Customer experience management specialist NICE Systems plans to acquire Causata, a provider of real-time Big Data analytics technology.
The acquisition will allow NICE to offer solutions which provide greater visibility into a customer’s activities on the Web and apply the insights from that data in real time, across other touch points such as the contact center. The hope is that organizations will be better positioned to enhance the customer experience, increase revenues and achieve greater operational efficiency. These solutions are further augmented by Causata’s Web-based predictive analytics and machine learning technologies, which, when applied to terabytes of information, allow organizations to improve real-time decisioning and guidance.
“One of the biggest challenges enterprises face today is the difficulty breaking barriers between the Web and assisted-service channels, such as the contact center,” said Keith Dawson, principal analyst at Ovum. “In order to truly understand the customer journey and get the most value from that understanding, companies must know what their customers are doing on the Web, as they do it. The key is to then share that insight with the sales, services, and marketing organizations, so that they can act in real time to deliver outstanding, personalized customer service and realize more sales opportunities.”
According to the NICE 2012 Consumer Survey, consumers use, on average, six different channels for interacting with their service providers. Oftentimes, people who are in touch with a company’s contact center are concurrently browsing their Website. Nice will target the new combined offering to leverage up-to-the-second information about a customer’s Web interaction and route the customer to the agent best suited to handle the call. In addition, the organization can identify sales opportunities in real time, select the offer that the customer is most likely to purchase based on their dynamic personal profile and real-time Web behavior, and guide the agent to the successful completion of the sale.
“Many of our customers interact with consumers in a siloed environment, leading to a disconnect between different touch points such as the company website, mobile app, stores and contact centers. These organizations are looking for the ability to tie together Web-based and contact center interactions for better and more efficient customer service,” said Zeevi Bregman, president and CEO of NICE. “The acquisition of Causata is another important step in executing on our strategy to help organizations get closer to their customers by providing real-time solutions which address the entire customer journey across touch points.”
