Imagine that one of your customers is experiencing a problem with a product or service that they have purchased from your company. Wanting to find a fast and easy solution to their problem, they land on your website, but after searching your FAQs and interacting with your chatbot, they realise they won’t be able to find the answer to their problem. It’s a little too complex.

They then decide to call your contact center to seek help. Once they get through to an agent and explain their issue, the agent quickly realises that the customer’s problem is quite complex and not something that they themselves will be able to help with. It will require the assistance of one of their colleagues in the back office. However, rather than asking them to call another team or placing them in another queue, they remember that they helped a customer with a similar issue last week and, in particular, how one of their colleagues in the back office team had been a great help.

Asking the customer to bear with them for a moment, the agent checks their system to see if that colleague is available and quickly messages them to see if they can help. Their colleague quickly responds saying that they can help, and the agent proceeds to loop their colleague into the conversation. Introducing their colleague to the customer and explaining the situation, the agent then takes a back seat in the conversation whilst their colleague helps the customer. This takes a few minutes, so while they wait for the issue to be resolved, the agent catches up with some administrative tasks and answers a few emails from other customers.

Once the customer’s issue is resolved, the agent jumps back into the conversation, thanks their colleague for being able to help and rounds off the interaction by asking the customer if there is anything else that they can help them with today. The customer answers that there is nothing else, and thanks the agent and their colleague for being so helpful. They both bid each other a good day. The call ends.

I recently played this scenario to Barak Eilam, CEO of NICE, and he explained that the type of connectivity and collaboration described in the scenario is exactly what 1CX, their new product line, aims to facilitate and is something that many of their customers have been asking for for some time now.

1CX is ostensibly a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) product addition to their existing platform, but its launch recognizes a couple of trends that are emerging in the customer service and experience space, namely:

1. Digital, automation and self-service technology will mature and improve in scope and effectiveness. This will remove much of the need for agent involvement in the majority of simple and straightforward inquiries from customers.
2. As this happens, the nature of the queries that customer service agents will be asked to handle will increase in complexity. Some of these more complex queries will require access to knowledge, systems, and expertise that is often not accessible on the front line but, more often than not, sits in the middle and back offices of large organizations.

Over and above the capability of their new product and what it will allow contact centers to do, particularly when faced with complex customer problems, one of the most interesting things about 1CX is how they are pricing it. Rather than pricing it like a separate UCaaS-lite offering and charging an additional $25 per seat, as is normal with some other systems, existing CXOne clients will only be charged an additional $5 per user per month for this set of enhanced collaboration and communications capabilities.

This is a smart move, particularly given the budget and investment constraints that many contact centers have to operate under, and is likely to prove popular.

This article was originally published on Forbes. com.

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