NICE Ltd. (NICE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining for today's NICE Talk. You asked a lot of questions about tended automation, and we selected one in advance, and we're going to answer it today. In this session, we are going to answer on what are the key winning strategies to unlock superior business value with a tender automation? So my name is Liran Meir Frenkel and I'm a Senior Product Marketing Manager, RPA and Performance Management at NICE. And with me today, I'm happy to introduce Harpreet Makan, a Practice Director at Everest Group. At the end of the session, we will have time for Q&A. So please submit your questions at the Q&A panel on the left hand. And also this session is recorded. So following the completion of this session, you will receive a link with the recording into your e-mail. And another thing, following the completion of today's talk, you will be redirected to our post lobby, which contains a very short for question survey. Please answer the question. If you have the time, we will appreciate your feedback because we want to be -- we want to improve, we want to be best for next time. And with that, I'm very happy to introduce you and to turn it over to Harpreet Makan. Harpreet, the stage is yours.

Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm very excited to be a guest speaker here today for this NICE Talk. A very good morning, good evening to all of you. Thank you for joining this session. Today, I will be sharing with you insights from Everest Group's latest research, the Attended Automation Playbook. We will talk about the growing need for attended automation to drive a positive impact on employee and customer experience. This playbook aims to empower enterprises like yours with practical advice and winning strategies to unlock superior business value with attended automation. My presentation today would take about 25 to 30 minutes I would start by sharing some insights based on the key things we have heard over the last couple of years from our enterprise conversations around evolving priorities that are driving organizations to transform into a digital-first organization. We will see how stakeholder experience is driving the transformation agenda today. We will then look at the business value that attended automation can bring in and how that can elevate stakeholder experience. In the last section, we will cover how does an organization's attended automation journey look like. And what are some of the best practices to accelerate value realization from this technology. Okay. With that, I'll start with my presentation. As part of our research, we speak to several enterprises. And what we see is increasing realization among global enterprises to evolve into digital first business to remain competitive. The primary reason for this is the business challenges that legacy business models face challenges like high turnaround time of legacy processes, dependency on manual task, significant volume of unstructured data, difficulty in keeping was with changing business models. And last but not the least, in ability to scale and manage demand spikes. As opposed to that, some of the key benefits of our digital-first business that enterprises experience are improved collaboration across teams, greater accuracy and lower risk, faster turnaround time, more touchless transactions, and most important, enhanced employee experience and improved customer satisfaction. Now as we see -- as we talk about some of the traditional drivers of digital transformation, we see them to revolve around overall cost savings, optimizing operations, improving regulatory compliance and employee productivity. However, what we see today is that the focus is shifting towards stakeholder experience. Stakeholder experience is becoming a key factor driving enterprise transformation agenda today. It is among the other factors such as increasing business resilience and driving growth. Digital transformation is expanding to these emerging drivers with new ways of working, employees are demanding seamless connected experience. On customer front, they are demanding [ postalized ] experiences and more real-time support. They also expect consistency and continuity across the channels based on past interactions. This insistence from both customers and employees is compelling for enterprises to meet their expectations and enhance overall experience using digital levers. What has this led to? We see that since attendant automation focuses on enabling individual employees to leverage automation technology. It positions itself as a virtual assistant for employees. Because of these reasons, it is a key technology that is emerging that is seeing accelerated adoption with the objective to drive positive impact on employee and customer experience. There's increasing awareness around the need to improve experience and because of which a tender automation market is experiencing accelerated adoption. If we talk in terms of the market size, the market stood at about USD 950 million at the end of 2021, and we expect it to continue at a sustained momentum of around 30% to reach around USD 1,500 million by 2023 end. With that, I think it is an interesting time to understand where the audience today stands -- we have a poll question for you. The question goes, has your organization adopted or plans to adopt attended automation? Would request you to share your answers by using your poll for all of these options. If you're already using it or plan to implement it in 6 to 12 months in 12 to 24 months in more than 2-plus years or no plans to adopt as of now. [Voting]

