I dream with my eyes open… so do my fellow executives here at NICE. It's the only way I can explain our ability to constantly innovate and repeatedly stay ahead of the curve with our customer service solutions. We saw that the future is cloud back in 2017 when we were the first to launch CXone, the world's no. 1 cloud customer experience platform. We visualized what a huge impact automation would have on customer experience and employee productivity when we unveiled NEVA, the world's first employee virtual assistant. But I'm not writing this blog post to highlight our achievements but rather demonstrate our culture of innovation which is how I believe we should live, work and dream. So, let's fast forward to what the future of customer service will look like in 2019 and beyond.
The future is autonomous and collaborative. So collaborative that robotic process automation will expand and influence the workforce management domain to automate and streamline planning processes. We'll see human - robot duos working in harmony, with agents of the future overseeing and managing interactions based on automatically generated, pre-categorized and analyzed data - to deliver amazing service and a truly personalized, human, customer experience.
I also visualize an intelligent and predictive future. Analytics will drive organizations to proactively predict what their customers are looking for in an interaction, which channel they prefer using and even offer solutions for challenges the customer is about to face. We will also see more personalized connections between agents and customers based on behavioral routing, which will also reduce average handle time, increase CSAT and customer experience while fueling more sales. Analytics will also power more intelligence in compliance processes, diminishing the risks of breaches that organizations face as they meet GDPR, MiFiiD, PCI-DSS and other regulations.
The future is collective and social. Everyone around the customer service organization will be empowered to deliver distinctive, differentiated service using the power of analytics which will elevate operational data into strategic insights. Marketing executives will realize that employees, specifically in the customer service context - agents, are the best brand ambassadors and will harness their power both inside their organization and on social media outside it.
And finally, there's no better vehicle to the future than the cloud. No matter what size the company, number of employees it has or the region in which it operates, all the signs are indicating a clear path to the cloud and further cloudification.
My colleagues and I are already innovating to make our vision a reality. I'm confident that in 2019 you'll continue to see NICE setting the trend and accelerating our customers into the future of customer service.