NICE Ltd. (NICE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. My name is Fiona Abiola-Musa. I'm the Regional Marketing Manager here at NICE, based in the U.K. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, Contact Center Work-at-Home Guidelines for COVID-19. Our presenters today is Donna Fluss, President of DMG Consulting; and Aviad Abiri, Vice President, Portfolio Marketing here at NICE. Today, our session is recorded, and you will receive a recording link, all of our on-demand webinars can be found at nice.com/events. At the end of the session, we will have time for Q&A. Please submit your question through the Q&A section on the right of your screen. On the bottom right of your screen, you'll see the webinar survey questions, please answer the questions before the webinar ends. We do appreciate your feedback on the webinar, so we know where we can improve. So let me hand you over to our first presenter today, Aviad Abiri. Aviad, please go ahead.

Thank you, Fiona. Hello, and welcome to today's session on contact center work-at-home guidelines for these times of COVID-19. Thank you all for joining. We have people from the U.S., from Europe and from all over the world. So good afternoon and good morning to all of you. My name is Aviad Abiri. I'm with the NICE marketing team. And I will be your host for today. I'm honored to have with us Donna Fluss, President of DMG Consulting. For over 35 years, Donna has been helping companies, in good times and in difficult times, to deliver outstanding customer experiences. In the past few months, her company has been focused on helping contact centers work through this pandemic. On a personal note, Donna and I have been working closely for over 20 years. She's one of the most knowledgeable people I know, and I can't think of a better authority on contact center success to lead us through this discussion on the guidelines for work at home in these very trying times. So Donna, welcome. Thank you for being with us.

I thought to get things started to ask you first about the realities of today's contact center as the COVID-19 epidemic is actually affecting the nature of customer service itself in these days of general distress. So to kick things off, can you share with us, what's happening in contact centers today?

Well, there surely is quite a bit happening. But one thing that isn't, as we all know, is baseball and football, which I have to admit, I'm quite happy about, but other members of my family are not. Amazing times, right? We've never seen anything like this. I've been in the market, as you pointed out, for quite some time. I've managed contact centers through multiple wars, I've managed them through epidemics, I've managed them through more natural disasters than I could even come up with, through major floods taking down buildings, but we have never seen anything like this. It's just unprecedented. I mean this is a situation, as we all know, where the best way to address the issue is something that's just totally against what we do in contact centers. So the best way to address this, Aviad, is social distancing, either 6 or 10 feet, which clearly doesn't work, when you've got contact centers where people are sitting in cubes that are best 4 x 2, 4 x 3. And so hands down, as we saw, the best way to address this is to get people out of the office and allow them to work at home. And for some, that was a great situation, I think maybe and -- we've been trying to come up with this number, maybe about 5% of contact centers today are work-at-home contact centers where the entire environment is work at home, no real estate for that operating environment. And obviously, those companies are sitting very -- and well -- really well positioned. Then you've got the large majority of -- large enterprises, large contact centers, extra-large contact centers that have, I don't know, somewhere between a few, maybe 10% of employees who were work-at-home. A lot of cases, lots of organizations plan to build full work-at-home programs. And I've seen these plans for 15 years. They started, they stopped for whatever reason. But in any case, figuring out how to get your folks working from home has turned into a really -- initially turned into a really challenging situation. Although at this point, the vast majority do have their employees, contact center employees working from home. I mean another interesting phenomena, and it's not phenomenal to me, but it was viewed that way around the world is all of a sudden, people were telling their contact center folks that they were mission-critical and actually were required to come into the office, which couldn't have been a worse practice. Then in terms of just other trends going on with this. So we have 2 other extremes. So in a lot of situations, the call volumes have been going up and up, by 5% -- dependent on the vertical, by 25%, by 50%, by 100%. There are situations going on right now, where customers are literally waiting for 1 to 3 hours to have a call answered. Now interaction volume has also gone up, but the call volume has gone up more substantially than anything else. We also have situations where companies aren't very busy because what they're doing, nobody is in the office. So they're not using those services. So we've seen organizations, call centers where the volumes have dropped. And then I think one of the most interesting phenomenons and this one shocked me during the first war where I managed -- it was a surprise at first. And after that, it was just something that became really clear, is during times of trouble -- thank you, Simon & Garfunkel. By the way, that was a reference to Simon & Garfunkel, whatever, Bridge over Troubled Water. But in any case, what happens is that contact centers became -- become the free national counseling -- counselors of the world. So people will reach out with a business issue, but they're going to start with what's on their mind. And it's troubling stuff that we're hearing about. But if you take into consideration the fact that our people, our agents are dealing with their personal issues. So they're, in a lot of cases, now work at home, they may have their spouse or partner working at home. They're kids are supposedly doing distance learning, working from home. I mean they're worried about parents. And then on top of this, they're dealing with other people's stuff, it's really, really a tough situation. And this webinar and the white paper that's also available from NICE is not about building an elegant work-at-home program, it's what do you do in the scenario where you don't have everyone work-at-home. You don't have a great fix. So how do you get everything working in order? As we say here in the states, your ducks in a row, so that you can keep things going well. And the most important, important guideline is folks, please, you need to keep your staff healthy, both physically and mentally so that they can be there to deliver the great service you want them to deliver.

