modern customer service practitioners can now be equipped with advanced analytics that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). These analytics and AI systems can ‘listen’ or ‘read’ 100% of all customer interactions and provide targeted feedback that agents and their supervisors can use to improve the practice of customer service.

Learn more about how to practice customer service.

Ensuring a positive customer experience is how you build brand loyalty and get your customers to tell others about their encounter with your business.

Learn more about why customer experience is important.

The accumulation of impressions that customers develop at all points of their journey with a product and service provided by an organization. Customer Experience (CX) is the way to differentiate your brand from others in the marketplace.

Learn more about customer experience.

Agents are the most critical resource in a contact center and there is a constant challenge of keeping them motivated and engaged.

1. Agents are in the frontline engaging with customers day in and out and improving agent experience directly impacts customer experience. As per research by Gartner and 87% of Customer experience (CX) executives agree that agent experience is the most critical driver of customer experience.

2. Agent attrition is the highest across various industries. Upto, 25% churn in a year or more. Rehiring, training and onboarding agents gets not just costly, but impacts customer service since tenured agents have a higher impact.

Driving agent experience involve looking at several aspects

1) Investing in the right tools for agents so they can get speed and efficiency - a truly unified desktop, ability to pivot channels within the same interactions, access to customer data as well as SMEs across the organization are just a few to name. All these result in a lower handle time and improved first contact resolution, that directly impact CX

2) Training is very critical for agents and getting them trained in more channels, more complex interactions requires investment in training processes as well as tools to identify and bridge the skill gap. All of this has to be done in a short window since most contact centers don't get the luxury of long onboarding and training times

3) Getting true visibility and alignment on overall goals will boost agent satisfaction and investment in employee incentives, team based gamification tools can help drive consistencies in performance

Learn more about agent satisfaction.

A Contact Center Virtual Assistant is called a Virtual Agent where a Live Agent repetitive tasks are accessed via an AI, natural language application program that understands conversational voice or text. Ultimately, a Virtual Agent completes a task for a user in a self-service manner allowing Live Agents to focus on more complex or high-touch workload. Over the last couple years, the voice and text-based Virtual Agents have grown in popularity as well as capabilities. By speaking or typing in a conversational manner, the Virtual Agent can understand the specifics commands within the request and map it to a particular response or ask additional clarifying questions. By allowing an end user to communicate in a conversational manner like they would with a Live agent, end users customer satisfaction increases with a higher chance of completing specific, defined task in a self-service manner.

In the larger Technology space the use of virtual assistant are more user-focused like Siri to manage daily user actions such as scheduling, calling, and performing repetitive tasks.

Learn more about virtual assistant.

Within a Contact Center, a Chatbot is a type of Virtual Agent. Generically, Chatbots refer to an AI Bot (or Virtual Agent) supporting the text-based channels (such as Chat, SMS, Email, Social, Messaging, etc.).

In the IT space, the use of virtual assistance is different from the use of Chatbot, with the end-user focus of completing ‘my individual tasks’ vs providing answers and task completion for the contact center.

Learn more about the difference between a chat bot and a virtual assistant.

Many use the terms AI and Machine Learning interchangeably, but AI refers to the the decision making capabilities of the system, while Machine Learning allows the system to learn new things from the data.

Learn more about the difference between AI and machine learning.

An automatic call distributor (ACD) is a type of software that allows contact centers to distribute inbound calls, emails, SMS, and social media messages to agents based on customer needs and agent skill sets. Instead of simply sending inbound requests to any available agent, ACD systems categorize calls and messages and then automatically check to see which available agent has the most relevant skills and experience to help the customer.

An ACD provides benefits such as increasing customer satisfaction with personalized voice and digital interactions. Additionally, it empowers agents to engage in smart interactions with customers.

NICE CXone provides an ACD with a skills-based omnichannel routing engine that intelligently connects customers to the best resource. It provides a universal queue for 30+ channels, all with a consolidated omnichannel agent application with customer context.

Learn more about ACD.

Cloud is the on-demand availability of computer system resources for compute power and data storage without the need for direct management of the system.

Learn more about cloud.

FCR stands for First Contact Resolution, or First Call Resolution if you are referring to voice-only interactions.

FCR is a key contact center metric that indicates if you were able to resolve a customer’s inquiry or problem on the first interaction, without the need for transfers, follow-ups or escalations. The higher your FCR, the better.

A high FCR helps boost your CSAT, increase agent productivity and reduce operational costs. To improve FCR consider adding the following to your contact center:

• Skills-based routing to connect the customer to the most capable agent right away.

