ICYMI: Hear from the top thought leaders who converged for our Digital CX Week 2022

Digital CX Week 2022 brought together some of today’s top CX industry thought leaders for three days of insightful discussions about how companies can better harness digital-first tech tools available now—as well as what’s on the horizon.

Read more takeaways from the sessions below and watch the on-demand sessions here for a deeper dive.

CXi: The Next Frontier

Our Digital CX Week 2022 kicked off with a session led by John Willcutts, Vice President of Digital Solutions, NICE CXone, who set the stage for the event by asking participants if they’re maximizing available digital solutions to better facilitate an efficient customer journey.

“CXi stands for customer experience interactions. And why that is so important is that we are looking at a new world where customer interactions are coming from numerous places, and they're coming at us from all these different entry points, and largely being managed by separate silos,” he said.

Willcutts laid out a holistic vision for managing all customer interactions on a single, data-driven platform to eliminate blind spots along the journey.

The upside of having so many ways to communicate with a company, whether it be phone, chat, social media, email or any digital channel, is the convenience factor but it has also made the customer journey to reach a resolution disjointed.

“The silos that we've created in the industry have made it very difficult for customers to manage across all the channels you see here. And the more difficult we've made it for customers, we've made it as difficult for the agents and, in turn, for your business to manage and get the outcomes that you're looking for,” Willcutts said.

That’s where NICE CXone can bring value to businesses and customers alike.

“Some people look at it as a sprint to solve CXi; others look at it as a marathon. And it's a journey that you begin—what we're telling you today is that you have a partner with CXone that can deliver all these solutions in one place, and that you can start from wherever you want,” Willcutts said.

For more information and a demo, visit “Choose your path to CXone.”

Welcome to the Advanced Digital Ecosystem

During “Welcome to the Advanced Digital Ecosystem,” advisory and analysis firm Opus Research shared its survey findings highlighting how companies consistently underuse conversational and digital interaction data that could be key to improving digital experiences for customers.

Those missed opportunities were at the heart of this session, featuring two analysts from Opus Research, Dan Miller and Derek Top, as well as digital expert from NICE, Elizabeth Tobey, Head of Marketing, Digital Solutions.

As Dan Miller pointed out, the last few years has spurred an “important transformation for how people were perceiving their digital tools and how they took command of it.”

A firm’s contact with customers used to be via a single channel at a time, but that journey has become more fluid. “It's every channel, and it's at any opportunity, and people are walking around with their smartphones,” Miller said. “We’re talking about millions—and maybe billions—of contacts that are part of these asynchronous conversations that customers are carrying on with companies.”

Emphasizing the existing challenge, Tobey added, “The idea is that businesses are growing, and the demands of consumers are scaling faster than a company can keep pace. There’s also the problem that a lot of brands are challenged with even knowing what their challenge is, and where they should first try and solve the problem.”

For the customer experience, it’s one journey and businesses need to understand where to improve in the presence of global market conditions changing drastically in unanticipated ways, Tobey continued.

“So those curveballs need to be addressed, and a lot of different solutions need to be created or workflows changed to evolve,” she said. “From our perspective, all of that is one cohesive unit . . . and (NICE) can help you figure out which prioritization is going to be most impactful to your business.”

The path to resolution includes:

• Transforming self-service into customer empowerment opportunities
• Listening to and understanding customer conversations to provide better experiences
• Identifying gaps and overcoming siloes to benefit from advanced digital initiatives

Leveraging conversational data was a hot topic in this session as Opus shared its survey results showing over 80% of respondents say they are actively using ASR to transcribe speech data while two-thirds of them acknowledge they are significantly underusing the audio.

Imagine the Possibilities: The Future State of Your Customer Journey

Imagining a single, data-driven platform that captures the entire customer journey actually requires zero imagination because NICE can deliver this experience now. That was the key takeaway from this session featuring Kevin Lee, NICE Global Head of Sales and Digital Strategy, who led a live demo highlighting the capabilities of our data, AI and analytics.

Lee presented a simulation of a consumer interacting with a brand for different reasons over time—and how NICE CXone, the world’s leading cloud CX platform, connects the dots in a seamless way for consumers seeking resolution.

A coordinated digital-first approach starts with deploying Enlighten XO as an AI self-service tool to analyze customer intents and the multiple layers inside the care conversations to pull out the categories of conversations and how they are related.

“You can then further drill into reservations and start to see, ‘Wow, these conversations are very complex.’ And right now, many of you are thinking, ‘Oh, great, I've got this, I've got keyword spotting. Why is this unique or different?’ Well, this is where it really starts to get different,” Lee said.