So maybe that's a great place to kick things off as we speak about the guidelines. Maybe to set the premise for the entirety of this session today. So let's start with what should organizations be doing to keep their employees safe, their agents safe?

Well, the most important, hands down, is work-at-home. And here you have a rendering of the ideal work-at-home scenario. Now it's truthfully ideal. You've got a living room, no animals barking in the background, no noisy neighbors, no other family members. But so clearly, the most important thing is to get your people out of the office. Early on, I was reading some articles that were just breaking my heart, and there were things actually that when I was thinking through the content for the white paper, what to include and what not? Because there's a lot more guidelines than what you're going to see in the white paper because, again, it's not about -- that white paper is not about building the elegant program. It's about how to take care of this situation, and we'll talk more about the elegant program. But there's just so many different things that organizations should be doing. So getting your people out of the office is clearly #1. But that's a huge challenge in itself. And for organizations that are already doing this, it's fine. But one of the real interesting phenomena that we have seen over the years, my firm DMG has seen, as we've been on hundreds of sites, is that even when companies have work-at-home programs, they may have agents. They don't necessarily have supervisors or managers working at home. So that has presented a very a different level of challenge because you've lots of supervisors, for example, who are used to managing line of sight. But when all is said and done, the most important thing is to allow your staff to be in a position to socially distance, which you can't do when coming into an operating environment. Which you can't do, right? If they required to take public transportation. So that first step is key to the success obviously, your operating environment, but actually, your entire organization because contact centers are mission-critical, contact centers is the brand and the voice, the empathetic voice, we hope and empathetic fingers, as we respond to digital interactions to the world and particularly in these kinds of times.

Great. So let's start kind of looking into what that takes. What are the guidelines for making this happen? So maybe let's start with the best way you believe to transition employees for work-at-home from a foundational standpoint?

Well, it's -- this one is kind of a funny one. The straight out answer to your -- to that question, and it's something that we saw and now it's been proven is that what we have seen is that if you have a cloud-based contact center solution, CCaaS it's referred to, it's also known as a cloud interaction platform, so your core infrastructure, you're routing and queuing, you're dialing in the cloud. Those organizations who were using those solutions have had a much easier time getting their people home. Now if your on-premise systems -- your systems are there, people -- companies have been able to get their staff at home, very doable. But what you have in front of you is, what we have now seen and has proven to be the best practice, and it's really interesting. As of July of 2019, last time we ran the numbers, only 16.8% of the seats, contact center worldwide seats were in the cloud. Even with all that activity, by the end of this year, we believe that number will be over 30% and possibly closer to 40% for a whole bunch of reasons. Now what happens if this is cloud is, obviously, it doesn't matter where you're delivering the interaction to, they can be anywhere. I mean it's just I mean the flexibility has proven itself. And I will say, having done many, many business cases on helping companies justify investments in cloud-based contact center infrastructure or CCaaS solutions, one of the considerations, Aviad, we never took into consideration the social distancing issue. But now not only can we take that into consideration when we build a business case, we can actually quantify, in a lot of cases, the benefits of it, which is something that I just never would have thought happened. And one of the most important proof points. And one of the most important concepts for today is flexibility. So the more flexible your operating environment, the more flexible your supervisors, the more flexible your agents, the more flexible your systems. The better off you are in both good and challenging times. But one thing I want to point out, what this chart shows, and it is a very busy one, is more of a really feature-rich CCaaS solutions. All these solutions are not the same right now. The name of the game is get your people out of the office and get them answering the interactions. How to acquire these systems, if you don't have them? It's also rather interesting. Most of the CCaaS vendors, including NICE inContact, have an offering for -- to help organizations with COVID. And long before we started to see this come out, we did write in the white paper that the best thing to do is, if you don't have this kind of flexible capability and you want to have it, and that's absolutely been the case. There have been government agencies who didn't need a contact center because they were able to do things round robin. And all of a sudden, clearly, they were bombarded with calls and just couldn't get them answered. If you have that kind of situation going on, reach out to the vendors you know, reach out to NICE inContact, for example. They do have a free offering, and this is not a message for NICE. It's a -- I mean, these companies have been extremely respectful and doing what they can to help people with these kind of issues. So the name of the game, Aviad, here is get your people out of the office, get them on a cloud-based solution, if you've got one and -- that you keep for disaster recovery, well, this is exactly that situation. I've seen lots of on-premise shops with a cloud-based solution for business continuity reasons, get -- pulling them out, dusting them off, so to speak, although it's not really the way it works and putting them in production and just get your folks going, get them comfortable. And then when it comes to adding on a lot of the other capabilities, you'll have plenty of time for that.

