On March 5, New Jersey-based cloud contact center firm NICE announced the availability of Voice Traffic Filter from Mutare, a provider of digital voice security solutions headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, as a premium application on the NICE CXexchange online marketplace. The partnership enables the two companies to take significant steps toward removing unwanted traffic from the call flows of their customers. The integration will also help NICE customers strengthen cybersecurity by filtering out malicious and suspicious calls as well as socially engineered attacks.
Chuck French, Mutare’s chief growth officer, said no one was better than NICE in meeting customer expectations. Barry Cooper, president of the CX Division at NICE, said the partnership with Mutare will enable an even more seamless experience for customers, eliminating unwanted traffic to enhance call flows, promote secure interactions. and drive exceptional CX.
On March 6, customer data science company dunnhumby and location analytics provider Placer.ai announced their partnership aimed at enabling retailers to unlock customer insights and give companies in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry an edge in increasingly competitive environments. Teaming up will allow California-based Placer.ai to provide data gathered from location visit trends to London-headquartered dunnhumby to complement insights that it publishes in the Retailer Preference Index (RPI), an annual report that has become the industry standard for measuring grocery retail brand equity, ranking more than 60 retailers according to both customer sentiment and financial performance data.
Matt O’Grady, president for the Americas at dunnhumby, said integrating insights into a holistic journey enables retailers to better understand their customers at a time when differentiation has never been more important. Mark Bowen, head of partner programs at Placer.ai, said the partnership with dunnhumby is a clear step in bringing together industry-leading insights, perspectives, and analysis to better inform strategy and decision making.
Also on March 6, tourism company TUI Group announced the expansion of its customer data strategies worldwide with customer data platform (CDP) provider Tealium to drive CX success as the travel industry recovers to pre-pandemic levels. Germany-based TUI first engaged San Diego, California-headquartered Tealium to enhance its digital transformation journey, but has since expanded its relationship with Tealium by leveraging its predictive analytics and conversions API solutions.
André Exner, director of customer hub and common analytics at TUI, said Tealium provides an improved experience in true real time. Rob Coyne, senior vice president and managing director of EMEA at Tealium, said the recent expansion with TUI was a resounding endorsement of the trust that clients placed in the company.
Between March 7 and March 8, no less than three noteworthy CX partnerships coalesced in the healthcare space, with two of the three alliances involving Microsoft or a Microsoft company.
On March 7, San Francisco-based contact center solutions company Genesys announced its collaboration with Epic Systems, the dominant player in electronic health records headquartered in Verona, Wisconsin, and the provider of health information technology to large US hospitals and health systems. The partnership will integrate the Genesys Cloud platform, relied upon by more than 600 healthcare organizations, with Epic’s customer relationship management suite, Cheers, to give patients and providers a more unified communication experience.
Tara Mahoney, vice president of global healthcare practice at Genesys, said the integration with Epic allows healthcare providers to respond effectively to changing patient preferences and create a more personalized care experience. Sam Seering, product manager at Epic’s Cheers, said the collaboration with Genesys enables health systems to improve the patient experience with insights from contact center interactions and to streamline agent productivity with embedded call controls.
Also on March 7, Microsoft and Cognizant joined forces to integrate generative AI capabilities. The collaboration embeds generative AI directly into the user interface of Cognizant’s TriZetto Assistant on Facets, software powered by Microsoft Azure that works alongside human users by sourcing enterprise data and automates actions on behalf of users to streamline workflows and minimize manual steps. Generative AI further plays a role in interpreting configuration documents, providing pre-built templates for configurations, accelerating user workflows as a result. And with user identity management, TriZetto software users are able to access necessary data across various contexts, extending the value of existing investments in TriZetto and Microsoft technologies.
Surya Gummadi, EVP and president at Cognizant Americas, said the collaboration with Microsoft makes it easier for organizations to realize the full potential of generative AI as a groundbreaking technology. Rob Dahdah, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s healthcare and life sciences Industry, said partnering with Cognizant has furnished solutions alleviate the acute challenges facing providers and insurance companies, while also delivering better patient and member experiences.
On March 8, Nuance Communications, a Microsoft company, and Providence, a not-for-profit health system serving the western US based in Renton, Washington, announced they were teaming up to accelerate AI innovation at scale. Providence will leverage Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare as a standard platform for developing and delivering AI-powered applications to improve operational efficiency, accelerate the development of in-house solutions, advance clinical research, improve physician and patient experiences, and expand industry collaboration.
BJ Moore, executive vice president and CIO at Providence, said the collaboration enables the company to rapidly scale and increase the capabilities of many of its existing solutions while creating more personalized and satisfied experiences for both patients and providers. Microsoft’s Rob Dahdah said the company is accelerating the development and adoption of AI solutions in healthcare by leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and incorporating previously siloed data streams into generative AI to offer insights and recommendations that improve operational efficiency and care outcomes.
On March 13, conversational cloud company LivePerson said it was working together with UK firm Infinity, the provider of a call analytics platform, to help brands better personalize digital experiences through conversational data and intelligence. The new partnership seeks to drive enhanced personalization and measurable return on investment (ROI) by connecting attribution data across voice calls and digital messaging conversations, enabling brands to strengthen their visibility into online-to-offline engagements, better understand factors driving escalation from digital to voice, and improve sales and service outcomes through more personalized experiences.
Warren Newbert, CEO of Milton Keynes, England-based Infinity, said the partnership will allow the company to offer even more valuable insights to marketers, sales teams, CX professionals, and contact centers. Dan Sincavage, senior vice president of global partnerships at New York City-headquartered LivePerson, said the combination of LivePerson’s industry-leading digital customer conversation platform and analytics with Infinity’s powerful call intelligence will allow brands to unlock a high-impact set of data and insights that make conversations across channels more powerful than ever, accelerating their digital transformation.
Also on March 13, iQor, the Florida-based managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business processing solutions, announced it was leveraging NICE CXone cloud-native customer experience (CX) platform. iQor is incorporating CXone into Symphony [AI], its generative AI ecosystem, to improve CX with real-time analytics and responses.
Prabhjot Singh, chief digital officer of iQor, said the partnership with NICE has enhanced the company’s CX capabilities in delivering notable CX for its clients. NICE’s Barry Cooper said the firm’s partnership with iQor demonstrates the importance of understanding the customer journey from end to end.
This series continues in Part 2, which covers CX partnerships formed from March 14 to the end of March.
Author Information
Alex is responsible for writing about trends and changes that are impacting the customer experience market. He had served as Principal Editor at Village Intelligence, a Los Angeles-based consultancy on technology impacting healthcare and healthcare-related industries. Alex was also Associate Director for Content Management at Omdia and Informa Tech, where he produced white papers, executive summaries, market insights, blogs, and other key content assets. His areas of coverage spanned the sectors grouped under the technology vertical, including semiconductors, smart technologies, enterprise & IT, media, displays, mobile, power, healthcare, China research, industrial and IoT, automotive, and transformative technologies.
At IHS Markit, he was Managing Editor of the company’s flagship IHS Quarterly, covering aerospace & defense, economics & country risk, chemicals, oil & gas, and other IHS verticals. He was Principal Editor of analyst output at iSuppli Corp. and Managing Editor of Market Watch, a fortnightly newsletter highlighting significant analyst report findings for pitching to the media. He started his career in writing as an Editor-Reporter for The Associated Press.
