Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about NICE drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated NICE and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

NICE originated as a vendor of contact center operational software and expanded into many adjacent areas in self-service, automation (including robotic process automation or RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and, most notably, advanced analytics. It was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor, ranking fourth overall in this Value Index evaluation. NICE was a Value Index Leader in Usability, where it ranked third, and in TCO/ROI, where it ranked first.

NICE is a diverse company that offers a Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) product which is embedded within a broad CX platform called CXone. CXone contains software for journey orchestration, digital-interaction handling and analytics, self-service and agent management. It is tied to an AI that includes purpose-built analysis solutions for specific CX problems such as increasing CSAT or managing complaints. CXone is an example of a vendor making a successful pivot to incorporate contact center technology and practices into a wider environment. NICE’s efforts to create a broader suite have focused on analytics to support specific personas.

NICE’s rankings were consistently high across Product and Customer Experience categories. It could improve its ranking in Capability by providing more marketer-centric analytics and KPIs, specifically around website activity, attribution, lead generation and the ROI of advertising spend. Another area of improvement in Capability is managing digital assets and product information.

This assessment was based on NICE’s customer experience management (CXM or CEM) products available in Fall of 2022. Since the close of the evaluation, NICE has added applications to CXone, including a Bot Builder and tools for improving the supervisor experience.

NICE, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.