Einat Weiss Of NICE On How to Build Lasting Customer Relationships

An Interview with Rachel Kline

Be efficient: At the end of the day customers want to have their issues solved quickly and easily. This is the number one way to create loyal customers. AI enhances organizations’ knowledge management systems, so agents always have the answers at their fingertips, ready to resolve interactions. AI can monitor for sentiment during interactions to ensure that a customer stays happy, guiding the agent with what to say to maintain a positive interaction. AI also powers intelligent bots so that customers can self-serve and resolve their issues on their own quickly.

Building lasting customer relationships has many benefits, including increased revenue, positive word-of-mouth recommendations, and saving on acquisition costs. But how does one do this? In this interview series, we are talking to product managers, C-suite executives, founders, and authors who can share their “Five Tips For Building Lasting Customer Relationships”. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Einat Weiss.

Einat is the Chief Marketing Officer at NICE, leading the company-wide Marketing strategy, covering digital, events and field activities, across all regions and solution lines. In the 15 years she has been with NICE, Einat held multiple leadership roles defining and shaping NICE’s global marketing strategy, as the company grew and expanded to its current success. Prior to joining NICE, Einat led product and global marketing in the telecom and enterprise software companies such as BMC and SAP. Einat holds an MBA with a focus on Marketing from the Technion and a BA in Computer Science.

Thank you for doing this with us! Before we begin, our readers would like to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this career path?

I got into tech very early on in my life, not just my career and was always intrigued by math, science and the ability to solve problems using technology.

Working with NICE for the past 16 years has enabled me to chase my dream of delivering innovative technology solutions. I first took on the role as the Director of Product Marketing based in Tel Aviv. Two years later, I moved to New York to lead marketing for the Americas as the VP of Marketing, and now I serve as NICE’s Chief Marketing Officer. I feel having a background in both technology and marketing has been very valuable in my ability to effectively carry out NICE’s mission of transforming customer experience with innovative, groundbreaking technology.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We’ve launched a series of campaigns this year that are aimed at educating our target audience about how NICE’s AI is different than everything else on the market today. It’s a big task given the amount of buzz there is around AI these days and I feel that it is our role as a market leader to not only market our products but also educate the market and set a standard. Our main message is that our AI, Enlighten, is different because it is purpose-built specifically for customer experience. It’s the only AI that CX organizations can use to generate positive business results. It is so important that organizations hear this as they try to navigate the waters right now and find the AI that is right for them. One of our recent campaigns illustrated this in a fun way, using a coach leading a CX AI race of CX leaders, as the leaders race to implement the right AI for their organization. This is just one example of what we are doing to get our message out to the market, and so far, it has been very effective.

For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit about your experience with building lasting customer relationships? Can you share an anecdote or two that illustrates your experience in this area?

Through my work at NICE, we have helped countless businesses and organizations deliver exceptional employee and customer experiences (CX). A recent success story that comes to mind is that of ONE (Open Network Exchange), a full-service solution provider in the travel industry. ONE turned to NICE to gain a 360-degree view of customer interactions and enable next-generation quality management.

Before NICE, ONE was only able to evaluate 1% of its total interactions, chosen on a purely random basis. This limited the insights available to the company and hampered its ability to truly understand the customer experience, preventing ONE from getting the full picture it needed. Implementing NICE’s Enlighten AI with ONE’s 1000+ employees globally enabled ONE to evaluate 100% of its interactions, using CX-built AI algorithms to automatically identify customer intents, agent behaviors and levels of sentiment exhibited within customer interactions. Within 90 days of implementation, the company had shifted the way it coaches its agents, saving a significant amount of time in the process. Enlighten saved ONE supervisors 4 to 5 hours per week, improving the quality and relevance of the coaching supervisors could provide to employees. Enlighten delivered objective analysis of agent soft skills, pinpointing areas for improvement to drive better customer interactions and ultimately grow customer loyalty.

Our collaboration with ONE exemplifies the transformative power of CX AI in improving employee performance and ultimately delivering better CX. By embracing innovation and leveraging insights from Enlighten AI, ONE has not only elevated the efficiency of its operations but also cemented its reputation as a customer-centric organization committed to delivering exceptional experiences at every touchpoint.

In today’s fast-paced and constantly evolving landscape, what strategies do you help organizations employ to maintain a strong connection with their customers and anticipate their changing needs?