Great. And we are seeing a lot of interest and organizations are looking to use the opportunity, the situation to actually transition to a cloud environment and moving their agents to work-from-home as part of that. We'll mention towards the end a few of our offerings that we're -- that we have out there today to help organizations make that transition quickly. So Donna, if an organization wants to do this, right, transition the contact center employees to work-from-home, one of the questions we get all the time is, "Okay, where should I start?" What are the things the organization should be doing, first of all?

And it's always a challenge about what to do first? And what to get going on? And here, I've got 8 initial steps. And obviously, the first thing you want to do is get your people out of the office. And as I said, lots of progress on this, the companies that were forcing their employees in -- many of them have now figured out how to let them work from home. Again, the operative concept is keep your people healthy. If you want them there for your customers, keep them healthy. And as you're sending people home, you need to give them the equipment that they need. There's some -- 1 company that I was talking to, which could not get PCs. And the good news is, by the way, China is back online and the production of PCs is back. But one company with hundreds of agents was literally sending their people home with their desktop computer in an Uber early on to get them out of the office. I mean we've seen some fun things, not necessarily the ideal situation, but again, that's where we were at, nobody anticipated this. Well, in their wildest dreams, we didn't expect something like this to happen. I mean it's kind of interesting, and I'll go back to the guidelines. The last time the world saw any kind of -- really pandemic was actually 1918, when soldiers came back from the first world war. So that kind of tells you. But back then, it didn't move at the speed of a jet plane. Now I think it's close to 200 countries where COVID -- the coronavirus has impacted. So it's rather -- it's still rather unique, and the companies' ability to address it has actually been pretty impressive. So send your people home, give them the equipment, if it's a cloud-based solution, honestly, they need to have a headset in order to answer the interactions and a PC. A very important thing is checking into the bandwidth. I mean before we do a webinar, for example, we all check into the bandwidth and make sure that we have enough capacity to handle. Now you're talking about a scenario where very likely people are sharing their home. As I mentioned, distance learning, where you've got your kids there, so you're competing with bandwidth. You've got your significant other, so I mean, lots of issues. So bandwidth is something that you need to take into consideration. You also want to ask your employees to carve out a spot. Now this is an interest -- this is kind of challenging as I started to say before. If you're good in New York City, I mean, those apartments are really small. I saw an article in the New York Times last week, where people were using their bathroom counters in order to work from home. I mean same situation in places like London, I mean the apartments are just small. So trying to find some space is really important. As we talked about using a CCaaS solution has turned into one of the most important practices, and it's what enables companies to get their people home very, very quickly. It's also critical to rethink a lot of your operating guidelines. So lot of the KPIs that worked before or were being used before are not going to be effective. They're actually counterproductive. So trying to get your employees to continue to pay attention to productivity numbers like average handle time, average talk time, it hasn't been a good idea for 20 years. But it's really a bad idea when you've got customers who've been waiting online to interact with somebody for 2 hours. So I think if you're going to rush them off the phone, no, it's not a good idea. There's other things you should start to pay attention to. Now it's also critically important to again provide support. So set up IT help desks, and IT helplines, again, work-at-home. Some of us are really good setting up the technical stuff, and some of us really aren't. We may be really good in speaking and interacting. But connecting in isn't the specialty. So again, make sure you've got the support there for your agents' empathies. And it's purposely the last one here, work with your supervisors and managers, help to give them guidelines and tips and tricks for managing a remote workforce. So again, we have some experience in most companies, large and small, for some work at home -- for agents, but not necessarily for supervisors, but there are a lot of tricks and tips and technologies to help with that.