• Analytics to discover what is preventing customer questions or issues from being resolved on the first contact.

• Performance management to identify where agents might need additional training so they have the knowledge and skills to answer customers’ questions on the first touch.

Learn more about FCR.

The most impactful KPI’s are those which simultaneously affect both customer satisfaction and contact center efficiency. Two such KPI’s include Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and First Call Resolution (FCR).

CSAT is an “outside in” measurement that reflects customer approval of services received. Satisfied customers value rapid, accurate, personalized and low-effort interactions. When a contact center can deliver on these qualities, they do so because they have implicitly identified and eliminated inefficiencies.

FCR is an “inside out” measurement that reflects a contact center's ability to resolve an issue on the first interaction. When a contact center can resolve an issue in a single interaction, it means they have the right levels of self-service assistance, well trained and empowered agents and systems to accurately connect customers to the right resources.

Learn more about the top call centers KPIs.

Digital and Digital Channels aren’t new, after all Chat and even Email are digital channels and they’ve been around for decades. What’s new is that we’ve reached an inflection point where the prevalence and relative importance of Digital Channels have caused a shift in the way Contact Centers must operate. Forecasting, Routing, Recording, Monitoring, Agent Experience, Reporting and Analytics are all changing to be optimized for the asynchronous nature of Digital Channels.

Learn more about digital customer service.

Digital Transformation can mean a lot of things, which to a great extent is why many Digital Transformation projects' mission creep. For the Contact Center there are a number of technology challenges to address, but many of the most difficult transformations are philosophical. How do I forecast agents when they are work on such diverse tasks? How do I measure productivity when service levels vary so widely? Transformation is a foundational change, and like any change, it is going to take the whole organization to succeed, and they need to expect to be operating outside of their comfort zones. To give yourself the best chance at success, acknowledge the expected discomfort, establish a clear vision for the transformation, then execute it as you would your most critical change management processes.

Learn more about digital transformation.

When consumers think of exceptional customer service, two things come to mind: quick resolution and personalized services. No matter who your customers are, buyers of all shapes and sizes have the same general customer service wish list. They want products and services to function as advertised, and expedient resolution of issues. But, a key difference is that what might be an inconvenience for a consumer, could have catastrophic consequences for an enterprise. If the Wi-Fi is out when you want to stream Netflix, that’s frustrating. If systems management software shuts down, that could bring an entire business to a grinding halt.

Learn more about the principles of customer service.

When trying to improve customer experience in the call center it can feel overwhelming. Where do you start? There are a lot of different opinions, but one of the best places to start is by listening to your customers and examining your metrics. Who better to involve in your plan to improve the customer experience than those stakeholders you are hoping to impact? You can listen to your customers by asking for their feedback and examining analytics to identify your strengths and opportunities. Your metrics can also help point out to you where your customer experience is faltering. Then using a cost-benefit analysis approach, you should prioritize your customer experience initiatives. While we often look for a silver bullet to improve the customer experience in the form of technology and software - there is no fast pass to CX. While technology plays a big role in your customer experience, don't forget to look inward as well - at your people and processes. Your people play a critical role in your customer experience, so CX initiatives should also impact your hiring, onboarding, training and development programs as well.

Learn more about how to improve customer experience in a call center.

Inbound contact centers react to incoming calls or contact requests from digital channels and route them to an available agent or self-service option as appropriate to fulfill the customer needs. Outbound contact centers initiate contacts to customers proactively providing customer service effort, anticipating the customer's needs and offering communication to address those needs. These communications can be initiated on voice and digital channels and provide high customer satisfaction when combined with aligning to stated customer preferences.

Learn more about the difference between inbound and outbound contact center.

Traditionally a blended contact center is one that allows agents to seamlessly move between inbound and outbound activity to achieve higher agent utilization by using agents to make outbound calls when inbound demands are low, or temporarily using outbound agents to assist with inbound spikes in activity. The next generation of blended contact center is an Omnichannel Blended Contact Center, which allows agents to work voice and digital channels concurrently and manages the work load appropriately for each agent based on their training and skill.

Learn more about blended contact center.

A unified queue is where all digital and voice contacts are prioritized and route to the right resources based on the rules and skills and channels those agents have available. The advantages of a unified queue include that it doesn’t consider the same agent across different routing engines that can’t see each other, and it ensures real time presence across all channels so the right decisions are made.

Learn more about unified queue.

Routing is the decision made by contact management software to send a contact to the most appropriate resource.

