Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Enterprise CX with NiCE: Unifying Voice, Digital, WFO & Agentic AI in One Platform
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Thanks, Scott. I love how you brought up both like Gartner's quadrant and Cognizy because I do believe that's one of the ways that NICE has kind of separated itself in the market as well Cognizy being a leader in the quadrant, in their quadrant for AI. So ⁓ you talk to me a little bit about how that integration is going and what's next? What customers can expect next with that? Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. And Scott, always like to wrap things up. I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we'll do some rapid fire. What's your favorite word? Thanks for joining us today. We are chatting with Scott Steiner, who is an account executive from Nice about their incredible platform and AI automation. Scott, welcome to the podcast. I am so happy to have you. Thanks for making time to join us today. Scott: possible. Same here, Gina. It's so good to be with you. Gina Gibson: What's your least favorite word? Scott: No. Gina Gibson: So let's start with the basics, go ahead, tell us a little bit about yourself. Scott: Absolutely. Well, you bet. And we're excited to announce that by the end of 25, the acquisition was completed. And because that Gina Gibson: and what excites you the most. Scott: Well, I've been with NICE now for a little over four years, and I've been in CCAS for quite some time from my days at AT &T for many years, reselling to some of the largest contact center solutions at ⁓ AT while was there in a previous life. I do live in Salt Lake City, but I cover the... a Rams win. Don't my wife. Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Scott: kind of AI engine sat outside of NICE. We've now fully integrated it within the NICE platform. ⁓ you know, ⁓ Cognigi was a solution that other CCAS providers were also ⁓ utilizing. So it wasn't really an exclusive to NICE prior to the acquisition. Will continue to be at exclusive? No. Gina Gibson: somebody wants more information on using Nice, who should they reach out to? Scott: Well, as you know, we're strong partners with Think Forward, Gina. So if they were to reach out to yourself at Think Forward, they know how to get a hold of you. And we can work together to provide them the information they have. There's always nice.com or they can find me on LinkedIn. Arizona and Nevada market for commercial, which to us is kind of that medium to enterprise space within businesses, not the largest Fortune 500 and not the smallest SMB, but kind of that middle ground of customers in that space. CognitG will still support the other leading brands that were also utilizing it. So the key here is really that CognitG engine. The AI capabilities from an agentic AI perspective are now owned by NICE. So it is certainly integrated with the platform and it can provide that really purpose-built customer experience that customers are looking for. Gina Gibson: Wonderful. Scott, big thank you to you for taking time out of your day to join us and share so many of exciting things happening at NICE and ⁓ looking forward to a nice new world in 2026. Thanks so much. Excellent. And Scott, always like to ask our guests, tell me one thing yourself that we won't find on LinkedIn. Scott: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Take care. I always, ⁓ I get the eyebrows raised when I tell them I have a 34 year old son. But I'm just glad I have the hair on my head still after all these years in sales. ⁓ What makes it so unique in the industry is its ability to ⁓ listen, ability to reason, and ability to respond ⁓ accurately on the knowledge the customer provides. ⁓ We've of moved away from really this, you know, provide these pre-built responses that your bot would, you know, respond with where agentic AI through Cognizy is really now Gina Gibson: I love it. love it. us your elevator pitch, Scott, for Nice. What's, say, if you got two minutes to tell us everything wonderful, which is a lot about Nice to pack into a short amount of time, but give us your pitch. Scott: Well, that's a great starting point for NICE. There's about three or four things that really set NICE apart, Gina. And I'll start off by saying one is that you can consider NICE to be the best in breed from a CX perspective, and we're also the best in suite. So to describe what that means is that when you look at us from the industry and how they look at NICE, they would categorize us in that providing this human-like interaction that is almost undisturnable to typical human might call in. It's so undisturnable that we have customers building in call flows that one agentic AI can front end and then hand off to multiple agentic AIs to complete similar workflows without the customer or the caller ever knowing that they're speaking to multiple bots throughout that entire interaction. Magic Gartner Magic Quadrant space for Gartner, know when you're thinking You know performance versus leadership in your space. We are lucky to be 11 times consecutive in the CCAS space for For Gartner, which is a huge accomplishment. It says a lot about how the industry thinks about who nice is When you talk about best of suite So it's really combining with NICE, this CognitG element with our conversational AI, that agentic orchestration and a single CX platform that can handle all the quality, all the interaction analytics and that entire elevation to even a