When I was 17, my first car was a 67 Cadillac. Sure, it floated like a cloud, but that was because the steering linkage was so loose that it was more like guiding than steering. One headlight housing was cracked, so that light was became my search light that was watching the bushes by the road as I drove by. It had lots of interior room because it had no seats. It had a powerful V8 engine, powerful that is when all eight cylinders were working. You get the picture. But at the age of 17, and my first car, it met my minimum requirements. Later, with the responsibilities of a spouse and parent, my minimum requirements became much higher.
I tell this story because we get questions about NICE CXone's ‘Minimum Requirements’. Does the agent station really need 256 Kb of Internet bandwidth, why can’t we use cell phones as our primary phone, if 200 ms is the maximum latency, how come I was able to launch the my Agent from Chile, with a latency of 300 ms? Etc, etc, etc. To address the details of the requirements, we recently published an ‘Agent Recommendations’ document that describes ‘Best Practices’ or minimum requirements if you will for an agent. There are many factors that go in to the design of a hosted contact center environment. Things like number of agents, are there At Home agents, computer telephony integrations, database interactions, service level requirements, other business demands and processes, reliability of services and last but not least, money.
Our goal at NICE is to help you design the contact center applications that meet your needs and provide you with the best possible service and service experience for your customers. The Agent Recommendations document is just a couple of pages. It is not a contact center design document. To assist you in this effort, we augment Best Practices with Professional Services, Sales Engineers and Business Analysts. NICE CXone is a great product and it is very robust. It will function across a wide range of conditions because it is designed to work even when things are not ideal. If a customer wants to build a contact center with the reliability and attributes of my 67 Cadillac, it can be done, but I can’t recommend it. My family is important to me, as I know your business is important to you. Plan, design and build the best contact center and application that your business model can afford. Then if there are problems and the conditions become less than ideal, NICE will carry you through those problems, because that is what it is designed to do.