NICE's CEO says AI is 'the ultimate alchemist' that can transform customer-experience solutions (2024)

• The software company NICE launched Enlighten AI to improve customer service and clients' efficiency.
• Enlighten AI decreases the workload for representatives and enhances customer interactions.
• This article is part of "CXOAIPlaybook" — straight talk from business leaders on how they're testing and using AI.

For "CXO AI Playbook," Business Insider takes a look at mini case studies about AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. We've asked each of the featured companies to tell us about the problems they're trying to solve with AI, who's making these decisions internally, and their vision for using AI in the future.

NICE, which stands for Neptune Intelligence Computer Engineering, is a customer-experience-software company headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey. The organization provides artificial-intelligence-powered products — such as virtual customer-service agents — to more than 25,000 organizations worldwide.

Situation analysis: What problem was NICE trying to solve?

Many companies still use manual processes for customer-service and -experience tasks. Historically, those tasks have been too complex to monitor and, consequently, difficult to automate, NICE CEO Barak Eilam told Business Insider. He added that many organizations still invested more in labor than in technology.

Many companies strive to reduce friction in their customer-service operations, but they aren't always able to provide high-quality assistance or adequately understand what customers need.

"It's a pretty interesting challenge to see how AI can assist in those cases that were hard to solve so far," Eilam said. He views AI as the "ultimate alchemist" that can help bring together people, technology, and processes.

Key staff and partners

NICE projects its revenue will reach $2.7 billion this year. It has more than 8,000 employees, including scientists, engineers, and business and thought leaders. The organization invests about 15% of its revenue back into research and development, Eilam said.

Over the past few years, NICE has shifted more key staff to AI, he said: "It's not just generic AI. They're all really experts in customer experience."

NICE also leveraged its existing customers and the vast amounts of data it's accumulated over the past few decades to build software that helps clients boost their customer-experience initiatives, Eilam said.

AI in action

About 2 ½ years ago, NICE launched Enlighten AI for CX, a set of solutions to optimize self-service and customer-experience operations, improve engagement, and boost customer satisfaction.

Eilam said Enlighten AI "dramatically improves" productivity and efficiency for customer-experience teams by automating many labor-intensive tasks, such as note-taking during customer-service calls. Customer-experience professionals can also quickly access information to take data-driven actions to solve customer problems. Enlighten Autopilot, one of the products within NICE's Enlighten AI for CX repository, enhances self-service with an AI-powered virtual assistant.

With Enlighten Copilot, another product, agents can access real-time insights to offer quick, personalized client interactions instead of putting customers on hold to look up information to answer their questions, Eilam said.

Did it work, and how did leaders know?

"AI is now leading every conversation with our customers," Eilam said. Many existing customers are adding Enlighten AI to their portfolios, and NICE is attracting new customers with its AI capabilities.

For example, the waste-management corporation Republic Services was already using NICE products but added Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction to measure, improve, and assess customer sentiment. Its customer-support system was manual, and the company felt that key insights were being missed.

Using Enlighten AI, Republic Services reduced the manual work of its customer-experience agents. It decreased repeat calls by 30% and lowered the average time spent on calls, despite an increase in seasonal call volume. The company also reduced negative customer sentiment by 33%.

The tech company Open Network Exchange also uses Enlighten AI to improve its customer care. Previously, ONE used manual quality-assurance processes and chose random customer calls to evaluate. This hindered supervisors' ability to objectively and holistically assess agents' skills that influenced customer experiences — and therefore interfered with their ability to provide meaningful coaching.

The organization implemented Enlighten AI to monitor 100% of its customer interactions and gather insights about the behaviors influencing customer sentiment. Within 90 days, the company began improving how it coached agents, saving supervisors four to five hours a week.

What's next?

NICE continues to focus on AI innovation, Eilam said.

He told BI the company saw many opportunities to expand its AI offerings by partnering with organizations that still spend 90% of their budgets on labor and 10% on technology and continue to rely on manual processes.

"A lot of new, big things are coming," Eilam said, adding that NICE planned to announce new products at its upcoming Interactions Customer Conference 2024 in June.

"That allows us to have a very optimistic view of the future," he said.

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