Learn more about routing.

What’s exciting about AI is how it’s transforming contact center solutions in different ways. First, self-service. AI is augmenting conversations with virtual assistants that provide instant help. Second, it’s anticipating needs: AI and Big Data will help to predict customer needs. And third, by automating where possible (and where it makes sense), AI is saving valuable human agents for those interactions where they’re needed most. AI-powered solutions are helping contact centers deliver a better customer experience – with faster resolution through conversational self-service and smarter agent-assisted channels with more personalized services that can make all businesses ‘feel local’. The thing with AI is, there are benefits for everyone. When it comes to how AI impacts the day-to-day for supervisors and agents, think more efficiency. Less repetitive work and much better optimization of contact center decisions. When FAQs are handled by self-service, agents can focus on higher-value tasks and field fewer repetitive questions. Plus, AI can reduce their training time – with better routing to only focus on specific skills and Agent Assistant bots to help them work smarter. For businesses, AI can mean substantial cost savings (accurate staffing, self-service containment, lower AHT), happier customers (higher CSAT), and better employee retention (happier, more engaged agents).

Learn more about the role AI plays in the contact center.

Companies investing in the improvement of their customer experience focus on mapping the customer journeys of their consumers across different segments, socio demographic groups and buying segments. They recognize their channel preferences, most frequent inquiries, and any behavioral trends affecting their preferences for receiving timely customer service. Applying these consumer insights to contact center processes is essential to delivering an omnichannel customer experience by leveraging digital channels, automation via chatbots and intelligent assistant, and utilizing the most recent tools for delivering outstanding customer experience.

Learn more about how to improve digital experience.

Customer digital journey is the process a customer follows in order to get a product or service using digital channels. Digital journey may include a customer asking a question or sending an inquiry by using email, live chat (web chat), social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or social messaging such as Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat or iMessage.

Learn more about digital journey.

As customers expect companies to respond to their inquiries on any channel they use for communication with their peers these days, companies need to digitally transform their operations to satisfy the customers. Digital transformation affect the entire organization across finance, marketing, sales, product development, human resources and operations. Without digitally transforming customer service operations, consumers would be left with a service not satisfying their needs, and potentially leave to their next alternative option. Companies that have successfully digitally transformed their contact center operations report higher customer satisfaction, higher productivity of their contact center agents, and higher revenues through more efficient upsell and cross-sell efforts.

Learn more about the importance of digital transformation.

Customers expect service in more ways than ever before. To summarize, here's the common types of customer service.

1. Surely, the oldest type of customer service is on-site; think good old corner store where the sales person knew you by name.

2. Phone customer service is still around and while digital is on the rise, voice will continue to be an important way to interact with customers.

3. Within digital customer service, the more traditional channels are Email and Live (or Web) Chat.

4. Other types of customer service include self-service (via voice with a simple IVR or more advanced Voice Portal automated solutions, as well as digital with chat bots).

5. More recent additions include Customer Service using Text / SMS, and a number of social channels such as direct messaging in Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp and many others, as well as and social listening.

Learn more about customer service.

CXone QM and QM Analytics are both part of the CXone Workforce Optimization Pro suite.

Both solutions provide you with the power of an innovative quality solution without the complexity and include:

-Simple, Intuitive Forms

-Efficient Workflows

-Effective Coaching

-Powerful Dashboards

CXone QM Analytics Pro is also incorporating analytics into quality management by leveraging automatic, granular analysis and categorization to more effectively pinpoint and evaluate interactions.

Learn more about the difference between quality management and qm analytics.

A digital experience platform is a contact center that enables companies to orchestrate, manage and administer digital experiences with the goal to provide superior customer service across many different interaction channels. Today’s consumers prefer using digital channels when reaching out to a company’s contact center. CXone delivers digital experiences to consumers by leveraging data, analytics and artificial intelligence to intelligently connect customers to the best resource. It empowers contact centers to efficiently and effectively manage and administer contact center resources, including interaction channels, workflows and agents. It facilitates reporting on and analyzing those interactions to optimize performance. And it provides customer data and context in a flexible and integrated manner which enables contact center agents to create amazing contextual customer experiences, regardless of the channel (or channels) the interaction occurs in.

Learn more about digital experience platform.

NICE CXone leverages global data centers in both public and private clouds to ensure a highly-available, redundant service. In our private clouds the solution uses geographically separate redundant hardware and networks with the ability to immediately fail-over in case of problems. In the public cloud we follow industry best practice leveraging services that support high availability, including geographic distribution.

