There’s a lot to like about NICE’s latest branding effort, which was rolled out in January of this year. They’ve done a great job, showing a new look, with a new message and a new attitude about a space that is in urgent need of re-defining.
Wearing my marketing hat, it’s great to see playful fun coming from a tech company, but what these visuals are really saying is that there are many ways to put a smile on your face, and ultimately, that’s the business NICE is in.
Is it just a matter of making a happy face, with squares for eyes and a swooshy curve for a smile? Yes, actually, it is that simple—and that’s the point—but a lot goes into what’s behind this new look, and how it reflects what contact centers really need in 2022. There will be no smiles on anybody’s faces for businesses that stick with the status quo for legacy-based contact center platforms—not for customers, not for agents and not for supervisors.
NICE’s fundamental marketing challenge
The challenge with any service business or software company like NICE is the lack of a physical product to hang your branding on. Most vendors in the “contact center” space have only recently evolved from being hardware-based—where there is a physical product you can see and touch—to software and cloud, where it’s all about experiences and outcomes.
NICE has emerged as a leader in the contact center space, but not just because their offerings provide better experiences that put smiles on the faces of customers. That’s what contact center vendors have been doing—or trying to do—for decades, but with cloud and digital transformation impacting the entire customer experience (CX) value chain, contact centers need more from the vendors. They must also put smiles on the faces of agents and supervisors, and that’s fundamental to NICE’s thinking, and their new branding messaging.
To make customer experiences truly “flow”—as per their new branding—NICE has brought a different vision to market, under the moniker of CXi. Rather than offer a new “product”—as in a CCaaS platform—they’re offering a more modern approach to the issues that contact centers struggle with. They don’t just need better technology; they need a better framework that works from the outside-in, where the objective is to create better customer experiences.
This stands in direct contrast to the conventional, inside-out framework, where the objective is to optimize operational performance and agent efficiency. CXi can certainly address these needs, but being cloud-native and heavily AI-driven, this framework is primarily built to drive better CX.
While these aspirations should resonate with all contact center leaders, they are essentially intangible, and that’s the marketing challenge NICE faces. When considering how best to convey that vision with branding, the central question becomes one of translating how a technology-based solution can deliver better outcomes for humans—your customers.
As AI becomes more prevalent for automating everything we do, it’s easy to associate this type of technology with machine-to-machine efficiencies. That may be true, but it’s not the message NICE wants to send with their branding. Nothing says “human” better than a smile, and in this context, the swooshy smile is sending the right message. Cloud and AI may be at heart of CXi, but what matters most is the smile that comes when experiences flow—of course for customers, but agents and supervisors, too.
How NICE’s messaging reflects their CXi vision
There’s been a marked shift from “contact center” to “customer experience” among all the vendors, and that’s not an easy change to communicate. NICE has distilled that effectively with their “make experiences flow” tag line, paired with a smile. In terms of supporting their CXi vision, here are two important messages that underlie the new branding:
- Help contact centers transition CX to the cloud
- Need to be aligned with a market leader
CCaaS is booming because contact centers have lagged in cloud adoption and are now frantically trying to modernize to keep up with changing customer expectations. The technologies behind the shift from contact center to CX are complex, and it’s not easy finding partners with the right expertise to orchestrate an end-to-end solution.
Finding the right partner is more than just providing current technology, as cloud migration is an ongoing journey that goes beyond selling point solutions or standalone pieces such as phone systems, IVRs, ACDs, etc. Cloud technology is constantly evolving, and AI expertise is still in short supply, so they’ll be looking to vendors who have all of that. With CXi, NICE is positioning itself to be exactly that type of vendor.
This is why the “make experiences flow” tag line should resonate with contact center leaders. They may still need solutions that help contact centers operate efficiently, but the emerging need is delivering great CX. Doing so requires a lot of orchestration, and that’s what’s behind the CXi vision.
End customers will relate to this as well, since seamless “flow” is at the core of today’s CX. Whether it’s between agents and customers, between bots and agents, between supervisors and agents, all these interactions must have minimal friction for CX to be good—or even great. Of course, all of this must be transparent to the customer, where effort is minimized but the results are maximized. This is when CX feels magical, but is only possible with cloud and AI working hard in the background.
There are many vendors for contact centers to choose from, and there is no shortage of great technology to deploy. That said, many businesses remain tied to legacy contact center systems that are too entrenched to uproot, but are increasingly aware they have serious limitations for today’s needs. With CX now becoming strategic for the C-suite, contact centers have greater urgency to address this shortfall, and as a result, we have a proliferation of CCaaS offerings.
While it’s always better to have healthy competition, many CCaaS players only address the low hanging fruit to help alleviate the short-term pressures faced by contact center leaders. We’ve seen this movie before with UCaaS, where the ever-expanding range of offerings has created a commodified, price-driven market. In time, this will likely happen for CCaaS, and it’s already becoming difficult for contact center vendors to differentiate.
CXi is one way for NICE to avoid that trap, especially as the market becomes even more crowded. Aside from the well-established contact center vendors, all the UCaaS players now have some form of a CCaaS offering—not just because the UC market is saturated, but also because CCaaS is a better long-term growth opportunity.
Going with a market leader helps mitigate the risk of adopting new technology, especially when things are changing so quickly. Price-driven buyers tend to go with market followers, but that’s not the customer NICE is going for. It’s still early days for both cloud and AI, and for buyers who want to quickly closer their technology gap—and stay ahead of the curve – they need to be more strategic.
This is where the better strategy is to go with a leader rather than a follower. A leader knows what the market wants, and in today’s digital world, NICE’s focus is on easy, quick experiences that just flow. That’s the vision behind CXi, and the messaging behind their branding; and it’s not just for what happens within the contact center, but externally for the customer as well. When all of that happens, everyone smiles—customers, agents, supervisors, and even executives. Message delivered, and vision realized.