The State of CX report: We’ve got plenty to share from our abundance of riches

NICE is lucky to have an abundance of riches—I’m speaking of data, of course. Through our proprietary AI built just for CX, we’ve gathered data for over three decades amounting to billions of interactions. But that’s not the only abundance we have—we also have the data expertise to interpret the data and identify the most powerful insights on the state of CX today.

I could go on about how we’re the only CX company with this kind of data and analysis. Instead, I’d rather focus on how these insights benefit you—a CX leader, a C-suite executive, a contact center supervisor. Our top-level insights can drive your next critical business decision, leading you to further growth that outpaces the competition.

Insight 1: Happy customers deliver outsized stock gains to the business

Crunching all the reams of data uncovered a firm validation on the value of CX. When comparing companies’ sentiment scores with their stock prices, it’s clear that these metrics have a direct correlation—companies with higher sentiment scores outperform their peers in stock value. We already know that it’s good business to keep customers happy, but our data shows an unmistakable connection between customer satisfaction and business performance.

The upshot of this correlation to business leaders is obvious: the better the customer experiences they can deliver to their customers, and outperform their competition, the more their business will succeed in the most tangible of returns.

CXone Mpower makes exceptional CX possible by analyzing 100% of customer interactions, whether they’re with an agent, on a self-service digital channel, or includes transfers among a range of channels. By capturing all interactions and analyzing them with our built-for-CX AI models, we reveal key trends in sentiment and behavior. This helps you to quickly spot problematic issues and winning strategies to help you continuously enhance experiences and set new CX standards.

Insight 2: Agents are your best brand ambassadors for customer satisfaction

Nested within this insight is good news and also a challenge to companies. First, the good news. Your agents are the best representatives of the company to your customer. A top-performing agent is worth their proverbial weight in gold for the positive impact they have on your CX.

The challenge, however, are variable agent performances. Agents in the lower half give different experiences to customers, disappointing them. Yet, if their performance scores are brought up closer to the average, overall KPIs for CX and in the contact center are boosted.

NICE helps companies get a grip on agent performance variability by establishing a centralized, intelligent quality management system. This way, companies can standardize processes, identify improvement areas, and optimize agent performance across the entire organization. Low performers can quickly be identified, and more importantly, be given the precise coaching and tools to bring them up to speed.

Insight 3: Positive agent soft-skill behaviors significantly boost customer sentiment

But what, exactly, can agents do while on a call with a customer to boost customer sentiment? It comes down to soft skills. Treating the customer with empathy, respect, and concern goes a very long way to making customers feel valued. The right soft skills can help calm a customer, rather than escalating the situation. The right soft skills also help the agent efficiently gather the information they need to resolve the issue promptly.

We found that when agents demonstrate more soft skills, customer sentiment scores follow. Investing in soft skills over mere process and technical training is a sure-fire way to deliver standout experiences in a crowded market.

NICE Enlighten AI is designed to support your agents to develop their soft skills. NICE Enlighten is purpose-built AI for CX and it measures nine key agent behaviors that influence customer sentiment.

Enlighten objectively measures these soft skills on every single interaction, so it’s not just looking at one small sample that can skew results. It consistently evaluates every interaction and enables targeted, data-driven coaching for agents. It’s like the AI assistant that every contact center supervisor wants.

Insight 4: Customer sentiment soars with unified AI hyper platform adoption

You can measure customer sentiment via surveys, but it’s only capturing from one angle what customers are thinking. And consider all the customers who choose not to respond—that’s leaving out a lot of feedback. Industry survey data offers a starting point for understanding customer sentiment, but they are limited in providing insights that show next best steps.

Instead, when organizations learn from their own customer interactions via sentiment data, they can take targeted action to improve that metric. Our data analysis shows that our customers outperform industry survey trends.

After all, customer interactions are the ultimate source of truth for measuring sentiment. AI captures every interaction, providing an objective, consistent view of customer experience. And with captured interactions measuring in the billions, AI-driven insights offer a comprehensive picture of sentiment.

CXone Mpower helps by orchestrating workflows, agents, and knowledge to accelerate decision-making and pinpointing precise steps. When applications and data are spread out over a complicated infrastructure that is not well interconnected, it limits the ability to collect, view, and understand customer insights. CXone Mpower helps you seamlessly transition from measuring sentiment to taking impactful actions.

Insight 5: The stakes of CX are higher than ever, yet most customer interactions with an agent are highly inefficient

Customers want more, they want better, and they want it now. Expectation transfer due to the best CX out there makes these expectations rise even further. The pressure is on agents to deliver customer experiences to remember.

Yet, our analysis found that only a small percentage of a customer interaction with an agent is spent on activities that positively influence customer sentiment. The rest of the time is squandered on other tasks, wasting precious moments during which the customer’s patience is wearing down.

This interaction time is critical for your brand because your agents are often the only people that your customers will interact with at your company—they are the face and voice of your brand. Agents have a short sliver of time to assess the situation to resolve it, all while personalizing the interaction and providing a human touch.

Inefficient interactions are problematic for your company, too, because every wasted second on one interaction is a second that could have been spent with another waiting customer. And as we all know, time is money in the contact center.

Help is on the way. NICE Enlighten Copilot maximizes customer interactions by providing agents with real-time guidance and insights on the interaction at hand. The agent can read the prompt to say just the right thing at the right time, whether that’s offering a discount, expressing empathy, or understanding the current call within the context of the customer’s last call. With these on-point, lightning-fast insights, customers go on their way quickly and satisfied with the outcome.

The sky’s the limit

With billions of CX interactions and purpose-built AI, NICE partners with customers to bring sharp insights to strategize the next phase of your CX. If there’s one take-away message from our data analysis—it’s that improving customer interactions to boost customer sentiment has a measurable, positive impact on a business’s bottom line.

Want to see all the data points that fuel the insights? Download the full State of CX report. See how other companies have soared with NICE, and how they are leveraging CX AI solutions that can send your CX into the stratosphere.