This solution is designed for high availability and is audited and tested to ensure the designs work in the real world. The availability of our services has been a priority, especially over the past year, because we know the impact that downtime has on our customers. We have dedicated teams monitoring the operational status of all our systems, and groups that focus on disaster readiness and recovery.

Learn more about disaster recovery.

The FedRAMP program is used by most of the U.S. Federal Government to qualify cloud service providers. It requires extensive internal processes as well as thorough auditing by external groups that are also government certified. These audits ensure that systems are continuously monitored for security and other risks that might affect customers.

NICE CXone was the first Cloud Contact Center to achieve a FedRAMP certification and remains the only cloud-native solution, meaning it is able to provide the scalability and availability features that come with the cloud and meet all the FedRAMP requirements.

Learn more about FedRAMP.

Calibrations are designed to ensure that everyone evaluating customer interactions are scoring the consistently and in line with the company’s created guidelines. Calibrations allow employees to be confident that everyone is graded fairly regardless of who is doing the evaluation.

Learn more about calibration.

Customers expect companies will respond to their inquiry on any channel they used for communication with their peers these days. That includes wide variety of digital channels, such as email, live chat (web chat), social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or social messaging such as Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat or iMessage.

Responding on these digital channels however doesn’t have to be difficult. Contact centers using a cloud based omnichannel platform such as NICE CXone with over 30 digital channels seamlessly integrated with voice, unified routing, reporting, WFO and quality management, can add new digital channels easily and in agile manner. Contact center agent’s efficiency may improve as they can manage more digital interactions at the same time and customer satisfaction and NPS may increase as customers get their inquiries resolved fast and on a digital channel of their choice.

Learn more about why a CC should support digital channels.

If your call center is using traditional on-premises telephony infrastructure, “hybrid cloud” can be a good way to start the transition to the cloud. Hybrid cloud enables contact centers to keep taking, recording, and archiving calls on-premises, but use those calls and data (with cloud quality management, workforce management, and analytics applications) to get the immediate benefits from continuous rollout of new productivity features without costly and time consuming changes to their on-premises environment. When the time is right for you to reconsider your ACD infrastructure, your move to the cloud is seamless and can be made while maintaining the investments you have in WFO and analytics.

Learn more about how NICE CXone defines hybrid cloud.

CXone supports Virtual Agents rather than generic virtual assistants (link to FAQ page about Virtual Assistants).

CXone supports a 3rd Party "Bring Your Own Bot" framework with 30+ DEVone partners within the AI/Bot Virtual Agent space, from Omilia or Nuance who provide voice driven conversational IVRs, to Chatbot providers like Google to Solvvy, amongst many others.

In addition, CXone working closely with DIY AI Engine providers such as Google, Microsoft, IBM to create flexible NLU Conversational Virtual Agent integrations natively within our CXone Studio scripting tools.

Learn about using a virtual assistant with CXone. 

Reporting and performance management are complementary, but different. While reporting and dashboards provide a plethora of information, and you can eventually get the insights and data you need, it might take manual exporting, data manipulation and analysis to get there. Additionally, the manual data manipulation process can delay the delivery of insights and information up and down the organization. Performance Management takes it a step further by automating report pulling and analysis, creating custom metrics and more. Performance Management also enables leaders to motivate agent performance. PM allows supervisors to set specific KPI goals and track coaching efforts, incorporate gamification, and provide dynamic dashboards that give both agents and leaders immediate insight into progress against targets.

Learn more about the difference between performance management and reporting.

The Payment Card Industry has categorized merchant and services provides with “levels”:

• PCI Compliance Level 1 - greater than 6M Mastercard or Visa transactions annually, OR, a merchant that has experienced an attack resulting in compromised card data, OR, a merchant deemed level 1 by a card association.

• PCI Compliance Level 2 - between 1M and 6M Mastercard or Visa transactions annually.

Within the assessment side of things, the difference between Level I and Level II is the who is actually doing the audit. Within a Level I audit, a third-party (external) to is usually hired to execute an audit. This allows organizations to remove bias against security controls. Level II is often conducted by an internal audit (potentially unbiased to security, biased to organization) team and/or a self-assessment (potential bias to security and with the organization).

Learn more about the difference between PCI Level I and Level II.

A RESTful API is set of rules and specifications that an application exposes for other applications, enterprise systems and third-party systems can interact with. CXone offers a collection of RESTful APIs that extend its functionality to other business critical systems to create the optimal customer service environment. NICE CXone puts “APIs first” giving you access to the same APIs we use for our own product development – at no additional cost.