human agent if necessary and keep that within that ⁓ We're talking about the ability for companies to utilize Nice kind of defragmentize. A lot of companies today might have various point solution, their voice is in one place, their digital is in another place, they might have their workforce in another place. And they lose is, you know, a single reporting, a single dashboarding, a holistic view of their entire contact center. platform. That's what's so powerful for customers. Gina Gibson: amazing to me and I never cease to be amazed on ⁓ weekly basis of how far AI has come and I think Cognizant has definitely been a leader in that space. Can give me an example Scott, it doesn't have to be with Cognizant, it can be, ⁓ but me one of your customer success stories of where a customer was maybe using a different platform, we don't have to name names, ⁓ and ⁓ implementing like what they implemented, how they implemented it and how it helped them grow. Scott: performance, the health at any given time. What Nice does from a best of suite is we bring all of those capabilities or pillars into the suite. And then we provide AI automation along the way. It's not merely a AI point solution that might provide self-service to a call. We're really listening to calls. We're learning about your calls. We're helping you improve the calls and personalize them. Yeah, for sure. You know, we've got a lot of success stories and you know, one of the really positive success stories that's been a referenceable account that's right here in the Valley and I won't mention their names, but if you went to the Nice website and looked up our, you know, customer testimonies, testimonies, you'll find them right there. They're one of the leading brands for the cruise, you know, the travel industry and some of through the entire customer journey. And that's how our AI really focuses difference from just the agentic AI, but also from the conversational AI and the ability then to analyze those interactions and really help customers improve CSAT or KPIs that they're focused on. AI is definitely at the core of our business, even though it's a buzzword in the industry. They represent some of the largest cruise brands, Holland America, Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and others. they're upwards to almost a thousand agents right now, but they left, you know, it's one of those stories where, you know, they were surviving on their premise-based solution. They were limited by the, ⁓ know, the capabilities ⁓ ⁓ a premise-based solution can provide, the lack of integration capabilities. It's really at the core of what makes special. And with our recent acquisition of CogniG, it really puts us in the leadership space of the Gentic AI. the ability to kind of jump to the next level of customer care from a a true CX experience. And, you know, when you are in a premise-based solution, you know, you really struggle with digital interactions. ⁓ most customers today want to be able to engage at ⁓ channel of their choice. And... Gina Gibson: That's great. I'm going to take a pause right here. Jonathan, I want you to stop recording and I want you to look at the recording because I'm seeing Scott. Scott: you know, we think of, you know, voice as still being a strong channel. And there's no doubt about that. customers who can be directed to a website and they can be prompted in that website with a proactive chat and that proactive chat can easily ⁓ into a voice interaction. And then you can, you know, ⁓ a follow-up text or follow-up email with the reservation information. and then you can memorialize that interaction back into your CRM and continue the workflow going forward. That is really, I think, the trite and true reason why the premise-based solutions are probably seeing their end of days within contact center. ⁓ And ability for a cloud-based solution to... ⁓ not only provide so many more capabilities, but integrate with so many of the customers now cloud-based. So you think about, you know, workday is where my HR is, or payroll is in ADP, or Oracle has my financials. All of these components cannot integrate with your workforce ⁓ CX. And so moving to the cloud, that's still, you know, a primary... a factor for most companies, but the ability to utilize all of the omni-channel capabilities. just to toot our horn just a little bit, when we talk about true omni-channel experience, we're talking about being able to leverage all of the channels simultaneously. It's being able to move a voice to an email, to a chat, to a text, in one seamless interaction. very unique on our platform. But when customers realize, wow, the less agent efficiency, the maximum agent efficiency, the less voice on their front end, and the ability to now manage entire interaction so I can report it, I can see it in real time, and then I can memorialize it, and then I can go back and quantify analytics-driven decisions made. That's all possible in the Nice platform. Gina Gibson: And you know, you've you kind of led into my next question, which is where do you think the role of like the human customer service agent is going to be given all the advances in AI? And I mean, I used to ask people what the next five to 10 years look like. But now I mean, we're we're at what do you think the next six to 12 months looks like? Because it's changing so quickly. Scott: Yeah. Well, will just speak to the human agent where it stands today. ⁓ as aware, Gene, as we've seen with AI, the advancements in just the last year to 12 