1. With the instability of the Middle East situation, what is NICE doing to protect its R&D and other corporate initiatives, in case this situation becomes so unstable that it inhibits NICE from conducting business?
Many back-up structures are in place, including outsourced manufacturing to a worldwide company to prevent any disruption in our production and distribution from occurring. Additionally, backup of our production sites are in place in Ireland and North Carolina that can be up and running in 10 hours. From an R&D perspective, we have measures in place that allow us to ramp up R&D in our Denver location within a few days notice.
2. It may be an understatement to say that there are many companies in the monitoring sector. How does NICE differentiate itself from its competitors?
NICE revolutionized the way contact centers utilize recordings and data collected from performance management processes when we introduced the concept of Customer Experience Management over 2 years ago. This leads to a much more comprehensive suite of products beyond anything offered in the industry today, to enable contact centers to truly manage their customer experiences. These include customer satisfaction surveys, “cradle to grave” view of customer interactions, eLearning, executive portals and analysis tools to pinpoint interactions based on a wide range of parameters, including hold times, transfers, long call durations, low customer satisfaction scores, key words and phrases, stress, etc., in addition to the traditional suite of quality management and agent evaluation applications we provide.
This has resulted in significant success and market growth resulting in NICE becoming a clear market leader with over 67% of Fortune 100 companies using NICE solutions, over 15,000 customers across 30,000 sites, the position as #1 in market share according Datamonitor and Frost & Sullivan, and #1 in the Magic Quadrant assessment performed by Gartner Group. Our differentiators have resulted in tremendous growth and success.
3. Many of your competitors are actively enhancing their current offerings, i.e. performance management. What enhancements can we expect from NICE in the near future?
Contact centers can expect numerous advancements as well as additional tools that will make their lives so much easier. Contact centers are challenged with a wealth of performance data from multiple sources today. Obtaining a complete snapshot of performance is quite difficult.
Personalized web portals and performance management dashboards will be coming soon enabling agents, supervisors, and up to the corporate executive to customize performance data they see and display it the way they want to see it. All vital performance metrics and reports will be colorfully displayed based on what is important to the viewer in a custom portal view. These metrics include quality scores, customer satisfaction ratings, productivity (e.g., holds, transfers, call duration, calls per hour, and more), and customer data from desktop applications. Users can drill-down to investigate root causes of trends and patterns, down to the specific customer survey response, quality evaluation, or the recording itself.
These are just a few of the exciting advancements that contact centers can expect from NICE.
4. Please comment on how the integration of NICE and Thales sales forces and R&D organizations are progressing. Have you seen some revenue and profitability benefits from the acquisition?
Everything has been working according to plan. In the U.S. we have 100% integration of our sales, marketing, operational staff; we've captured 2nd place in public safety and are in the lead in many large public safety procurements which we expect to win. Furthermore, we're eliminating duplicate costs, gained new markets (particularly public safety) and nearly doubled revenues in the UK.
5. In this economy significant profitability has been difficult to achieve. Although NICE is an industry leader in the monitoring market sector, what does the company have to do to improve its bottom line?
NICE has been very fortunate in this tight economy due to recent trends that have placed NICE Systems in an enviable position of strength. These include:
The economy has created much more cautious decision makers who place greater emphasis on the stability and future viability of the vendor as a key criterion for selection. Companies are assessing vendors based on their financial stability in an effort to ensure that their investment is safe. This leaves few vendors standing. NICE's continued growth and strong financial position has served us well during the tight economy.
Additionally, organizations are implementing cost-cutting measures, one of which is to consolidate their IT functions. This has resulted in standardizing on one recording vendor across their enterprise where previously they had multiple vendors that resulted in inefficiencies. This has also served NICE well in that only NICE can provide all of the recording options (100% recording, random, selective recording of calls, screens, emails, VoIP, etc.,) that they require across all of their contact centers, and has the national and global presence to support their contact centers across the country and around the globe.
New regulations and recent litigation has driven a significant uptake in 100% recording for risk management and verification purposes. NICE's extensive experience in 100% recording in mission critical environments as the recording standard by the FCC for all air traffic control communications as well as trading floor environments make NICE the obvious and safe choice for organizations to ensure that 100% of their interactions are captured and securely stored. Niche players in quality assurance applications, such as, Witness have hurried to add 100% recording capabilities to their product line.
NICE has achieved 46% year over year growth resulting from these 3 major trends.
6. NICE has been a strong proponent of Customer Experience Management (CEM) which advocates, among many things, the utilization of information captured at the agent level by senior management in an organization in order to make informed decisions. What is the adoption rate of CEM by these organizations? What can we expect in the future?
NICE has seen significant interest and growth in the adoption of our CEM business intelligence offerings. The tight economy has driven the need for organizations to get closer to their customers and understand their needs better and try to keep them loyal. This trend has placed tremendous pressure on contact centers to provide top-notch service as well as to feedback to the enterprise about what customers are saying when they call the company, as they strive to grow and retain their customers.
Tools, such as Executive Connect from NICE, has enabled executives to dial in to listen to customer interactions with their company, from anywhere at any time. They are able to target specific types of calls to hone in on areas of importance to the business.
NICE was also the first to deliver word-spotting and emotion detection tools to enable organizations to pinpoint interactions containing valuable customer intelligence. For instance, calls where the customer mentioned the competitor's name or promotion, where the customer was irate, etc., in order to improve their products and services to better meet the needs of customers.
7. NICE recently introduced NICE Customer Feedback Solution that enables customers to quickly evaluate a call with agent. Do you have any tangible results/benefits from this Feedback capability that you can share us?
Customer Experience Management solutions, like NICE Feedback, an IVR survey application, enables organizations to obtain customer feedback on the service level provided by the contact center This has resulted in measurable improvements far beyond what traditional quality management vendors in the industry can deliver.
Organizations are using call recording to improve its understanding of customer needs, what they are saying about their products, services, and competitors and to identify quickly pinpoint breakdowns that lead to customer dissatisfaction and defection. Executives are tapping customer insights using new applications to spot key words and phrases, stress detection, and analytics. The improvements reach far beyond agent performance and expand throughout the enterprise, including:
Increased customer satisfaction by 8%
Reduced new hire agent turnover by 27%
Improved first-call resolution by over 18%
Increase in quality from a minimum of 7% and up to 40% improvement
Decrease in off-line training time by 11%