Thanks, Donna. That's very helpful. We are starting to get a few questions in there. If you have questions for us, please put them in the Q&A section. We will absolutely have time to get to them at the end of the session. Donna, I guess, managing contact center employees remotely poses numerous challenges. So what are some of the practices around at-home agent management in these times of change?

Yes. And this is really, really challenging because a lot of the guidelines that we had, totally off, as I started to say before. But right now our objective is, how do we keep the contact center going? How do we keep our employees motivated? How do we keep them healthy? And it's tough. The most important best practice after keeping our staff healthy is communication. Organizations, enterprises need to be communicating with their customers. If there is a 2-hour delay, please reach out to your customers and let them know that this is going on, make sure that whatever gets communicated to your customers gets communicated to your contact center staff, so that they know and there's many, many different ways. Now one of the things you're going to really need to do is your supervisors are going to need to reach out to their staff and chat with them, literally, and actually speak with them, I should say, also chatting with them. For years and years, we've seen more and more supervisors being pulled towards doing reports. This is not the time to do reports. This is the time for your supervisors to do what they actually signed up for, which is helping their employees and helping their customers. When it comes to communicating with agents, well, how do you do this? And there's multiple ways. Now one of the heroes of the pandemic is turning out to be interaction analytics, speech and text analytics. And it's been proven already to be highly effective in identifying the classic 10 to 20 things. And what's interesting about it is that, it's able to identify what you knew to ask about and try to identify as well as what you didn't know to ask about. Then you can use that information to update your self-service, you can use that information to update your knowledge basis. But even as you're using interaction analytics, speech and text analytics, either on a daily basis and in a lot of cases, increasingly so, on an hourly basis, you still need to give your employees, your agents, a rundown of what's been changed. Because literally, they could go to a knowledge-based article one point and it could be one answer. And an hour later, it could actually be -- and we've seen this happen, a different answer. So interaction analytics is driving a lot, a lot of those kind of changes. As I mentioned, you need to keep in touch with your employees. And literally, it should be a requirement for supervisors to reach out multiple times. And what we're seeing from interaction analytics that the stress level, that the emotion level, that the sentiment level is going higher and higher, and you need to work with both -- with your customers and with your agents, I meant, and help them to deal with those kind of situation. Now we also need to do some standard kind of training. We know that people are going to call us and share things with us. And we know how troubling they're going to be, and we're hearing about these situations as well. It's not just about an empathetic year. I mean you want to show lots of empathy, particularly if somebody has waited a really long time. But it's also important for the health of your agents for them to know how to get that customer back to where they can actually do something for them. And so it's about validating and then moving the customer back to a business issue. So for example, if somebody starts talking about a personal issue, somebody being sick, and there's unfortunately a lot of that going on, show empathy. "I'm so sorry for that situation, but let's go back to your business issue because that's something I can help you with". So that turns into a positive. You also want to build social online communities. You want to take off some of the restraints on chat between agents and between supervisors. Now is the time for that flexibility. And along those same lines, folks, there are some outstanding workforce management capabilities. Mobility is essential. If you're doing mobility, by the way, that obviously means that you're going to need to allow your staff to have their phones at their desks. There are some mobile applications that will allow the solution to automatically reach out when it needs more resources. Give people a break if they want it, when they don't need as many. And these adaptive real-time solutions for workforce management are game changers, but it's also necessary for you to really back off. This is not the time to look at real-time adherence. I fully understand that you need your people to be there. But what you need them to be there is healthy. If they can give you 4 hours in the evening and 4 hours early in the morning, instead of their actual 8-hour shift, thank them. Please don't say, "Ah, your [ archy ] A numbers -- real-time adherence numbers are what they aren't supposed to be, your occupancy numbers aren't right". So take a really adaptive and flexible approach to scheduling right now, and that will go a long way for helping your operating environment.

Yes. Thank you, Donna. And I think this idea of keeping our employees' work-life balance has always been an important topic. I think more so these days than ever before, probably, that you're keeping that flexibility. I suggest we move forward. I'm getting a lot of questions on this topic. So I'm so glad we actually have a slide on this, Donna. What about the technical aspects of the work-at-home environment? What should organizations be looking for when it comes to the technology and security of work-from-home?