I think we have the results now. Okay. We'll go to the next page to share the results of this poll with all of you. So among the audience here, we see a fairly equal distribution. About 40% of the audiences are already using attend automation. There are a few who are planning to implement it in the coming months and year, and there are 40%, which currently have no plans to adopt. I'm sure after this session, some of these organizations will start looking towards or exploring attend automation as a very strong potential technology to adopt. In the next slide, we'll talk about some of the reasons why we say so, right? Enterprises that have adopted a tender automation at scale have achieved significant improvement in employee and customer experience among other business benefits. They have been able to drive cost savings by offloading tasks to attend automation and improving FT capacity. Attended Automation has helped boosted productivity by helping employees in gathering information from different applications, traverse in different databases. And this automation, overall speeds processing time, thereby and reduces human errors, thereby increasing overall efficiency. It also helps with regulatory reporting and compliance. Overall, it aims in maximizing employees' potential by enabling them to focus on higher value work, thereby creating a positive impact on employee experience. With a positive impact on employee experience, it also supports a digitally enabled customer experience with personalized interactions, thereby improving overall customers at auction. We did a survey some time back. And what we saw was on an average enterprise that have adopted an automation at scale, realized a 52% improvement in employee productivity and about 40% improvement in employee experience compared to the pre-automation scenario. I believe this will give very strong reason for some of the attendees here to start exploring this technology. With that, we will move to the next section. In this section, we will talk about some key applications of attend automation and see how it can be leveraged to transform customer care operations. We will also talk about citizen model approach for automation adoption and how a tenant automation can play a role here. Let's start by looking at some of the key applications of attended automation. Firstly, tend automation can play a significant role in on-the-job training and process guidance. We are all aware of the current talent churn that organizations are facing. In this scenario, having a virtual assistant that can help employees guide them through steps they need to take, reduce the possibility of missing important activities is indeed very helpful. Attend Automation guidance capability enabled through features such as health bubbles or tool chips can also increase training effectiveness and enable faster learning for new employees. The second key aspect is employee assistance wherein attend automation can help pass information across multiple sources, provide that to agents in near real time, provide their pillars, suggest them upsell, cross-sell opportunities or recommendations. It can also help analyze fast customer interactions to ensure personalized recommendations. Attend Automation can also help with on-demand data processing, which is about accessing and updating data in near real time, thereby increasing agent efficiency. It can also assist employees in post call work like transcribing customer agent interactions, taking summary notes, generating reminders or generating call logs. After we have looked at some of these applications, I think all of you would be curious to understand how do you identify a process that is suitable to adopt or to automate using attend automation. Just to give you a perspective on that, we believe that there are 5 critical dimensions that you need to look at or assess to understand the attended automation potential. Starting with process complexity, meaning processes that involve employee to traverse various applications and databases that also require them require judgment to make the decision. Such processes make a very stronger case for attend automation. Also because these are the kind of processes that cannot be handled over completely to an unattended robot. If we talk about existing process health, which refers to how well defined or structured the process is. If a process is very well defined, very structured, it can be we handed over to an unattended automation and therefore, reduces the avenues to apply attended automation. Similarly, some of the other factors include technology fragmentation, scale of processes or operations and extent of digitization. A lot of these have a very positive correlation, meaning the greater scale, the strengthen the more it strengthens the business case for attend automation. I hope this gives you some sense of how can you go about identifying and prioritizing processes for attended automation. To give you some perspective around where other enterprises have adopted this technology. What we see is that attend automation is primarily leveraged by enterprises for contact center processes. Over 60% to 65% adoption is in this sector. It is used to enhance productivity of employees, reduce cost and turnaround time and also follow better compliance. The major use cases in this area that we see are on billing support, technical support, order management, appointment booking and some of these are really driving adoption at a very fast pace within contact centers. The second largest sector is industry-specific processes, especially banking specific processes where we see high adoption in use cases around report generation, processing of loan applications and reconciliation in trade. Now to see how attend automation operationalizes in the real world, we will deep them into the contact center function. We will look at some of the key challenges that are present in contact center processes and that can be very well addressed using attend automation. Contact center processes, there is a lot of paper-based communication, manual data inputs that are involved, there are high chances of data entry errors which could lead to delayed or inaccurate updates to customers. It could also result in possibility of compliance risk due to these processing errors inaccurate analysis, leading to incomplete or shortly resolution for customers. Overall, high turnaround time reduced productivity and high chance of the agent missing important conversation points. With that, I'll help you understand how can attend automation be leveraged in this space in contact center. Again, this slide is just to give you a sense of where internal automation can be leveraged to transform contact center process. The way is the slide that you see in front of you, when the customer contacts the agent, there are a number of multiple touch points thereafter, thereafter that interaction, where other automation can play a tier role. For instance, when the customer contracts, the agent and upload the documents, the attend automation robot can help extract relevant information. It can help the agent to track process and compliance aviation, it can provide step-by-step guidance and also collate customer data and present it to the agent in a simplified and consolidated manner. In the post-interaction phase, attend automation can analyze the ticket and guide agents suggest any needed trainings, help transcribe the call, create call notes or summaries and also change the lead status for that particular ticket or customer. I believe -- I hope this gives you a very good picture of how the automation can be leveraged to transform a contact center process. With that, we will switch gears to talk a little bit here about to a distinct approach to intelligent automation adoption. There's a shortfall question for you here to understand if you have invested in the citizen led model for your automation program. Would request you to pull your answers and put this question. [Voting]

