One of the major announcements at contact-center-as-a-service leader NiCE Ltd.‘s Interactions user event in Las Vegas last week was a partnership with Snowflake Inc., the cloud-based data warehousing company.

This might seem like a strange partnership as typical partners for contact center vendors include customer relationship management companies, service firms and the like, but this addresses a huge customer pain point, which is management of data.

At the event, NiCE positioned the collaboration as being able to “unlock the full value of customer interaction data” across the front, middle and back office. The collaboration combines NiCE CXone Mpower’s AI for customer service automation with Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing to enable joint customers to access and update data to automate customer service at scale. By leveraging their complementary capabilities, the companies said, they will make accessing the wealth of customer data significantly easier to unlock the insights stored in traditional silos.

When I talk to customers about what holds them back from moving forward with artificial intelligence in the contact center, it’s data management. Customer related data is scattered everywhere, which creates an AI problem. There’s an axiom in data science that states, “Good data leads to good insights,” and that’s true. But silos of data lead to fragmented insights, and that’s what most companies have today.

The partnership with Snowflake creates a single source of truth for the data that NiCE will use for its AI features and functions.

The recent collaboration between NiCE and Snowflake offers several significant benefits, the primary concentration being on the consolidation of data, automation and improved customer experience. Here are some details of three significant benefits:

Breaking data silos and merging customer interaction data

With the partnership, organizations can securely and easily share front office generated customer data with middle and back-office systems using Snowflake Secure Data Sharing. This enables data previously siloed across different departments or applications to be merged into a single, trusted data lake on Snowflake. This unification enables AI to be applied end-to-end across the customer journey and prevent data fragmentation.

Enabling automation across the enterprise

By connecting customer interaction data with the underlying operational systems, organizations can automate cross departmental business process, which historically have been difficult to impossible to automate. Examples include service fulfillment, billing, claims processing and account updates. This speeds up processes, improves accuracy and efficiency across the customer lifecycle.

Accelerating AI adoption and enabling smarter business choices

With a secure, centralized data lake that can be shared across the company, organizations can get the most of their customer experience data for AI use cases. This includes better reporting, richer analytics and the ability to enable AI-driven workflows and more personalized customer interactions. By providing a single point of truth for interaction data, the partnership enables better decision making and facilitates the creation of AI-driven CX. In short, accurate AI begets more AI.

NiCE now available on the AWS Marketplace, making purchasing easier for customers

Another partnership announced at Interactions was that NiCE’s CXone Mpower platform is now available in the Amazon Web Services Inc. Marketplace. This has raised some eyebrows by some industry watchers because AWS has its own product, Amazon Connect, available on the Marketplace, and it’s easy to assume that Amazon would direct customers to it.

However, that assumption isn’t true. AWS often has competing vendor, including Talkdesk and Genesys, in their marketplace as the goal is to give customers choice. I’ve talked to the Marketplace team about its philosophy, and they’ve told me there is no preferential treatment given to Amazon products over competitive. This creates a situation where the product teams need to ensure the homegrown product is competitive as, if it’s not, customers will pass on it in favor of another. The customer wins as they get choice and the competitiveness drives product innovation. The other benefit to customers is they can spend down any unused credits by purchasing through the Marketplace, which simplifies purchasing.

Also, as part of this agreement, NiCE and AWS will co-innovate, enabling customers to leverage their own data across the customer journey and combine NiCE’s own models with AWS services. Under this agreement, NiCE and AWS are actively co-innovating, allowing organizations to leverage their own data across the front, mid and back office in a way that combines NiCE CX AI-specific models with new AWS technology, such as Amazon Q and Bedrock.

I’ve seen a fair amount of rhetoric since the announcement regarding NiCE not having a history of partnering and this isn’t exactly true. Though the company does choose to build its own technology in adjacent areas, such as in workforce and quality management, which has given it a platform advantage, it has a long history of partnering with companies to create bilateral value.

It has a wide range of system integrator, service provider and technology partners that add to NiCE’s offering. Snowflake and AWS are an extension of that.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: NiCE