Learn more about RESTful API.

CXone APIs follow the RESTful standards, and allow configuration changes like creating a user or retrieving data about a contact to be communicated to another system without having to navigate through a visual user interface.

Learn more about CXone APIs.

QM - which stands for Quality Management - is the act of overseeing different activities and tasks within an organization to ensure that products and services offered, as well as the means used to achieve them, are consistent.

Learn more about quality management.

The difference between Omnichannel and Multichannel is the way that contact center agents are able to interact with a customer and the channel that they are associated with.

Omnichannel allows a company to communicate with their customers in a more seamless experience on the channels that they support. This approach would allow an agent to work with a contact as a single interaction regardless of channel, all while being able to access previous interaction history.

Multichannel allows a company to communicate with their customers on multiple channels, such as, phone, email, chat and social media. This approach lacks in the ability for an agent to handle an existing contact and view previous interactions.

Learn more about the difference between omnichannel and multichannel.

WFO is an acronym for Workforce Optimization, while WFM is an acronym for Workforce Management. WFO from a software perspective are those solutions that directly improve and upscale the productivity, efficiency and quality output of your agents. While you could argue that every piece of contact center software should increase agent efficiency and thus be considered a workforce solution, the contact center industry uses WFO as an umbrella term for four fundamental components: Workforce management; Quality management, including quality management analytics powered by speech and text; Performance management, including contact center gamification; and Voice and screen recording.

WFM helps ensure you have the “right” skilled agents in the “right” place at the “right” time. The ability to achieve the “right” staffing mix has a direct impact on customer service metrics like service levels (SLA), average speed of answer (ASA), and customer satisfaction (CSAT). So WFM is a component or subset of WFO.

Learn more about the difference between WFO and WFM.

CXone provides 30+ customer channels, including: Voice, Voicemail, Chat, Work Items, SMS Outbound, Email, Live Chat Video, Co-browsing, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Twitter Messenger, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, SMS Inbound, Telegram, Line, WhatsApp and google play are all offered by NICE CXone.

Which channels should I offer?

Offering your customers all of the digital channels that they have an account with will offer the ability to interact with you customers on their preferred channel of choice. Everything is now happening in real time, which is why those companies that can offer immediacy, personalization and accessibility to their customers. Take time to understand "where" your customers are, and prioritize the implementation of these different channels in your contact center based on customer appetite and need.

Learn more about the available customer channels in CXone.

NICE CXone combines Omnichannel Routing, Workforce Optimization, Customer Analytics, Automation and Artificial Intelligence—all built in the cloud. CXone refers to the NICE brand of products.

The NICE CXone ACD is a skills-based omnichannel routing engine that ensures voice and digital interactions are routed to the best available agent. It provides a universal queue for over 30+ interaction channels within a consolidated agent application with customer context. Agent efficiency increases as agents are empowered to handle multiple customer interactions simultaneously. The CXone ACD leverages analytics and artificial intelligence for even smarter contact routing.

Learn more about NICE CXone ACD.

Quality of Service (QoS) is a generic term that refers both to the quality customers perceive to be receiving from their service providers and the mechanisms used by those service providers to maintain such quality. In networking, QoS is generally associated with the amount of packet loss, delay and jitter customers experience during periods of heavy usage and network congestion. NICE CXone uses MOS scores guaranteed to be 3.9 or higher to provide a guaranteed QoS performance standard. Service providers can implement QoS policies that enforce SLAs (Service Level Agreements) by prioritizing specific mission-critical applications. NICE CXone prioritizes real-time traffic streams such as VOIP (Voice Over IP), time-sensitive signaling such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the delivery of CDRs (Call Detail Records) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) traps. Unfortunately, service providers can only reliably implement QoS policies within their networks and loose such ability once packets traverse other networks.

Learn more about quality of service in networking.

It starts with your company mission statement and an understanding of what excellence looks, sounds, and feels like to your customers. From there you reverse engineer your processes to support those outcomes, and enable yourselves to validate that your processes are being followed. That is where tools like Interaction Analytics, Feedback Management and Quality Management come into play - in the process validation stage of delivery.

Learn more about providing a great customer experience consistently.

A way to develop the right customer experience strategy is to identify what's important to your customers and then build an experience map by documenting each customer touchpoint- the when, how and why a customer is interacting with your company. At each of these interaction points, assess and document the experience to see how well you are meeting expectations and identify areas of improvement. 

Learn more about how to improve customer experience.