I think we have the answers. And just to share what we see among the audience present here today. About 8% of the audience has indicated a yes, that they are using a citizen model for automation program. About 44% are currently not using it. And several -- close to 50% of the organizations here among the attendees are not really sure about whether are they going ahead with this or not? I think a similar situation is what we see in the market as well. Just to give you a sense of what we are talking about here. A citizen model is 1 of the 2 approaches that we see with respect to automation adoption. The other approach is a top-down approach where the top management mandates automation as a part of broader transformation agenda. Other is a citizen model approach, where while the top management endorses this program, the focus is on a decentralized team structure. It is about having a user-centric approach to automation. It is more business-led with increased ownership of businesses responsible for driving widespread adoption among employees. The automation COE here plays more of an enabler role. And as I said, it is a user-centric approach as compared to a process-centric approach in a top-down model. The IT function and the business units work in a collaborative fashion to follow this approach to automation adoption. Now why are we talking about this approach today? Because there are several business benefits of citizen led model. We believe that this model should be a key component of an enterprise's automation strategy as it offers various business benefits that can meaningfully complement the top-down approach. Some of the benefits include eliminating dependency on providers as COE drives training and upskilling. There is accelerated identification of new use cases. It is much more cost efficient, has set lower dependency on IT, and it overall improves employee productivity at a much faster pace and drives greater automation penetration. It also helps in team management because the business users at themselves involved in adopting and driving automation. Now while we see there are so many benefits of this approach. There are still -- we still see a very opportunistic leverage currently of this model. The prevalence is low. While the adoption is accelerating, we believe attend automation can play a key role in this regard. Let's see how attend automation, because it is applicable to own ground employees, business users, it improves automation accessibility and empowers business users. Since users are able to see the change on ground, it helps overcome the fear of job loss. The value proposition is positioned around a personnel assistance to improve or to boost productivity. The use cases that are automated using attend automation are also more relevant to business users. It enhances the ease of getting started for them. It helps focus on more relevant use cases that have an on-ground returns. And overall, it really helps manage change and increase receptivity of automation among business users. With that, we will move to the last section of the presentation today, where we will talk about the Athena automation journey. While this technology is gaining rapid traction and accelerated adoption, we see that many enterprises struggle with implementing attend automation effectively to achieve maximum or desired benefits. In this section, we will look at what are the various stages of the regen automation journey and also talk about some of the winning strategies and best practices to achieve superior outcomes from investments they have made or are planning to make in attend automation. To give you a look around how we see enterprises attend automation journey, we believe that it can be broken down into 5 distinct steps. The first step stands around understanding the current state, which is about mapping out the current then automation capabilities and overall outcomes, understanding the utter automation technology and possible outcomes that are achievable. What this helps us in creating a business case, which is a second stage. Now in terms of creating a business case, it involves identifying the processes, one about which we talked about a few pages earlier, identifying those processes that are more suitable for automation using attend automation technology. This step focuses on detailing the business case, defining the target outcome state and also iterating and identifying the achievable outcomes. Then you go into the third stage, which is about determining the capability target state. Now after an organization has defined where they want to go in terms of the outcomes, it is about determining the capability level required to reach that stage. Identifying the different capability elements drive from the kind of solution that they need to the kind of governance model that they need to put in place, the level of sponsorship that is needed, the level of stakeholder buying in or IT alignment that is needed to make this journey successful. The fourth step is around identifying determinants and mapping the path. Every organization, every enterprise is different. While the current state and the target state could be the same, there could be different part that each organization could take to reach the target state, depending upon some of the determinants like organization structure, how centralizer decentralize it is, what is the level of technology adoption maturity? What is the level of technology awareness of the employee base and some of the other determinants like these? It is about identifying the best fit part suitable for every organization individually. And the last step is about executing against that identified or mapped path. This step also involves identifying potential challenges to adoption in defend some of the best practice framework and establishing a continuous monitoring and feedback loop to refine the target state I think it's a good segue to the next slide, which talks about some of the key best practices frameworks that we have seen to have helped in enterprises ensure a successful execution and a very successful attend automation journey. The first one among this is increasing awareness. I think this is one of the key factors. Enterprises should spread awareness about our automation and its benefit. This will help address any concerns employees might have. This will help get a faster and a more stronger sustainable buy-in from the employee base. The second is about securing buying from business leadership and enterprise IT. Buying in from the senior management is essential to ensure smoother implementation and buy in from enterprise IT will really help tackle any challenges related to data security and compliance, especially in the early stages. The third is about promoting a crowdsourcing approach to identify new use cases. We believe that adopting a bottom-up approach involving process owners and setting up portals where they can submit new automation ideas that the COE can then prioritize will lead to a very large-scale adoption. We have also seen around the fourth best practice, which is about leverage of task mining solutions that capture process information through UI locks, task mining solutions that look at key strokes, mouse clicks and different user activities to capture the process flow and provide insights around the process map, process flow, how are the different tests being repeated, provides insight in the frequency of the different steps. How this technology really helps it is by identifying the tasks that can be automated given the frequency, duration and repetitiveness. It potently helps with this, but also help create initial automation scripts, which can reduce the overall implementation time. This technology also has the potential to help you prioritize these identified opportunities based as the ROI. The fifth best practice that I would like to highlight is around empowering the COE, especially in the early stages of your automation journey. This will really help create a very strong and solid foundational structure and set up a governance framework for a robust and successful automation program. The fifth one is around dedicated internal training programs. It could be by leveraging service provider partners, all the technology providers to help you as an enterprise develop in-house skills, upskill our employees and secure the right talent to enable citizen development. I think some of these best practices could really help an organization at whatever stage they are in their end automation journey to take you to the next level and achieve superior business outcomes, superior ROI greater value from their investments. This concludes my presentation. And with that, I will hand it over back to Liran for taking this session ahead.