Well, that's a great question, and it's obviously one of the killer questions. #1, security, security, security. So we've already seen some bad press about things that happened unexpectedly. The ideal situation -- and that's not what a lot of companies are in, is that they're using a cloud-based solution coming into a virtual private network, virtual private network or an MPLS line. So you've got the security protocols in place. I've absolutely already seen the government show some flexibility in terms of some of these requirements. But you need to pay attention to some of the security things, although we've absolutely seen some flexibility initially as companies put in place some of the more security-oriented issues. From a system perspective, I talked about the power of cloud-based solutions, starting with CCaaS, the core infrastructure, very, very powerful because of the flexibility, because of the adaptability, because of the breadth of capabilities you can have from that. Now is the time where organizations are realizing there's a huge opportunity to improve self-service applications. Again, this is one of the powers of interaction analytics. It identifies what the issues are. If we can get some of those on our IVRs, on our intelligent virtual assistants, so that we can move as many things away from our agents to the self-service, keeping in mind that self-service is the #1 preferred method of service even in challenging times. I referenced chat tools. There are some really funky rules. And I have to admit funky is the only word I can say for how companies and contact centers allow their agents to use chat. So sometimes they can only chat with 1 supervisor. They can't chat with any other agents. Folks, throw out all those rules right now. If an agent has a question, just let them get the answer from anyone that they can get in touch with, within the parameters of the operating environment. So again, it's about flexibility. I talked about the critical nature of mobile tools, particularly in the area of workforce management and as modifying the use of WFM. WFM solutions can either be your worst nightmare or the most -- one of the most important solutions bar the -- with the exception of the other ones that I've already talked about because you can use scheduling to really be a game changer for your employees as well as for your customers. So I mean, these are some of the important things. And then clearly, over time, you can get back into production on so many of the other applications that you're going to be needing.

Great. Going back to the idea of managing employees at home. What are some of the ways by which organizations can provide better visibility around what at-home agents are actually doing to improve performance and productivity?

There's a lot of really great tools that we already have in these operating environments. And that some of which come along with the ACD, with the cloud solution. From a management perspective, we've -- I've touched on this a couple of times, it's about oversight. But how do you have that oversight? Now it would be wonderful if everyone had x-ray vision or maybe it wouldn't be so wonderful. But again, keeping in mind, most of our employees are going to want to do the right thing. And supervisors and managers need to use the tools that will help them. You need to continue to do quality management. Now when I say this, I almost always get the question, "But right now, we're in an all hands on deck situation". I understand. But you need to have that insight now. The best way to do it is, again, another speech analytics capability called analytics-enabled quality management, which is where the solution is doing the quality assurance on an automated basis. Since that's relatively immature from a rollout perspective. So the technology is good, but a small number of companies have it at this point. Those who do have it, obviously, should be having it work 100% of both the speech and digital interactions, but you still also need to do some quality management. You need to do some core monitoring. And again, for the primary reasons, you've got to make sure your employees are healthy. You've got to make sure that they're putting up with unbelievably huge loads of stress, personal stress and what they're hearing. It does take its toll. Now another great tool is that the cloud-based contact center solution provides real-time performance management because then people can self-manage. You do not want to give the impression if you've got 2-hour wait, that the call the person is on is not important. So give people the tools. They'll see what's going on. Continue to communicate. I've talked about interaction analytics in almost every slide. Now surveying is an interesting one. If you're talking to a client who is in pain for whatever reason, dealing with stress, you don't want to survey that person. Where surveying really can be positive is when it comes right now to using it for your agents. Make sure they have what they need, make sure you know what they need. I talked about internal chats, and then this is a concept called presence, which is really very important. It can be on your ACD, but now maybe the time where your organization is allowing you to look deeper into the organization to find experts to get those calls or other interactions out of the contact center. These are just some of the tools. And communicate, communicate and communicate.

Great. Before we open it up for Q&A, I think we're all looking to get through these tough times, and we will. There will be a time after COVID-19. It's starting to become a real conversation, thankfully. What do you suggest organization should be doing after the pandemic is over?