A business can better understand how those conversations are made up, as well as the intents and use cases under a specific conversation and rapidly accelerate the time to value to leverage the best conversations with the highest customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

Demonstrating the power of CXone, Lee also walked through a case where a journey starts with a customer searching on Google or another search engine to put in their query.

“This is one of the most fundamental differences in our approach. Along with using data, it's that you can't wait behind a toll-free number and wait for that inbound call anymore,” Lee said. “Your consumers have needs events, and they're going to Google and if you’re not there at the top of the stack ranking, someone else is capturing those needs events.”

Knowledge Done Right

Choosing a new knowledge management system is an easy choice when you find the right solution, as demonstrated by data platform Splunk. In this session, Splunk’s content team discussed how CXone Expert transformed its Splunk Lantern Customer Success Center external site, taking a deep technical product and making it accessible to the public leveraging the knowledge management system.

Aaron Rice, General Manager, CXone Expert, led a conversation with Jennifer Swallow and Kaye Chapman of Splunk, about their challenge and how CXone helped them solve it.

The evolution began in 2020 when Swallow started at Splunk with the goal of creating an easier to use public portal featuring information written by Splunk experts.

From May 2021 to May 2022, the site saw new user growth of 4,000 and returning growth of 15,000. Beyond Splunk’s core team of two, the site crowdsources content from an estimated 1,000 within the customer success organization that could be contributing. Despite turnover within the Splunk content team during this time, there was no interruption to its self-service center.

“The thing that I love about knowledge is that it can be a stable buffer in the storm of whatever goes on,” Rice said. “As you move forward, you're going to continue growing, and your customers on the front end don't feel any of that turnover happening. They've got the stable self-service resource out there that's always on, that they can always go to no matter what's happening internally or externally for Splunk.”

Swallow and Chapman explained the gap that the site, powered by helps fill, and how they’ve aligned with the customer service team to make the content easier for everybody to use, including spotlighting featured articles.

“What we found was that once customers have read the (technical) docs, that's great but how do they actually apply that product then to have business outcomes that they want to have . . . We wanted to serve all customers so we started this knowledge base in order to fill that gap and sort of become a CSM (Splunk customer success manager) in a digital self-service format,” Swallow said.

To better serve the site’s returning visitors, Splunk features articles it thinks visitors would find valuable—a tactic that Rice applauded. “It’s just an indication you’re doing it right,” he said. “I think in a world where everybody’s getting spammed-there’s great relief in that kind of experience where the customer feels in control of what they consume and when they consume it.”

The Joy of Proactive

Mark Smith, founder and CEO of CXone ContactEngine, the leader in proactive conversational AI, hosted a sit-down interview with Nicola Millard, principal innovation partner at BT, a British multinational telecommunications firm, to talk more about the meaning of proactive customer service.

What is proactive customer service? In a nutshell, it means initiating customer interactions at the right time, taking action to address consumer concerns before they escalate to a problem and taking the initiative to identify potential problems and take steps to find a solution. Effective ways to achieve proactive customer service include consistently monitoring customer feedback and taking action to get customers help more immediately.

“Start where you've got a win for the customer—a better experience, and a win for you as a brand—save money, and then you can travel more through other areas where the ROIs might be a little bit less but where the customer experience improvement will give you a greater lifetime value,” Smith said.

For example, a contact center call to a customer in need of assistance to help troubleshoot a tech issue that can be handled remotely is a minor expense compared with sending an engineer to a home when that may not even be necessary.

“If you can get enough data about the customer, you can start to figure out what that intention state is. And then you can start to build journeys on top of that and that could be about, ‘let's be proactive with the customer,’” Millard said. “It could be about giving them a phone number to ring if they want to talk to somebody, it could be taking them down an automated journey. I think the trick is trying to figure out where that customer is on the journey and then signpost very effectively.”

So, they have a goal, and then underlying that goal is an intent, which drives their channel choices, she said.

“We're always obsessed in the contact center industry about channels. And customers aren't that obsessed about channels; they're more obsessed about goals,” Millard said.

Watch the sessions on demand, download our 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report and get a CXone demo

In case you missed our recent event, you can watch all the Digital CX Week 2022 sessions on demand. 

For real-time feedback from consumers and senior decision-makers about the digital-first customer journey, download our 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report.

The report offers an insider’s perspective on what’s working and whether businesses are living up to their customers’ expectations, identifying major gaps between what customers think about their support journeys and how seriously business leaders are taking their expectations and showing that these disconnects have a major impact on brand loyalty.

In fact, the report found 57% of customers will abandon a brand after only one or two negative interactions, and that 53% of businesses believe their customers are very satisfied with their existing self-service offerings with only 15% of consumers agreeing.

Find out more about how CXone has the digital CX solutions to elevate the customer experience, watch our demo and then contact us for a quote.