- Software company NICE has launched Enlighten AI to improve customer service and efficiency for its clients.
- Enlighten AI reduces agent workload and enhances customer interactions.
- This article is “CXO AI Playbook“Business leaders speak openly about how they're testing and using AI.”
In “CXO AI Playbook,” Business Insider presents mini-case studies of AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. Each company talks about the problem they're trying to solve with AI, who is making those decisions within their company, and their vision for the future of AI.
NICE (short for Neptune Intelligence Computer Engineering) is a customer experience software company headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey. The company provides artificial intelligence-powered products, such as virtual customer service agents, to more than 25,000 organizations worldwide.
The situation: What problem were they trying to solve?
Many companies still use manual processes for customer service and customer experience tasks. Historically, these tasks have been too complex to monitor and, as a result, difficult to automate, NICE CEO Barak Eilam told Business Insider, adding that many organizations still invest in workforce over technology.
Many businesses strive to reduce friction in their customer service operations, but they aren’t always able to provide quality support or properly understand their customers’ needs.
“It’s a really interesting challenge to see how AI can help with cases that have been hard to solve before,” says Eilham, who sees AI as “the ultimate alchemist” that helps bring people, technology, and process together.
Key Staff
NICE expects revenue to reach $2.7 billion this year and has more than 8,000 employees including scientists, engineers, business leaders and thought leaders. The organization reinvests about 15% of revenue into research and development, Eyram said.
Over the past few years, NICE has shifted more key staff into AI, he said: “It's not just general-purpose AI. They're all true experts in customer experience.”
NICE has also built software that leverages the vast amount of data it has accumulated with existing customers and over the past decades to enhance its clients' efforts to improve customer experience, Eilham said.
AI Planning
About two and a half years ago, NICE launched Enlighten AI for CX, a set of solutions to optimize self-service and customer experience operations, improve engagement, and increase customer satisfaction.
Eyram said Enlighten AI “dramatically improves” the productivity and efficiency of customer experience teams by automating many labor-intensive tasks, such as taking notes during customer service calls. Customer experience professionals can also quickly access information to take data-driven actions and resolve customer issues. Enlighten Autopilot, one of the products in NICE's Enlighten AI for CX repository, enhances self-service with an AI-powered virtual assistant.
Another product, Enlighten Copilot, gives agents access to real-time insights to provide quick, personalized interactions without making customers wait while they look up information to answer their questions, Eilham said.
AI Plan Results
“AI is now leading every conversation we have with our customers,” said Eilham. Many existing customers are adding Enlighten AI to their portfolios, and NICE is attracting new customers with its AI capabilities.
For example, waste management company Republic Services was already using NICE products but added Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction to measure, improve and evaluate customer sentiment. The company felt that its customer support system was manual and not providing key insights.
Republic Services used Enlighten AI to reduce manual work for their customer experience agents. They saw a 30% decrease in repeat calls and a shorter average call time, despite seasonal increases in call volume. The company also saw a 33% reduction in negative customer sentiment.
Technology company Open Network Exchange is also using Enlighten AI to improve customer service. Previously, ONE used a manual quality assurance process to randomly select and evaluate customer calls. This prevented supervisors from objectively and comprehensively assessing agent skills that impact customer experience and providing meaningful coaching.
The company deployed Enlighten AI to monitor 100% of customer interactions and gather insights into behaviors that influence customer sentiment. Within 90 days, the company began improving how it coached its agents and saved supervisors four to five hours of their time per week.
What's next?
NICE remains focused on AI innovation, Eilam said.
He told BI that the company sees a lot of opportunities to expand its AI services by partnering with organizations that spend 90% of their budget on people, 10% on technology and still rely on manual processes.
“There's a lot of new big things happening,” Eyram said, adding that NICE plans to unveil new products at the Interactions Customer Conference 2024 in June.
“This gives us a very optimistic outlook for the future,” he said.