Thank you, Harpreet, very much, and I'm delighted to introduce to NEVA, a NICE Employee Virtual Attendant and integrated automation platform that basically brings people and robots together. So let's see how NEVA empowers the agents. So NEVA, this is basically all the 3 main PLRs that assemble the structure of every enterprise, technology, people and processes. Now let's see how NEVA helps tackle each one of the challenges that this point posed on the agent. First of all, technology. So NEVA integrates with basically any duplication, be it homegrown over legacy or third-party application, anything at all she integrates with it. Also, she simplified the rest of activities made so providing processes, she's providing the processes and applications assistance will in real time, which really helps the agents tax better. She also helps overcome the process barrier by reducing process complexity and leading the agent through lengthy, complicated routines. And she also provided clarity into how processes get executed so they can be optimized and improved. Finally, she helps your people how providing them with real-time interaction guidance chip-up on the screen, offering the relevant contextual data to help the agents do the engagement better. And also, she -- also it helps your agents be more involved and engaged because they are the KPIs, provide the answers that they are in the correct time so they can deliver a better CX. Let's jump into the description of the entire product. So basically, what we offer is an inclusive unified intelligence automation platform. The assemble are 3 main layers. The basic layer is basically all the fundamentals. -- ever control the control room, our connection with the AI, all the integrations that we provide as well as NEVA where we create the attendant automation. Second layer is the creation layer. This is the layer where we discover the processes that are right for automation or the optimization. And we give the order to turn them into those by clicking a bottle, which we call NEVA create. And the upper layer, this is basically where our automations are working. We have here NEVA Assist, which is the robot that helps the agents do their work better. And we have the NEVA unattended, which are their robots that operate on their own and do the operation and to end without the interference of the agent. Here, you can see some of the main benefits that are coming from all the success stories that we have with our customers. You can see here a lot of the agents KPIs and the great results that were provided following the deployment of our NEVA. Last but not least, I totally encourage you to schedule a demo with us to reach out to us, and we will tailor you a demo that will be tailored to your business needs. And you can find a lot of information about us about our platform at nicerpa.com.

And now it's a great time to reach out to your questions and see how we can address that. So first question that we have here is what are some ways or best practices to identify new just cases, sorry, for attended automation adoption. Harpreet, do you like to?

