NICE MD ANZ Rod Lester says customer experience ought to be frictionless, and that this is the NICE way. While iTWire hates a cliche we do love a good pun and what can we say but the attitude behind CXOne sure is pretty nice!

NICE has a long 36-year heritage, starting as a call recording company, pivoting in 2014 with a Kodak moment seeing it become the leading CX business with over $US 2.6b in revenue, accelerating each year over the last six years. Lester spoke with iTWire to tell the story behind the company's transformation, as well as what it's bringing in this new age of artificial intelligence.

While NICE started life as a call recording company, it's now far more, Lester explained.

In fact, it was ahead of the curve from the start. While NICE began life nearly four decades ago, the call recording industry only truly exploded in the early 2000's when call recording for compliance became a serious necessity for regulated organisations. "Everyone needed it," Lester said.

This began a period of new vendors popping up, vendors consolidating, and related technologies emerged such as workforce management, quality, gamification - "these became a category we define as workforce optimisation," Lester said.

By 2012 the industry settled down with two major vendors dominating the global market, one being Verint, and the other, of course, NICE. "80% of the workforce optimisation business was supported by these two companies," Lester explained. Both started in Israel, both had about the same amount of people, and both had relatively similar product offerings. "Every six months one or the other would come up with a new capability or feature and was then leapfrogged by the other."

Until 2014. 10 years ago, NICE appointed Barak Eilam as CEO. Eilam had already served with NICE for more than a decade and was no newcomer, but he did bring new ideas to the helm. It was time, Eilam said, to drive a new strategy - to transform and pivot to something new. This was the "Kodak moment" for the business which saw it become the CX powerhouse it is today.

This transformation began simply; NICE acquired an IVR business in North America - a $US 1b purchase, so no small change - and embedded this new intellectual property into a brand-new platform it launched. This was none other than CXone.

Suddenly, NICE was no longer a call recording company; it was competing against the big contact centre players like Genesys. NICE CXone grew in popularity and strength.

Today, "analysts say we have the number one platform," Lester said.

Today, NICE CXone handles over a million contact centre agents across the world. It onboards 150 new customers each quarter. And it brings in more than $US 2.6b, growing year on year.

Rod Lester is the head of the CX division for NICE in the ANZ region. NICE isn't only CX - "we also have public safety and emergency services, and financial crime and compliance divisions," Lester said. These have specific reliability requirements and are very specific platforms. However, CX is by and away the largest, making 80% of the NICE revenue stream.

Australia is a high-cost first-world country and with that "our customers have incredibly high expectations of CX," he said. "Their cost to serve is incredibly high compared to other parts of the world."

As a result, "we tend to focus on embracing new technology more so than elsewhere in the world, if it can increase overall CX and take cost out of the equation."

Within the region Lester's team is onboarding two customers on average every three weeks, and has grown from six customers prior to the pandemic and its lockdowns, to more than 280 now. "We're excited about the milestone of 300 customers coming up in the next few months."

This customer base covers everything from small contact centres of four agents, to a "huge amount of local councils and lots of state Government." CXone

State governments particularly find NICE CXone attractive because it can set agencies up in parent/child scenarios - "one agency may provide a shared service to lots of other agencies. We can provide solutions to allow organisations like this deliver a consistent platform across the entire organisation."

Further, "sometimes we find different agencies have different imperatives. They don't get locked in because our platform is flexible," Lester explained. "We can make differentiated environments specific to them, while still part of the platform."

Customers also find CXone very attractive, he said, because they can make changes themselves - "customers can do as little or as much as they wish", while supported by a large base of engineers and consultants when desired.

However, what really stands NICE apart is its continual re-investment and refocus into its product. "We re-invest 17% of revenue back into the platform and creating new value," Lester said, explaining the company makes four major releases each year, with each driven by the end customer. "We see where demand is, and put our investment in that."

"The platform is continually coming out with amazing new tech," he said, noting analyst firm Forrester has lauded NICE CXOne for the breadth of capabilities in its offering.

One example is bursting; "for utilities especially, and organisations that have to deal with catastrophic events, it can burst up to a high number of users, and when the event is completed drop back down to its usual steady state," Lester said. "In an on-premises world an organisation would need to provision to its absolute peak load, with perpetual licenses, hardware, compute ... it would build to 'here' but only use to 'there'."

