TMC Labs review: NiceLog System

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Apr 2001

NiceLog System

NICE Systems

200 Plaza Dr, 4th Fl.

Secaucus, NJ 07094

Ph: 888-577-6423; Fx: 201-617-9898

Web site: http://www.nice.com

Price: Starts at $60,000 (100-seat contact center) and varies depending on size and configurations. NICE has also recently introduced NiceAdvantage, its under 100seat contact center solution, with scaleddown capacity and pricing for smaller contact centers.

Recording and monitoring systems have almost always had a place within the mid-to-large-sized call center, but certainly today they are an absolute requirement. In the past, recording the voice conversation along with perhaps some CTI information such as Caller ID or account number was all that was required. Today, however, communicating with your customers has evolved to include e-mail, chat and even VoIP Thus, it is important that newer generation recording and monitoring systems are "all encompassing" to include these new media types as well architected to allow for future media types. Many of today's advanced products also capture information from an agents screen and associate it with the voice recording of the call to better capture the experience between the customer and the agent.

Another important trend in recording and monitoring products is to provide not only record-and-playback functionality, but also evaluation tools, analysis and data for coaching agents to improve the customer experience. By capturing calls, followed by evaluating calls, then performing analysis of the evaluations (as well as reports), followed by coaching of agents, and finally capturing future calls for agent reevaluation, the complete cycle of both the customer experience and the agents performance can be realized.

In today's highly competitive world, it is very important to not only build customer loyalty, but to keep it. That is why CRM products have become a multibillion-dollar business. Tracking the customer experience "cradle-tograve," even if the call is transferred several times across multiple call centers, helps ensure a happy, loyal customer. Mistakes will surely happen, but with the proper CRM solutions, pinpointing these problems will be possible.

TMC Labs rook a rest drive of NICE Systems NiceLog System version 8.5, which includes this "cradle-to-grave" functionality due to its integration with the NICE Analyzer, a data analysis tool that NICE developed through its acquisition of CenterPoint Solutions last year. TMC Labs determined that NICE Systems has a wide breadth of features as well as integration with several third-party software vendors that are leaders in their respective fields. For instance, NICE Systems has an ActiveX control that can be embedded into systems from Siebel, Vantive, Clarify and more, allowing an agent to initiate recording at the touch of a button or even automatically when the agent enters a certain field or screen. NICE Systems also integrates with leading workforce management products, such as Blue Pumpkin, to determine if the recording schedule defined coincides with the agent's work schedule. Since recording technologies have become so mission-critical, NICE Systems has also integrated its product with Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG, a comprehensive system healthmonitoring tool, to observe NICE Systems' resources, including servers and databases.

Additionally, in the next release (version 8.7), NICE Systems will integrate with e-mail management systems from companies such as Kana, eGain, Genesys and Lucent. This will allow a supervisor to do a search within the NiceLog System, based on the e-mail address or the subject of an e-mail, and then be able to playback the screen recording of the email response. This will show, in realtime, the typing speed of the agent, typos, grammatical errors and the like, as well as the content of the message - all of which are important for quality assurance and training purposes. The next release will also have VoIP recording capabilities, supporting up to 24 channels.

Also in the next release will be integration with Astounds training module. As a result, a user will be able to trigger a particular Astound training session if an agent's evaluation scores reach a certain threshold. The particular training session initiated would depend on which task the agent failed.

Installation

NICE Systems always installs the server software themselves, so we had no need to perform this step. We did examine the initial configuration of the system, administration, as well as the installation of the client software. Initial configuration required first defining a site with Nice Administrator, and then defining agents, creating groups, servers, as well as the input and output channels. We also configured each agent with certain privileges and assigned them to specific groups. The interface for configuring the system was very well organized and featured the ability to administer multiple sites or systems across an IP network. Overall, installation was a breeze and initial configuration was relatively simple considering the complexity of the system, thus earning a perfect 5 rating.