In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving landscape, maintaining a strong connection with customers and anticipating their needs requires a robust CX AI strategy. Purpose-built AI trained on historical customer interactions, infused with generative AI, enables organizations to deliver better employee-assisted and unassisted interactions.

Customers today increasingly want more ways to self-serve and resolve their issues on their own without employee assistance. Purpose-built AI for CX enables organizations to build more intelligent, conversational bots that can respond instantly to customer inquiries with relevant, accurate responses just as a human employee would. This eliminates the need for customers to have to call customer service, leading to faster resolution and happier customers.

When a customer wants to speak with an employee, purpose-built AI for CX can improve that experience as well. AI analyzes interactions historically and in real time, serving as a powerful assistant to employees, raising suggestions for navigating the customer conversation better and generating next-best actions for employees. Employees don’t have to place customers on hold while they search for information to answer a customer request; AI pushes this information to them at their fingertips at the appropriate time. AI can also monitor interactions for potential upsell opportunities as well as to ensure that compliance needs are being met. By taking some of the burden off employees, AI allows them to focus on what really matters — building those long-lasting relationships with their customers.

Can you discuss the strategies that companies can employ to strike a balance between driving revenue and profitability, and focusing on building customer relationships and loyalty?

AI allows organizations to drive revenue and focus on building lasting customer relationships simultaneously. Purpose-built AI for CX optimizes operations by automating repetitive tasks and streamlining workflows. By deploying AI-powered solutions, businesses can empower their workforce to perform at their highest level, reducing handle time and increasing productivity. This not only improves the bottom line by driving down operational costs but also frees up resources to focus on more strategic initiatives to enhance customer relationships and loyalty.

Furthermore, by applying AI to interaction data, organizations can identify trends and patterns that inform targeted marketing campaigns and product offerings. This enables companies to anticipate customer needs and deliver personalized experiences that resonate with their audience, ultimately driving revenue growth and fostering long-term loyalty.

Could you describe the metrics and measures organizations can use to evaluate the success of customer relationship-building efforts, and how you identify areas for improvement?

Organizations must recognize the notion that customers want to spend as little time as possible with their customer service entities. Customers want their issues resolved quickly, with little to no effort, and in a way that feels personalized and consistent with their history and preferences. Organizations that can achieve this — gain lifelong customers.

To best measure the success of their customer experience efforts, organizations are turning away from traditional voice-of-the-customer and survey solutions and rely more and more on AI solutions that measure customer interactions as a better way of predicting customer satisfaction. AI solutions can analyze every customer interaction, looking at factors such as speech patterns, time to resolution and customer sentiment, providing businesses with a nuanced understanding of customer interactions, allowing them to pinpoint areas where relationship-building efforts can be enhanced. Supervisors, equipped with this information, can proactively address issues as they arise, ensuring swift resolution and continuous optimization.

Overall, this approach combines quantitative metrics with AI-driven qualitative analysis to comprehensively evaluate the success of customer relationship-building efforts and identify opportunities for improvement.

Regarding customer-facing teams, what steps can you take to ensure they can deliver personalized, proactive, and efficient support, tailored to the needs of each individual customer?

To set customer-facing teams up for success, organizations should leverage CX-built AI that’s based on a cloud platform foundation.

The first step is implementing an interaction-centric cloud platform underpinned by CX AI. This platform acts as a centralized hub for customer interaction data, eliminating siloes between teams, enabling information to be easily shared within workflows and accessed by every employee. It is critical that this platform includes the complete range of applications required in today’s modern CX environment, and can record, orchestrate, analyze, evaluate, guide and report on interactions across any customer channel of choice. This allows organizations to manage the entirety of the customer journey, providing the responding employee with all the historical and contextual information needed to progress the conversation, and eliminating the need to ask the customer repetitive questions. AI uses historical interaction and best practices data to guide the employee with next-best actions to speed up the time to resolution.

Organizations also need to make sure they are selecting the right AI. Experience has shown that generic AI solutions do not provide adequate support for customer experiences. Generic AI, trained on the open internet, can yield highly inaccurate and inappropriate responses that do not necessarily align with the company’s guidance. Only domain-specific AI, tailored to the needs of their organization, can get the job done. CX-built AI needs to be trained on customer interactions and integrated with powerful Knowledge Management and Generative AI to provide contextual, relevant and accurate next-best actions in a conversational way.

What tips do you have for responding to negative customer feedback, and what steps can be taken to turn those experiences into positive outcomes?