NICE CXone has a variety of tools that can be used to determine where agents need additional coaching or training to improve their performance.

NICE CXone Performance Management tools provide visually-powerful dashboards with custom widgets to easily display data that is impactful across your contact center. how agents are performing in the Key Performance Metrics that are important to the business.

Reporting allows supervisors and management to drill down by agents and teams to compare performance it identify coaching opportunities.

NICE CXone Quality Management tools allow supervisors to evaluate agent interactions based on a defined quality standards. Reviewing the evaluations gives insight into areas of opportunity for agents and trends that may need additional training.

Learn more about how to tell where agents who are not performing well or need training.

The metrics that companies capture should be based on the company’s goals and ensuring that employee’s performance is meeting or improving those goals. Companies should look at metrics from four main groups based on their business needs.

Consumer Perception – Net Promoter Scores (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Consumer Experience – Average Hold Time, Average Abandon Rate, Transfer Rate, First Call Resolution (FCR)

Employee Productivity – Average Speed of Answer (ASA), Average Handle Time (AHT), After Call Work (ACW), Calls per Hour

Company Productivity - Service Levels, Call Volume, Occupancy Rate

Determine the main metrics limiting to what is most important to move the company forward.

Learn more about the kind of call center metrics to capture.

Measuring customer satisfaction is easy as asking. The best practice to obtain the greatest number of responses is to ask at the end of a customer conversation or transaction. Ask a short number of questions to reduce the proportion of respondents who quit in the middle of a survey.

You might start with a high-level question such as "How satisfied are you with the help offered?", then dive deeper with questions such as "How knowledgeable was the agent who helped you?" and "How easy was it to get the help you needed?"

NICE CXone Feedback Management has a built in-library of Certified Questions that help you apply the best practices of industry experts to get the most useful measurements of satisfaction.

Learn more about how to measure customer satisfaction.

Providing the best Customer Experience is the end result every vendor or brand is reaching for. Whether it be my minimizing interaction and hold times, making their interactions and routing more efficient, to tracking their customer journey's, CX has already become one of the greatest competitive advantages you can have in your market. While there a lot of complex answers to this, the companies that are successfully implementing strategies to increase this are meeting their customer's where their customers want to be met. They understand the ways their customers want to interact with them and deploy capabilities that address these. They are looking at technologies to partner with and are built to last. This includes the ability to deploy digital interactions and are ready for future technological innovation as well. Customers are also wanting more and more consolidation from vendors to do achieve this. The rise of the consumer employee is also a major strategy companies are employing to increase the agent satisfaction which has a direct correlation between increasing your Customer Satisfaction and Experience.

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Yes, an 800 number can be provisioned for dual purpose functionality so that it can be used for both voice interactions, as well as inbound and outbound texting capabilities.

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To make it the digital experience right, you will need to create and validate a good plan of how your end-to-end digital experience for your customers should look like. Many businesses that attempt a digital transformation fail without having this in place / doing this process. You will need to invest sufficiently into this critical part and do a research and design of ideas how they will fit and work with your customers.

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Digital Experience has become nowadays very critical for every business as more and more customers coming or purchasing through digital journeys. That's why it's important to have an experience manager in place, who will be responsible for managing and overseeing all interactions made between your customers and your business over the digital. That also should include all proceeding steps even before your customers made an entry to your digital journey to have the full context and result in great experience right at the beginning and continue that with no drops. That's should be daily bread and butter of your Digital Experience Manager.

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One important aspect of improving online customer service is making sure you are offering all the digital channels your customers prefer, and that they are accessible from any online device. Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels - even if you're not there. For example, are customers trying to find out on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp? Or are they sending SMS texts to your call center number with no response? Make sure you are meeting your customers in the channels they expect and delivering personalized digital interactions - seamlessly - across all channels.

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Developing your products, services, and processes around the desired customer experience is the foundation for providing the best customer service.

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Great customer experience (CX) is a critical KPI contact center leaders are measured on and it is emerging as a key competitive differentiator, more than product and price.

Great customer experience includes

1) Ability for the customer to interact with their brands in any channel they wish

2) Having a seamless experience across these channels

3) Faster and proactive response to their queries

To achieve CX companies have to look at people, process and technology aspects

1) Invest in an omnichannel routing platforms that can connect the best agent that can address the customer needs

2) Get a unified desktop for the agents with tight integrations with CRM and UCaaS so all the customer details and conversations are in one place. That will help the agent resolve customer issues faster, the first time.