Well, as you said, this will pass. The amount of research and innovation that's going to come out of this will be amazing, and we will return to what will be a new normal. And when that happens, there's a lot of different things that you're going to do -- and lots of questions, "Are you going to have everyone come back in the office? Are you not going to do that?" And we've seen so many of these questions. But afterwards, you'll have an opportunity to figure out what worked and what didn't work. And while it's not great, trial by fire, as we say, well, that's what we've just done. And anyone who has their staff at home, congratulations on that. Anyone who doesn't, please get them out of the office. And when it's all said and done, that's when you'll take a step back. And that will be the time to create your formal work-at-home plan. And the great news, and there's always great news in some of this is that you will have seen things that work and things that don't work, and you can include your formal work-at-home program as part of your updated business continuity plan. Lots of organizations, Aviad, have business continuity plans. I have seen hundreds of them because it's one of the standard things we check when we're on-site doing certain types of initiatives. But none of them -- I mean, I've never seen -- with over 100 of these things we've looked at, I've never seen one that took into account the need for social distancing. That's a really interesting add that we'll be making to our business continuity plans. So the net of this is that, when all said and done, when things return to whatever that new normal is going to be, you'll have an opportunity to create and finally finish and will prioritize building a work-at-home plan and updating your business continuity plan. And of course, your work-at-home plan is a -- will be a component of your business continuity. And you'll take -- include the things that worked and you will exclude the things that didn't work. But that will be the time to do these kind of things.

Yes. It's very reassuring to think that we will come out of this stronger and better with better plans for a future event like this. Maybe -- so thank you, Donna. I think this was not only very interesting and fascinating information, but also very practical, I think. And the questions we're getting we'll get to in just a second, are very practical questions. And they touch on a lot of the topics that you already covered, but in a little more detail. So maybe to kick things off, I will ask you, of all the things that we covered today, what would you say is the biggest challenge to contact center work-at-home, of all the topics we covered?

The #1 challenge is supervisors not knowing how to manage their people when they're out of the office. Lot of supervisors, it's the line of vision. And now they can't see their people. That is the #1 challenge. And part of my answer is one of these feel good kind of answers, and you've known me a long time, so you know I'm always into the practical side of this, but the vast majority of our employees want to do the right thing. And this isn't an issue of, well, millennials do this and Xers do this and Yers do this. People want to do the right thing and particularly now in these kind of things. But supervisors also have to be understanding. If somebody worked 9 to 5, and now they've got 3 kids running around and a dog, and they have to take turns with their partner, you've got to be really, really flexible. So managers need to put together those guidelines and work with their supervisors just as supervisors need to work with their employees.

Yes. That's a really great answer. I think what we're seeing on our end is that kind of the way you laid it out, I think organizations are struggling in different -- with different questions at different times. Starting in the beginning of March and all through April so far, we've seen organizations struggle with the mechanics of getting people to work-from-home. We spoke about the idea of moving to cloud to do that. And that was kind of the first wave is, "Okay, how do I transition my entire contact center to work-from-home?" And organizations are either in the process of doing that, have already done it or have a plan in place where they're keeping some employees in an office in some form and some people work-from-home. Now we're seeing the -- when that's already done, they're encountering the next level of challenges, exactly like you're saying, how do I manage those employees? How do I enable and empower my supervisors to -- in order to be able to better understand, to drive performance, to drive engagement? So those are the kind of questions they're dealing with today. So I think it's kind of an evolving set of challenges. I'm going to open it up for a few more questions we've got from the audience, Donna, with your permission. I want to start -- and I'm just going to -- I hope we'll get to as many of them as we can. You touched several times on -- throughout your session today on different metrics, and you kind of gave a little bit of your opinion on average handle time, you spoke about adherence to schedule and a few others. But one of the questions that we got, I think, was an interesting one is, what are the metrics? What are the KPIs you believe should be emphasized in these particular times?

In times like these, actually, a lot of these, I think, we really should start to reconsider in general. So there's actually -- there's a whole continuum here. So I am not a fan of productivity numbers. I haven't been a fan to them ever. I wasn't a fan when they first came out at the beginning, and I'm just not a fan now. And I also -- I think we're going to have an opportunity to rethink a lot of those. But now is not the time for those. Now is the time to show appreciation for anything and everything our employees are doing, but you still have to manage your shop. You have to make sure you've got people where you need them to be. So what you need to be doing is measuring the shop. Look at what interactions are offered and handled, what are the service levels. What's -- what are -- what's happening with the self-service solutions? Are -- is the percentage of people defaulting out of self-service larger than before? Or is -- are more people staying in the self-service? So you're looking more at the holistic shop, which is a much healthier approach. Now down the road, you're going to be looking at things like ease, but we're going to get there, and there are ways to calculate that. Another interesting KPI is the accuracy of your knowledge base. Now you need to know if that knowledge base is accurate or not. And if it isn't accurate, if it isn't up-to-date, get it up-to-date because it's not like you can just walk over and say to somebody, "Hey, this is the situation, the knowledge base." So again, much more managing from a bigger picture and other things to take into consideration is going to be sentiment. So use speech and text analytics, use interaction analytics to take the pulse of your customers and the pulse of your agents. I can't even begin to tell you how important that's going to be. Going back to what I said at the beginning, which is, "let's keep our employees healthy, so they can be there for our customers."

