NICE Acquires inContact

NICE has just made an acquisition that is, well, very nice indeed, with the purchase of inContact. With this purchase, NICE can enhance its solutions with the cloud contact center offerings from inContact, creating a fully integrated and complete cloud contact center solution suite.

NICE is known as a provider of contact center software solutions, designed to enable intelligent decision-making through advanced data analytics. inContact is a leader in cloud contact center software, offering a complete solution that includes a customer interaction cloud, expert service model, and a broad partner ecosystem.

By combining NICE’s WFO and Analytics solutions with inContact’s contact center cloud offerings, organizations using NICE’s solutions can transform the contact center to an “Experience Center,” connecting customers and employees through personalization, advanced analytics, and smart action. It also means that a single vendor can provide WFO applications and Analytics along with a contact center cloud infrastructure, combining two essentials for workflow, customer support, and communications.

Following the acquisition, NICE claims that it will be able to provide a “true” contact center cloud offering, providing full cloud functionality, a low total cost of ownership, and quick, seamless upgrades. Each element of the contact center features Analytics, so as to adapt and adjust interactions in real-time, according to customer intent and employee persona across all channels.

Blair Pleasant of UCStrategies notes that according to NICE, this acquisition will lead to a “Reinvention of customer service.” At the core is a new vision for customer service that combines cloud omnichannel contact centers with a powerful WFO portfolio in the cloud, providing a single integrated solution from a single vendor. The company notes that the cloud delivery model is the perfect way to deliver this in a seamless way providing full elasticity and enabling organizations to pay for only what they need. It also provides multi-tenancy and cloud reliability. NICE notes that the omnichannel contact center plus WFO is just the beginning of the story, and that by fusing advanced analytics, organizations can reinvent customer service.

Pleasant adds: “NICE is introducing the Experience Center, where omnichannel contact center and WFO meet analytics in the cloud. Integrating this together with omnichannel contact center in the cloud lets organizations use analytics to connect and route the right call based on understanding of customer needs and intent with the right person using the right channel. Going further, businesses will be able to use advanced journey analytics to understand the customer’s next step and then proactively connect the customer with the right agent, while giving the agent the right tools.”

“My concern for NICE,” notes Pleasant, “is that some of its current partners that provide contact center products, including Aspect, Avaya, and Cisco, are likely to find another WFO and analytics partner, as they view inContact as a competitor. While I don’t see any impact on inContact partners such as RingCentral, there will certainly be some shuffling of partnerships in the coming months. The big question is how will NICE’s primary competitor Verint respond – will Verint now look to acquire a cloud contact center company such as LiveOps or Five 9? NICE is clearly gaining cloud expertise from inContact, as well as a large subscriber base, and Verint is likely respond by acquiring one of inContact’s chief rivals. Market consolidation continues.”

Not only will this acquisition give NICE a foothold in the cloud contact center space, it will also enable it to reach market segments of all sizes as an end-to-end cloud-based customer service solution provider. The Contact Center as a Service industry is significantly larger than the market NICE currently reaches, so this will provide a greater outreach and partner network in markets worldwide.

For more information, visit www.nice.com and www.inContact.com.