3) Train your agents smart with the right training that fills their skills gap as well as training that matters the most like problem solving skills

Learn more about how to create good customer experience.

Agent performance and productivity are measured by bringing together different KPIs, metrics and trends that are monitored and tracked for every employee over time.

Supervisors must monitor a range of KPIs to measure agent productivity, these KPIs highlight behavioral patterns and areas to improve.

Major KPIs measured in contact center are: average handling time, call transfer rate, sentiment score, SLA and average time in queue.

Learn more about how to measure agent productivity.

A properly designed and implemented Quality Management System makes customer satisfaction a priority. It requires that customer feedback be encouraged from multiple sources, and that this information be managed and used to improve customer satisfaction.

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Your website can improve your customer experience by being a visual embodiment of your brand and organizational mission. When thinking about your customer's experience with your website you should:

1 Ensure that the User Interface is clean and uncluttered. You don’t want you customers to have to scroll through and read reams of information to get to what they want or need.

2. Make your company's information clearly visible, and improve navigation by linking your logo to the homepage from every page in the site.

3. Design your navigation in a way that is intuitive and complements how customers think - not to how your organization thinks internally or to mirror your organizational structure.

4. Ensure your website is accessible from all devices, as most customers use their smartphones to access most websites these days!

5. Enable your customers to help themselves through Frequent Asked Questions, self-help sections, and customer-facing chatbots that can handle simple transactions.

6. Make it easy for customers to get help from your support team. While we always encourage customers to help themselves first, you also don't want to make it a labyrinth for customers to find any sort of phone number, chat, or support information.

Learn more about how a website can improve customer experience.

Technology has empowered customers to get what they want, whenever they want, and how they want it. We know that personal interactions are predominantly digital today. Digital = A Different Way to Do Business. Offering Digital Channels enables our companies to effectively manage their Brand and provide a Seamless Customer User Experience via their evolving Channel of Choice. 76% of businesses globally feel there’s room for improvement in providing a seamless CX offering with traditional and new digital channels in the same user interface.

Learn more about how digital customer experience can be improved.

Digital channels offers organizations an opportunity to understand the norm of modern-day digital interaction, engage with customers on their preferred channel and deliver on their expectations of a multi-channel customer experience.

The normalization of people using Digital channels requires you to rethink how you interact with your customers.

• For B2B teams, digital first means replacing cold calling with social selling. Your customers are already active in social media and that’s where you need to be. Instead of waiting for the customer to contact you, you will need to reach out to them, build a relationship and educate them. You can do this by sharing relevant content and your expertise as part of a solution to their problem.

• For marketing teams, digital first means reducing your spend on offline marketing activities, such as direct mail, billboards and TV ads. Your customers want (and expect) highly targeted messages, which can only be achieved through a data driven marketing strategy. Now, you need to use digital channels to implement search engine marketing, account based marketing and email marketing strategies.

• For customer service teams, you're no longer restricted to waiting for the phone to ring or a fax to come through. Digital first is not just about being reactive. It’s about being proactive in the way that will help your customers, who use a wide range of channels to seek out support. Social media, reviews sites, forums, and communities are all now part of the customer service eco-system.

Learn more about how to engage customers digitally.

Contact center KPI’s are organized by objectives like cost control, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction and more. In addition, contact centers are designed to be inbound, outbound or a combination of both. Therefore, there are many important KPIs. However, the following KPI’s are frequently used.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). This KPI measures the level of satisfaction customers have towards your services. The greater the satisfaction, the better. Perhaps this is the ultimate KPI since it reflects how customer’s value your services and helps managers identify and prioritize improvements.

First Call Resolution (FCR). This KPI measures the number of interactions that were resolved in the first interaction and affects both customer satisfaction and cost. The greater the FCR rate, the better. High first call resolution rates often indicate a need for better agent training and empowerment.

Average Handle Time (AHT). This is the total time an agent spends on an interaction and affects customer satisfaction and cost. Assuming adequate customer satisfaction scores, lower AHT times are better because it means agents can service more interactions. High AHT often indicate a need for better agent training and empowerment.

Cost per Interaction. This KPI divides total contact center costs by the total number of interactions to produce a cost per transaction. This KPI helps organizations track operating cost and efficiency. High interaction costs are affected by inefficient systems resulting in a low-productivity workforce.

Learn more about the most important KPIs for a contact center operations.

Agent job satisfaction, like workers in other occupations, is heavily influenced by factors including stress, workload, recognition, purpose, empowerment and work-life balance. To reduce agent turnover, you must address these factors. But how? Here are a few ideas to consider.

