Big CX News from AWS, NICE, & Salesforce

In another week full of big CX announcements, we’ve seen an exciting addition to Amazon Connect. Elsewhere, NICE has bolstered its contact center forecasting capabilities.

Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.

AWS has added an Analytics Data Lake to its CCaaS platform: Amazon Connect.

The new solution provides a single source of contact center data, pulling on contact records, agent performance information, conversational intelligence insights, and more.

In doing so, AWS claims that it eliminates the need to develop and maintain complex data pipelines.

Instead, contact centers can work from that single source to create custom reports using data from across Amazon Connect.

They may also pull data from third-party sources to bolster their reports using AWS’s zero-ETL integrations, which combine, clean, and normalize data from different sources.

With this complete, normalized data set, contact center managers may apply the business intelligence tools of their choice, like Amazon Quicksight.

From there, contact center managers can analyze the information that matters most to them, developing a centralized view of their most critical customer, employee, and business outcomes.

Yet, the contact center can also build custom reports for various other stakeholders, including agents, supervisors, and operations teams, including the most pertinent insights for each persona. (Read on…).

NICE has added an Inventory Insights module to its True to Interval (TTI) Analytics workforce management (WFM) solution.

The TTI Analytics solution logs contact center interactions in the interval they occur.

That has proven to be a popular module amongst contact center forecasters. After all, service teams typically log each contact in the reporting period it’s completed. However, many contacts will begin in the prior period.

As such, contact centers – especially large operations with 15-minute reporting intervals – previously had no way to accurately capture demand in the period it begins.

TTI Analytics solves this problem, and NICE has now expanded the solution with Inventory Insights.

The new feature takes that active reporting into the back-office to enable a common planning interval.

In doing so, contact centers may better manage high interaction complexity across customer-facing conversations and related non-customer-facing activities.

As a result, NICE hopes that customers can unlock new cross-office efficiencies that will drive “improved bottom-line performance”. (Read on…).

Salesforce has shared insight into its acquisition strategy by discussing its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) framework.

The CRM provider cited this framework as a critical reason that no company has been “more successful with M&A than Salesforce.”

During an earnings call, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, said: “Products that we acquired, many of them at the multi-hundred-million-dollar revenue level, are now at the multi-billion-dollar revenue level.

Some of the largest, most important software companies in the market today are actually companies that we acquired at much smaller levels.

While Benioff confirmed that Salesforce will continue to invest in “inorganic innovations,” he was quick to point out that any deals will be struck in accordance with the company’s M&A framework.

When it comes to large-scale acquisitions, the CRM leader outlined the need for the company it snaps up to have a best-in-class asset, a clear timeline to value accretion, and a strong balance sheet. (Read on…).

Vodafone has revealed that the implementation of Microsoft’s generative AI (GenAI) solutions has significantly improved its virtual agents.

In an early win for the recently announced partnership, the telecommunications provider claims that “super-charging” its assistant with GenAI has resulted in a 20% NPS increase.

Ignacio Garcia, Vodafone Italy’s CIO and Global Director of Data Analytics and AI, also revealed that the revamped virtual assistants had improved “70% first-time resolution to 90% … just because you have agents using GenAI.”

Announced in January of this year, enhancing the customer experience by adopting GenAI infrastructure was one of the key tenets of the Vodafone-Microsoft ten-year strategic partnership.

In addition, the collaboration aimed to accelerate Vodafone’s digital transformation, expand its IoT business, and extend its M-PESA mobile money service across Africa and develop new digital and financial services for businesses using Microsoft technology.

The deal will also benefit Microsoft through a $1.5 billion Vodafone investment into the company’s cloud and AI services over the next decade.

For Ahmed Elsayed – CIO of Vodafone UK and Europe, and Digital Engineering Director – maximizing the potential of GenAI tech is critical to Vodafone’s overall CX goal (Read on…).