Contact center market leader NICE Ltd. used the recent Enterprise Connect show to add to its artificial intelligence portfolio with the release of Enlighten XM (Experience Memory), which adds AI-infused contextual memory to the contact center.

The solution brings together a wide range of customer data, including conversational information, metadata and analytics, and creates a memory graph for each customer. This information is fed into the large language models’ deep data memory to create what NICE calls “hyper-personalized” customer journeys.

NICE customers will be able to understand, remember and dynamically adapt to each customer’s preferences based on their interaction history. The company can do this because it bucked the trend of using off-the-shelf LLMs and instead built its own customer experience-focused AI models.

At Enterprise Connect, I had the opportunity to discuss this with Andy Traba, vice president of product management for NICE CXone. He explained the significance of contextual memory in customer interactions.

“Virtual agents are trained from the best agents, and now we are adding this contextual memory so it will remember who the person is and what their experiences are,” he said. “This lets it adapt the language used with that customer. Do they like to be communicated with in a warm, sensitive manner or get to the facts? Some people do not mind an emoji in chat; others will get triggered negatively when they see one and now we know that per customer.”

Every contact center vendor is now tapping into the power of generative AI to create greater personalization capabilities, but NICE is the only vendor I have seen that can dynamically update the models per conversation.

In addition to Enlighten XM, NICE made several other announcements at Enterprise Connect. These include:

Updates to Enlighten Copilot

The latest set of enhancements to Enlighten Copilot uses AI to meet the needs of supervisors and CX decision-makers. To put the announcement in context, NICE referenced research conducted by Metrigy that indicates a notable surge in the adoption of AI in workplaces, surpassing the 40% mark in 2023. Organizations using AI to enhance customer interactions have seen significant improvements, including a 30% reduction in interaction handle time, a 36% boost in sales figures, and a 29% decrease in agent attrition rates.

With those figures in mind, AI-infused Enlighten Copilot is primed to help CX leaders transform the contact center into a higher-value function. One of the Fortune 100 companies I met with told me they were looking to use AI to shift their agents from reactive support to proactive revenue generation. Enlighten Copilot is primed to address the needs of brands looking to evolve their contact centers into customer experience platforms.

Details of the updates include:

Enlighten Copilot for Agents aims to improve agent-assisted interactions by providing agents with content that eliminates manual searches. Copilot generates real-time, conversational responses to steer interactions to favorable outcomes. It can identify and suggest tailored compliance measures and upsell opportunities to agents during conversations. In addition, Copilot can provide both real-time and post-interaction summaries.

NICE Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors enables supervisors to be more strategic by offering insights from Copilot for Agents data. Supervisors have real-time access to agent performance, which should help improve team effectiveness. Copilot for Supervisors provides a holistic view of agent performance, including real-time and historical data for speech patterns, resolution times, and customer sentiment. It can also identify where supervisors should target their coaching.

NICE Enlighten Actions provides access to an organization’s CX data sourced from NICE Enlighten Copilot and CXone. CX leaders can use its conversational interface to address immediate needs without additional coding. They also gain the ability to use unstructured data to help achieve goals. In addition, NICE Enlighten Actions integrates with native and third-party apps and data within the CXone suite.

AI-powered employee support

In the announcement, Barry Cooper, President of the CX Division at NICE, underscored the potential of the Enlighten Copilot suite and discussed its role in offering AI-powered employee support within the CX domain.

“The next-gen NICE Enlighten Copilot is the industry’s leading AI-powered employee assist, purpose-built for CX,” he said. “Built from thousands of models trained on CX-specific interactions, NICE Enlighten Copilot amplifies skilled labor, automating repetitive tasks and delivering faster access to knowledge. With NICE Enlighten Actions, CX leaders can increase decision velocity and realize business goals faster, streamlining operations and ultimately driving exceptional customer experience.”

Some final thoughts

The promise of AI is not in replacing employees or the much-ballyhooed taking over the world. Instead, it’s about making us all more efficient and productive. The Enlighten suite allows brands to make their agents smarter and work faster by providing timely, relevant information and offloading many mundane interactions and tasks that drive up agent churn.

Supervisor enhancements are critical in a hybrid work world where agents work from home. Contact center managers are no longer in the same building as many agents and can’t listen to audible cues.

NICE has been a mainstay in the Gartner MQ for CCaaS for years, and it has been early in shipping AI features. This set of announcements leverages the breadth of its offering and the depth of its data to create a number of unique capabilities.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting.

Photo: Nice