By contrast, the NICE CXone SaaS platform brings a significantly lower TCO for the end customer and, because it is a shared platform, even the smallest of organisations can take advantage of features, functions, and capabilities which would previously have only been available to large telcos, government departments, and health insurers.

One example Lester gives is 'callback in queue' - where a caller can drop out from waiting on hold, and the system will phone them when an agent is ready.

"Callback in queue became a thing in around 2010," he said. "We sold it to BUPA, who were one of the first adopters. They were delighted because, during their rate review period, it helped serve the customer."

However, it wasn't cheap back in the day. "It cost them $850K in professional services, $1m in licenses, and 20% in maintenance," Lester said. However, "now it is in the base functionality and a tiny operation with four agents can toggle a radio button to turn it on and use it right away."

It'd be easy to say SaaS makes everything easier for everyone, everywhere, from any vendor, but the reality is not so simple. "Typically, contact centres were laggards for cloud. Cloud has been around for ages, but it took the industry a long time to be able to do it."

"While cloud is nice and fluffy, interaction management is really complex," Lester said. "To create a cloud service that has stability, broad feature capability, depth, is manageable, and usable by end customers is no mean feat."

However, it's available now. And with NICE re-investing continually, it's an always advancing, always improving product.

"In the old world, an organisation would start with a business problem. Then, to solve it, they needed to create some functional and non-functional requirements. This was turned into an RFP/RFT/RFI and sent to market. Vendors were chosen, a waterfall-style grinding out took place, downselection to two vendors, then one, contract negotiations for three to four months before a signed contract. This became a signed project. Equipment was ordered ... it took a minimum of two years to get through before your solution was delivered. It took a year to go live. Everything was signed off, the customer threw a party, but what they got was a solution to the problem they had three years ago."

And, with such investment, "that solution needs to get a return on capital, a return on investment. It stays static for at least three years. There's no agility, no flexibility, and no provision for peak," Lester said.

Cloud changed all this, "the onus is on the platform manufacturer to keep innovating and keep coming out with new features and functions."

What really drives innovation for NICE, and core to its DNA, is the concept of customer success.

"Part of our job is to go back to customers and say let's understand how you're using the platform at the moment as it may not be optimal," Lester said. "We look at what they are doing and it all becomes more collaborative than it was in the old world. Back then, companies would sell something, say bye, and come back in three years."

"Today, we need to ensure the customer gets continuous value or they turn a system off and go to someone else's cloud. The onus to drive continuous value is now incumbent on the vendor. It's squarely on us to bring constant innovation, and ensure value is being extracted, or we will find ourselves with the customer moving away."

NICE isn't doing this in a vacuum; "yes, we have a great platform, but the thing that is the real secret to our success is our partner community. It's the depth of their consulting capability to extract value, and the people we've managed to attract and retain in our business in the ANZ region."

Speaking of new features, AI is a hot topic everywhere, and NICE is no exception.

"We've been in AI for a long time," Lester said, "but generative AI has been a real inflexion point. While we've had AI, we diverted investment funding specifically to AI and automation."

An example is auto-summarisation. "We're doing this natively within our platform," Lester said, "and the capability is available to any CXone customer. A huge amount of customers have taken it up. Auto summarisation ensures consistent summarisation across every agent, as opposed to some doing a spotty summary of what the call was about. It's consistent across the entire agent population and the data can be used to create new and interesting insights."

Another is CXone's Copilot capability. "Everyone has a Copilot," Lester said humorously, "but ours is specific to contact centres. It sits across voice and digital and will provide the agent with some suggested responses. They can click on one they like best and curate and edit it."

“The benchmark in digital messaging is the agent may take three to four digital messages; we've more than doubled this with our agents now able to take nine interactions via the use of AI.”

And another is autopilot-capability within the platform. "The customer can have a human-like experience without the need to fail out to a live agent," Lester said.

In fact, you can have all these experiences combined within the platform. "The customer can start a journey within web," for example, "then talk to a digital autopilot function. If needed, this can elevate to a human agent, who then augments via Copilot."

It's all very exciting days as NICE continues to re-invest and push the boundaries of what customer experience really means and is capable of. And, all capabilities, all functions become available within the one platform.

“It will only continue to accelerate from here,” Lester said.

This is true CX, driven by a business that puts the customer first, and lets customer feedback drive the product. What can we say, but .... nice !

Take a look for yourself here ...