Sure, Liran. Thanks for getting up that question for me. I think it's a very important question that we have been hearing from several enterprises as they try to adopt or scale this technology. What we believe there are 2 ways to look at it, right? One is the impact potential that you can get by automating that use case, which could be around what is the cost or volume of transactions? Or what is your overall business criticality. The second lens that you need to take is look at the automation potential, which will depend on some of the factors that we talked about, like process complexity. -- or level of technology fragmentation, the overall scale of the process, the greater the scale, the more the business criticality, the higher the volume. All of these really make a very strong case to make -- to prioritize that use case for attend automation adoption. Also one other aspect that we have seen enterprises use are starting to use is task mining. I think what Liran also mentioned about NEVA discovery., I think that really gives a very data-backed approach to identify new use cases. It will help you highlight the tasks that can be automated. It will help generate initial automate automation scripts and gather insights that will also help you prioritize these identified opportunities based on the expected ROI.

Okay. Let's move on to the next question. How can attended automation be leveraged in conjunction with other technologies such as conversational AI or task mining?

Sure. Again, I think a very interesting question again. We just talked about task mining. In addition to identifying or prioritizing use cases, I think a very important place where task mining really adds value is by establishing continuous feedback loop and a continuous monitoring mechanism to assess the impact once they have adopted the an automation, it is very crucial to analyze the impact on an ongoing basis and refine your approach basis that -- with respect to conversation in AI, it is, again, a very good solution that has been used by several enterprises to augment attend automation. The way it helps us to automate conversational bot flows and ensure bidirectional communication between chat bots and unattended robots. Once you get a get a query or any request from a customer through a conversational interface, it can either be handed over to an unattended robot or the human the customer agent can leverage attend automation to handle that query and then trigger the response back to the customer through the conversational AI interface.

Thank you very much. Let's take another one. What are some common challenges or people that organization may encounter when implementing attended automation.

Sure. I think we touched upon some of the best practices. But if I were to talk about the key challenges that organization space, then in a first and foremost is the lack of awareness about the potential value that this technology can provide. The lack of awareness right from the management level to the employee level. The second pertinent challenge that we see is about training and accessing resources to develop these automations. It is also difficult to constitute and implement the right governance model, right, change management strategy. And one of the things that we just talked about while I was answering the previous question, is about maintaining a healthy pipeline of automation opportunities. We have seen organizations struggling at that point also.

Okay. I'll take another 2. Could you elaborate on some real world use case where tenant automation has been successfully leveraged to assist employees.

Sure. I think I talk about 2 or 3 industries where we have seen significant leverage of this technology, definitely in the customer care units or contact center, especially of BFSI and telecom, where we have seen this being leveraged extensively. We have also seen it being leveraged in e-commerce sector, the use cases like increasing efficiency for return or replacement request, processing these requests effectively. Also in terms -- when I talk about some of the replacement and recurred requests, the way attended automation can be leveraged is about catching all the details, taking the purchase date, triggering the action in the underlying system and then helping the customer agent to trigger that response back to the customer. We have also seen it being leveraged in telecom, as I said, taking the task from the agent, providing them more near real-time guidance to manage or maneuver through customer data.

Okay. And here is the last question that I see right now. Audience, you're welcome to wait some more if you'd like. In the meantime, I'll read this one. How can organization determine which processes are best suited for deed automation versus those that should be automated through unattended automation. That's a good one.

Yes. I think one of the key aspects which I would suggest or recommend to look out for is the level of judgment that is needed to handle that process. If you really require human judgment and you require an employee or a customer agent to take that decision, but you still want to improve the efficiency and productivity. That makes it a very stronger case for agenda automation and not so suitable privately for unattended automation. Because here, attend automation will really act as a virtual assistant. It will help employee. It will improve the productivity. It will help get things done faster, but it will still have the flexibility for the employee to take that judgment when and where needed. I think that is one of the key factors that I believe could differentiate or help you understand to automate a process using attended versus unattended automation.

Okay. Let's see if we have another question here. No. I don't see one. So -- okay. So thank you very much to all of you for joining us today, listening. The recording will be sent to you following wait. You have a question here? No? Okay. Sorry. The recording will be sent to you via e-mail, your e-mail following this -- the end of this session. I encourage you all to go to the post lobby and to answer our very short survey to help us improve. And also, if you want to download some relevant assets that we already prepared for you there, you are welcome to do so and visit our website to more information. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Harpreet to us a great having you here with us today, and we'll see you in our next webinars. Thank you.

Thank you.