to 18 months has been exponential. I even ⁓ faster, greater even what the, you know, AI creators have imagined. But what We, and I think, you know, most industry analysts believe is that in three to five years, needing a human agent is probably going to be really less ⁓ ⁓ operational practice. So there's going to be much, ⁓ ⁓ within that human agent operations, which, hey, that's a, if you're, you know, managing 500 plus contact center seats, think about the budget you are operating on. You are probably thinking, you know, the slimmer the margins, you know, ⁓ the is to run that part of the business. So you really have to be good at it. So ⁓ how businesses now, you know, respond to that trend? Well, What we're learning is that just throwing AI out there as the answer isn't always the easiest and best. Sure, you can just put a bot out there. You've around to see all of the AI point solutions that are there. No offense, there are some really good ones. There are some not so good ones. And the investment to into them typically isn't as much as we would think about bringing up 500, you know, contact center agents, which is great. But, know, making the experience of that AI interaction positive ⁓ really what's going to be the differentiator going forward. And AI can do a lot on your front end, AI on nice on the back end for agents is doing a lot as well because Gina Gibson: Right. Scott: We really treat this as looking at your workflows, your AI agents, and your human agents, and the interaction that goes across all three of those in one of those kind of bubbles that overlap. ⁓ It's are you effectively making sure your AI bots, your workflows, and your human agents all work together? And within... Nice's enlightened AI, we're actually able to really empower agents with the knowledge that you need to give to them at the most critical time when those customers are asking for it. So while you have your knowledge, whether it's in a CRM, whether it's in a third party, or even with it's a nice, we will be able to go in with our AI and learn it, retrieve it, present it to the agent at that real time that it's needed. And that allows the agent to vocalize it or push it back out through a digital channel to that customer at the time it's needed. And then we can take that next step to memorialize it, push it into the workflow, ⁓ now seamlessly send it off ⁓ your CRM or whatever ⁓ the next step in that engagement. And so That's a critical piece that NICE is continually working with. We've got 200 plus within our ecosystem, whether it's CRMs, whether it's ⁓ or other platforms that require those workflows to be managed through. But AI is really allowing us to ⁓ those critical decisions before they're needed to know what step is ⁓ going ⁓ You know, between Copilot and some of our enlightened CSAT capabilities, we're helping customers gain that customer sentiment knowledge and really being able to say, that was a really good interaction. I want my team and this group to see what that interaction is and coach them up to follow it. And then I can measure everybody on what that looks like. And can show or demonstrate real improvement because You know, in this business, companies brands are really made on a sale within that first 30 seconds. if that first 30 seconds is not a good experience in this day and age, there's just too many options. And so if aren't really focused on that, they're going to be losing out. And you can really see, you know, the companies who are investing in it, because the experiences are so good, you're like, Gina Gibson: Yeah. Scott: Damn, that was a really great experience. I'm so glad I out to them or contacted them or whatever. You are just so much more likely to return the business, stay with that business rather moving on. So as AI more prevalent, companies really need to make sure they're taking advantage of that technology because it's only going to be more competitive for them in the CX world. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think we can agree probably that agents are not going to go away. They might diminish, but that AI is there to help them, as you've said, be more productive and work on the harder things, right? ⁓ Just quickly, what's next for Nice? Scott: For sure. Yep. Well, that's a good question. So we are constantly making enhancements. We focus on about four upgrades to the platform a year, and those releases we make public to our customers so they know what's coming along. What I can tell you that I see is, as I was talking about earlier, is this blending of Gina Gibson: what's coming down the pipe this year. Scott: customer experience. And that customer experience kind of covers a lot of different things. not just what channels become available, but it's really within the business now of seamlessly operating from a CX function. It's blending now into my work, my call flow, my workflow, and being able to drive that throughout the entire business. And ⁓ constantly ⁓ automating what we can with our customers and our integrations are only getting stronger. So I can tell you with some of the CRMs that are out there ⁓ there's two or three that we all know and we work with out there, our are becoming far more deeper and we're going to be able to increase the outs, the objects ⁓ and that flow. to really work as one. that's that call turns into that business action, and then we can really refine how to improve the business processes by doing that. So AI is going to continue to evolve. There's no doubt about that.