So on that vein, we're actually getting a few questions on that particular aspect of things. I don't know if you have anything to add about the ways in which to keep agents engaged and motivated? Any thoughts on that specifically in these times?

Absolutely. The most -- again, communication. So supervisors should be required, already no flexibility on this one, to talk to each of their agents at least once a day to be chatting with their agents multiple times. And I'm not just talking about helping on a case. This is a literal -- but don't -- never touch another employee, but a literal tap on the back, a conceptual tap on the back. You should be finding the interactions that are stellar. You should be rewarding people for everything and anything. You should be making sure that your staff has what they need. These are the kind of things, much more recognition than any other time. And you possibly can have somebody, if you don't, just dedicated or multiple people dedicated to these kind of things. And if supervisors are in much closer contact with their employees, they're going to be finding these things. So I mean, these are just examples. Now another thing is if you can try, to get people involved in other activities, other channels, get them off the phones a little bit more than you did before, again, keeping in mind, but there's a lot of practices like this. It's also essential for your employees to know about the EAP programs, employee assistance programs that are available. Make these kind of programs available and allow people to be aware of them. I mean I was telling you before this call, my firm is going to be making available some -- an exercise program and a meditation program and a yoga program every other week starting next month, just because we want to do those kind of things. Companies can also do -- bigger companies can also do those kind of things.

Yes. We spoke about the overwhelming number of calls that is going up. Sometimes, it's quite the opposite. I think you mentioned that in your conversation. One of the questions we got is about a situation where the company is not making any sales or barely minimum. How do you manage your agents to still be productive with a bare minimum workload?

Great question. And so this is -- there's multiple things. I mean, first of all, I hope if you possibly can, please keep them on payroll. Please try not to [ fire ] a lot of people. We know that there's a lot of service people and salespeople for that matter, who are on food stamps already because of the salaries that we pay and then there's lots of organizations who pay quite a bit. That's one issue. But now is an opportunity for you actually to do some restructuring and retraining. And it's really just a matter of taking advantage of the situation. You may use the time for uptraining. You may use the time for having agents conceptually sit together and work together to grow in each other's jobs. So there's a lot of different things. You may actually decide to take some of these people out of the contact center and have them do other activities for your organization. If you -- for example, now is a great time, if you want to build a knowledge base in preparation for an AI initiative. I mean these are just some of the kind of things that organizations can do, but there's a lot of activities.

Great. An interesting question that is kind of touching on that, but not really, but just this idea of handholding, is about new hires. Now we're hearing a lot of organizations that are moving their supervisors to take calls, people who usually do face-to-face interaction because the load is so high are beginning to get on the phone and take customer service calls. How do you handle new hires that are not prepared to work independently, but you still need them on the job and you still need them on the job training. How do you -- how would you approach that? The whole exposure aspect of being -- yes.

Couple of different ways. There is a couple of different ways. First of all, a best practice and it has been a best practice since the beginning of contact centers is that when you're hiring people, you want to interview them in the mode that you're going to hire them for us of their phone, hire them over phone. I mean interview them. And there's other interviews too and other things. So I'm not -- all of which by the way can be done, almost all of which can be done over the phone. There are certain types of testing that can't be done over the phone or over a video. But as I said, communicate. So we've got video communications for final interviews. But in the meantime, if you're hiring chat agents, do the initial interview over chat. So those kind of things are givens. Then as it is a lot of training, and it's not the ideal kind is by PowerPoint, and that can be done virtually. And it can be done beautifully by virtually and just like we're doing. This isn't a training session. This is a "what to do under the circumstances" session. But in the meantime, you could do this kind of training. Then you actually can have -- you can actually do side-by-side with some of the technology in some of these ACDs, even if people aren't in the same place. I mean just the symphonies can do that kind of thing. We can actually -- the technology to do that is there. But on the other hand, what you can also do is, there's a lot of activities that agents have to do that take them away from handling interactions, and it's both good and bad. Because they need a mental break. On the other hand, they're really good. You can have the newer people fill in on some of these tasks. But you really can run training programs. You can really do side by side because of the amazing technology that's available today and you can use these people to fill in on other activities, freeing up different people to spend their time in live interaction. So it really -- with the right technology, you have a lot of flexibility. And even without the right technology, you can go through formal training programs and still do some less formal one-on-ones. There absolutely are ways.