An integrated agent-centric desktop along with agent training and coaching can help instill competence and confidence which in turn can reduce job stress and improve agent empowerment.

Workforce management can help improve agent workload, and work-life balance by helping managers to properly forecast, schedule and manage shifts, as well as give agents more flexibility over their shift schedules or to coordinate changes with other agents.

And finally, performance management can help managers identify and recognize top performers as well as give agents the ability to see how their efforts compare to peers and how they contribute to team and company goals and achievements.

Learn more about how to reduce agent turnover.

Personalizing your customer’s experience requires data. The data has to be readily available and relevant. It is this data that helps you “know” your customer and tune their experiences based on their expected needs and known preferences. When this data is made available to predictive algorithms and other forms of AI, it becomes a powerful engine to drive more personalized self service and routing decisions. And when that data is provided to Contact Center Agents in a way that is easily consumed at the moment of truth, this is your opportunity to truly thrill your customer with a personalized experience.

Learn more about how to personalize customer experience.

The primary reasons to move from spreadsheets to WFM Pro are increased usability, and more efficient/cost effective scheduling. Every agent has online access to their own schedule, with ability to request time off, update schedule preferences, trade shifts from anywhere in the world. When there is a scheduling update or approval of a request they get in-application notifications. Functionally, WFM software, like CXone WFM Pro, leverages advanced patented AI forecasting algorithms to more accurately predict the future contacts, including allowing for lifts based on marketing activities, and optimizes scheduling through multiskill efficiencies utilizing simulation and machine learning.

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The term customer journey describes a complete end-to-end set of experiences customers have when interacting with an organization or brand. When thinking about customer journey, it's important to think of it not only in the context of the customer service organization or contact center, but the entire organization. A customer journey starts the moment a customer learns about your organization and includes their experiences on your website, physically in your store, with your products, and much more.

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When talking about a customer journey, the term customer journey map often comes up as well. A customer journey map is a visual diagram of all touchpoints within a customer journey. It can be leveraged in real time for agents to improve an experience or leveraged via analytics to identify trends that help improve the overall customer experience that is delivered. The mapping of your customer journey should be a collaborative exercise across all organizational functions, from customer service, to marketing, production, finance, and more. Each function has their own unique interaction with the customer, either directly or indirectly. When mapping your customer journey you should also consider the customer persona, the phases of the purchase journey, different touchpoints within each phase, customer thoughts and actions, pain points, opportunities for improvement, and moments of truth. Also, ensure your customer journey map is written from the perspective of the customer, not the company.

Learn more about how to map a customer journey.

Most contact centers calculate cost per call by taking the sum of all costs for running the call center for a given period time divided by the number of calls handled in the call center for that same period.

The general cost per call should include all calls handled by the contact center, regardless of whether the call was handled by an agent or contained within the IVR. The hardest part of calculating cost per call is usually determining the fully loaded costs of the contact center, beyond just agent wage.

You can also calculate the cost per call for calls only handled by agents by factoring in the average number of calls an agent handles in a given time period as well as their wage. For example, let’s say on average your agents handle 80 calls in an 8 hour shift, - meaning they handle an average of 10 calls per hour. Now that you have her average calls per hour, you can determine the cost per call by dividing your average hourly agent wage by the average calls per hour. So if your average agent wage full loaded is $20 per hour, and the average calls per hour is 10, then your average cost per call is $2. Usually the hardest part of determining cost per call is figuring our the fully loaded cost of your agent, factoring in costs beyond wage, like overhead, benefits, etc.

Contacts centers also increasingly track “Contact per Contact” for the entire contact center, as well as “Contact per Contact by Channel” since most contact centers are handling more than just calls these days.

Learn more about how to calculate cost per call.

First Contact Resolution (FCR) is usually expressed as a percentage, and represents the number of contacts that are resolved the first time the customer reaches out to the contact center without needing escalation, transfer, or additional contacts to resolve the issue. To calculate, you take the number of contacts resolved in the first inbound contact divided by the total number of contacts handle in that time period. Sometimes the hardest part, though, is determining which contacts were resolved in the first contact. Many contact centers do this using dispositions or cases. For example, you can create an FCR disposition that an agent selects, or better yet, you can create and close a case within a certain time frame tracked by ticketing system. Other contacts centers just make the assumption that a case created and resolved within a certain short time frame is resolved in the first contact. Also, advanced interaction analytics software can also detect FCR.

Learn more about how to measure FCR.