Comprehensive software reviews to make better IT decisions
Is NICE Enlighten AI the Kiss of Death for Traditional Call Centers?
There is a customer service revolution underway, and it is being led by customer experience vendors who leverage AI to work alongside humans. These vendors are transforming customer journeys into highly personalized experiences, disrupting existing customer service ecosystems, and potentially spelling the end of call centers as we know them. Their large language models (LLMs) and machine learning (ML) algorithms manage and learn from an enormous volume of interactions, far beyond what the human brain can compute and manage.
We recently had the opportunity to review NICE, an enterprise-level contact center as a service (CCaaS) vendor. NICE’s Enlighten AI features 11+ targeted modules developed from over 1,000 CX-specific AI models and data points. With almost 40 years on the market, they have decades of experience and can use this data in their AI ecosystem. NICE positions Enlighten AI as a technology that is able to automate customer service, analyze and identify issues, and create more personalized interactions, including:
- Deliver automated and efficient AI customer service
Automate routine tasks to free up agents to handle more complex problems, improving efficiency.
- Use data to analyze and fix issues
Analyze data patterns and trends in huge data sets, identify potential issues, and actively improve the AI customer care experience.
- Craft a personalized experience
Quick and accurate responses reduce wait times, improve productivity, and increase customer satisfaction.
What’s under the hood?
Enlighten AI is built on the following products for CX:
- Enlighten Copilot: This AI provides real-time assistance to the reps and identifies and automates tasks, reducing cognitive load and improving efficiency. It provides behavioral guidance, compliance alerts, and even potential sales opportunities to improve the performance of individual reps and supervisors. For example, if you run a large grocery chain and need to sell more strawberries because they will go bad, this agent will directly work on that framework when speaking with a customer who is trying to decide whether to purchase strawberries or apples, while at the same time delivering a personalized customer experience.
- Enlighten Autopilot: An AI autopilot that can fully resolve customer needs using conversational AI and optimized with Enlighten XO, a set of AI models specifically for experience optimization.
- Enlighten Actions: Generative AI with a conversational AI interface built for leaders. It makes it easy for them to develop insights, identify automation opportunities, and create knowledge base articles on commonly referenced topics.
CXone: A solution for enterprise customer service & rage clicking
With the addition of AI, CXone has been designed to handle complex and rich customer interactions across almost any platform. It can replace disjointed technologies that limit the ability to get a single view of your customer. Unlike general AI models, NICE claims that their solution is purpose-built for CX with models specifically trained on decades of customer service data. It detects behaviors like rage-clicking and proactively addresses underlying issues that will improve customers satisfaction.
When presenting, NICE highlighted these key features as to why someone would choose their software:
Key features of CXone
- Ease of integration: NICE Enlighten AI integrates into existing tech, enhancing its ability to personalize and optimize the customer service experience according to the customer’s needs and the agents available.
- Security and compliance: The solution is compliant with FedRAMP, PCI DSS, HITRUST, SOC2, and GDPR.
- Streamline stack: Through their comprehensive offerings, NICE can help enterprise companies reduce the number of separate tools and systems needed to support customer service.
With these features, NICE reports that their experience up to a 350% increase in ROI.
NICE is a leader in the SoftwareReviews CCaaS Data Quadrant
NICE is recognized as a market leader in the contact center as a service (CCaaS), consistently earning praise from reviewers. With over $1.5 billion in annual sales, the company stands out as a major player in the category.
NICE has a long history of innovation. CXone is their flagship product and is highly favored in the CCaaS sector (see Data Quadrant).
Users praise CXone for its ease of integration, automation, and feature set.
NICE rounds out its market offerings with the Enlighten AI solution set, which builds on its original customer service software technology.
Primary concerns of CXone:
- Cost: Their pricing is often seen as high and might not be suited to smaller businesses.
- Learning curve: Like most software in this area, there is a learning curve for those who would like to implement NICE.
Our take
We have reached an inflection point where AI is leading the charge for massive transformation in IT services, and customer service is no exception. What used to take months or years to code into a customer experience is now taking days. The sheer volume of data processed in customer experiences outpaces our ability to digest and comprehend it, but AI can.
With Enlighten, NICE has taken a giant step toward managing vast data lakes of interactions, understanding them, and using artificial intelligence to enhance the customer experience. This positions them as a contender for enterprise-level solutions using customer experience AI – and certainly as one that should be on a shortlist for evaluation.
AI solutions like NICE are poised to bring about a massive shift in how call centers, customer service reps, and chatbots operate. And since a chatbot never gets cranky or frustrated, this analyst thinks it might even be better than the human experience. We fully expect that solutions like NICE Enlighten will have a massive impact on how customer interactions are led in the future.
Want to know More?
Read related research or explore our AI Marketplace offerings.