When responding to negative customer feedback, it’s vital to handle the situation empathetically and proactively address their concerns. Begin by acknowledging the customer’s feelings and redirecting the conversation towards collaboration rather than conflict. AI makes this easy, monitoring conversations in real-time, guiding employees on the next best responses and pulling the necessary information to resolve the issue.

Work closely with the customer to troubleshoot any issues, leveraging AI-guided prompts or knowledgebase resources to streamline the process and find a resolution quickly. Communicate the efforts invested in resolving the issue to establish credibility and reassure the customer of your commitment to their satisfaction.

To turn the experience into a positive outcome, consider offering additional value. AI can inject potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities personalized to the individual. Following the conclusion of the interaction, organizations can use AI-powered proactive engagement to identify trends and root causes for negative customer experiences, reaching out to customers with personalized information ahead of an issue, to prevent negative experiences before they even happen.

Lastly, how do you use technology or AI to enhance customer relationships, and what tools have you found to be most effective in building and maintaining them?

The latest advancements in AI technology have transformed how companies build customer relationships. Purpose-built AI for CX optimizes experiences for employees, supervisors, CX leaders and customers. For customer experience specifically, AI powers next-generation self-service, enabling customers to resolve issues easily on their own. AI also improves employee performance, enabling employees to deliver a better customer experience with proactive conversational copiloting capabilities at their fingertips. Supervisors benefit from enhanced oversight, leveraging data insights to further optimize team performance and provide targeted coaching. Additionally, leaders gain total visibility into operations, using AI to increase decision velocity and drive better outcomes for the business and its customers.

In your experience, what are five key components of building lasting customer relationships?

1. Prioritize Personalization: Leverage customer interaction data with AI to understand customer needs and preferences and guide interactions accordingly. Digital advancements have heightened customer expectations. AI is a game changer for being able to deliver hyper personalized experiences and meet customers’ needs.
2. Do proactive outreach: Organizations should be able to anticipate their customers’ needs. If organizations manage their interaction data efficiently with the infusion of AI, they can create accurate events for customer outreach. This means they know when a renewal is coming up for a customer so they can reach out before a customer does. This is also useful during times of emergency. Organizations can proactively reach out about power outages and storm shelters without a customer having to call in to ask.
3. Apply CX-built AI solutions. Generic AI models cannot ensure that accurate, trusted responses are being delivered to customers. Only CX-specific AI models, based on millions of historical customer interactions, and that are built around unique CX use cases, can ensure seamless and trusted customer experiences.
4. Leverage a cloud platform: Organizations cannot deliver next-generation customer experience unless they centralize their operations on a single, cloud platform that is interactions-based. This enables organizations to manage every interaction across digital and voice channels with a comprehensive set of applications that share workflows. This is also the central data hub that AI needs to be trained on to generate rich insights. Without a platform, data and teams are siloed, making it impossible for organizations to truly optimize operations and build lasting positive relationships with customers.
5. Be efficient: At the end of the day customers want to have their issues solved quickly and easily. This is the number one way to create loyal customers. AI enhances organizations’ knowledge management systems, so agents always have the answers at their fingertips, ready to resolve interactions. AI can monitor for sentiment during interactions to ensure that a customer stays happy, guiding the agent with what to say to maintain a positive interaction. AI also powers intelligent bots so that customers can self-serve and resolve their issues on their own quickly.

How do you ensure that these ideas are implemented throughout the customer journey?

It’s important to have buy-in across an organization to successfully implement next-generation CX technology. AI can and should be used at every level of the workforce including employees, supervisors, CX leaders and consumers. This ensures that every aspect of operations is optimized to deliver the best possible employee and customer experience.

We are nearly done. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?

Customer service has always been about trying to achieve the elusive and challenging goal of creating exceptional customer experiences. It’s my mission every day at NICE to help make that a reality. AI is helping achieve this dream a lot faster. Fundamentally, people want their issues resolved quickly and effortlessly. They want to be known and their preferences and history considered. NICE’s CX-built AI does that, saving people valuable time and effort to focus on what really matters to them. This groundbreaking technology is also making employees’ lives better, helping them accomplish tasks more efficiently and develop deeper, positive relationships with consumers. I’m excited to continue my goal of transforming CX around the world.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Please follow all of NICE’s social accounts. That’s where you will find the most up-to-date information on the innovative work we are doing!

Thank you for the interview. We wish you only continued success!