That's great. So we're -- we have time for just a couple more maybe. Donna, we're getting a lot of questions. I'm going to summarize them all as 1 big mega question for you that is related to security aspect. You did touch on that, and we'll bring up back that slide. But some of the questions are more specific. Can you address what are some of the security needs you have to put in place? And especially, we're getting questions about handling of private customer data like credit cards, PCI compliance, et cetera, if you can address those concerns.

The security issues are clearly some of the most difficult. If you have a virtual private network and the interactions are going through the VPN and VPNs are set up for security reasons. So if you have those kind of pipes, great. If you don't have those kind of pipes and a lot of companies don't, this does become more problematic. When it comes to things like PCI -- PII, private information, PHI or when it comes to PCI DSS, payment card information, there is a variety of different things. First of all, there are readily available IVR applications, which can take payments. That increases the talk time. In some cases, there's issues like that. When you -- with a lot of the offerings in the marketplace, you get recording along with the core contact center voice capability. For example, these are things that are -- NICE inContact, for example, offers that, go the extra step and put in the PCI DSS application that allows you to stop recording at certain times. GDPR in EU is a huge issue. And there is -- in California, we've got CAA. The country of California is it sometimes gets referred to as CAA, those California issues -- requirements are pretty similar actually to GDPR. So you can -- and in the meantime, again, not perfect, but it will qualify. If you don't have a full PCI DSS, for example, you can ask your agents to stop the recordings at certain times. And it can be done manually. So I mean, these are just a few of the things. And this is something that you're going to be paying attention to until your folks are back in the office, and this is something that is going to take up considerable attention as you're putting together your formal programs.

Thank you, Donna. 1 final question is once this crisis is behind us, how do we get agents at home back into the office, what you recommend there?

Aviad, that's an interesting one. And it's one that I've been asked so many different times. So I'm a process engineer by training. And so there are kind of right ways and there are kind of wrong ways of doing these things, it will depend. Ultimately, we're going to see a -- to use the word again, a continuum of what's happening. I think over time, a lot of organizations, though, who didn't start with a work-at-home program are going to let some of their employees stay home. I think that companies that actually had a work-at-home program, just -- so people as part of the business continuity are actually reverse what people think, those companies are going to have all the people come in because that's part of their plan. Let them go home and then bring them back. They should -- they may want to revisit that. So we're going to see a little bit of both. Over time, I think a lot of people are going to end up back in the office, and I encourage companies, strongly urge them to please finish that work-at-home program that you've thought about incorporating what you need to for agents, for supervisors, for managers and make sure you have the equipment that you need and make sure you -- as part of your plan, you actually test this plan on an ongoing basis. It could be every 6 months, every year. And so that people really know, and again, it's a communication issue, where they need to be, when they -- and how they need to be there. So that the next time something serious happens, and we hope it doesn't, but it very likely could, you will have a comfortable plan to know how to handle that. But netting it out, we're going to see a little bit of everything when it comes to what companies are doing.

Thank you so much, Donna, for your time today and for your great advice. Before we go, I'd just like to remind everyone that we here at NICE are doing our part to help keep your contact center employees safe and healthy, obviously, by making sure your service levels are kept at the highest levels possible. In particular, last month, we announced CXone at home. It's a free 60-day offering for transitioning agents to work-from-home in 48 hours or less. No contract, no upfront commitment necessary, and it's all based on our leading cloud-native CXone platform. This offer now includes also some of our CXone workforce optimization applications, including recording, workforce management, quality management and performance management. In addition, we also introduced WEM@home, it's a specialty price package up and running in 72 hours or less. It offers visibility, performance and engagement for your remote at-home agents. The solution includes desktop analytics to get a sense of what your agent desktop activities are. Our enlightened artificial intelligence analytics that can help measure automatically agent behaviors like empathy and other behaviors. And our voice of the employee survey to monitor employee engagement and motivation. If you're interested in any of these offerings as well as some others that we have available, please contact your NICE representatives or go to our website at www.nice.com. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Donna. Everybody stay safe and healthy. We'll get through this together and looking forward to seeing you again. Goodbye.