NICE CXone is a cloud-native customer experience (CX) platform that deserves strong consideration from enterprises seeking to consolidate their CX stacks into a single unified system. By bringing together omnichannel routing, analytics, workforce optimization, automation, and artificial intelligence, NICE CXone presents a streamlined approach to improve contact center experiences, both for customers and support agents alike.
Compare NICE CXone to the Best Contact Center Software
Our review of NICE CXone found its security, compliance, scalability, and support capabilities to be notable high points. Meanwhile, the platform’s vast array of features may be excessive for some, but it’s purpose-built to provide deep and integrated support across the entire CX workflow journey.
It packs a lot of punch and comes with a high price tag. Because of that, it’s not typically an option we recommend for most businesses.
Nextiva came in as our number one choice for most people because of its ability to balance functionality, ease of use, and affordability better than the rest. RingCentral lands somewhere between Nextiva and CXone in terms of advanced functionality. Vonage came in at third because of its simple and affordable modular platform.
Check out our top contact center picks to learn more about how our favorites stack up against each other.
NICE CXone: The Good and The Bad
The Good
Comprehensive Platform: First and foremost, NICE CXone combines a full suite of CX capabilities like omnichannel routing, workforce optimization, analytics, automation, AI, and more on a unified cloud platform. This consolidation simplifies management and integration.
Digital and Self-Service Capabilities: Unlike some of the other CX platforms on the market, NICE CXone has developed an impressive digital and self-service suite that’s focused on leveraging AI to improve customer support experiences.
A key, recurring theme across all of the platform’s components is the use of advanced conversational AI to deliver personalized interactions. For example, NICE CXone allows you to meet customers early in their journey with intelligent virtual agents and chatbots that feel more natural through improved dialog management.
Another unique element is the platform’s Proactive Conversational AI, with reach-out capabilities that anticipate customer needs before they arise. This kind of functionality allows your human agents to focus on relationship-building and handling complex support issues (as opposed to resolving repetitive information requests).
Advanced Call Handling: As an advanced cloud contact center platform, NICE CXone provides sophisticated capabilities for optimizing voice call operations. These capabilities include intelligent call routing, call center IVR, call analytics, workforce management, and agent empowerment. Some of the key voice call features include automatic call distributions based on skills and priority levels for VIP customers, automated call recordings (with integrated speech analytics for performance insights), and customizable dashboards that expose real-time and historical KPIs.
Additionally, NICE CXone also helps forecast staffing needs based on predictive models that account for seasonality, campaigns, and trends.
Journey Orchestration and Routing: NICE CXone has also developed some unique features focused on customer journey orchestration and omnichannel routing. Most of this functionality revolves around leveraging AI to guide customers to resolutions via their support channels of choice—while also maintaining context between touchpoints. Additionally, the platform’s AI-powered routing directs each contact to the best-matched resource based on predictive modeling (rather than typical rules-based assignments). The platform’s integrated dialer also minimizes drop-offs by initiating outreach before customers abandon the support queue.
Agent Assist Contact Center Solutions: Like some of its other standout features, NICE CXone’s Agent Assist module focuses on augmenting the capabilities of customer service representatives with artificial intelligence. The goal is to equip support agents with clever tools and automated guidance in real time to help them handle complex customer needs more effectively.
A prime example is Copilot—the platform’s always-on AI system that suggests the next actions that agents can take during calls for faster resolution. The platform also has an AutoSummary feature that uses AI to relieve agents from manual note-taking duties by automatically documenting interactions.
Furthermore, unlike solutions whose goal is to replace humans entirely with bots, NICE CXone looks to harmonize AI-powered enhancements within existing manual workflows.
Workforce Engagement Management (WEM): NICE CXone’s Workforce Engagement Management suite aims to engage and support full customer service teams with the use of AI. For example, the platform’s AI-powered schedule forecasting ensures that your staffing aligns with predicted volumes to meet service-level targets. Similarly, the platform’s quality management functionality provides automated evaluative feedback based on machine learning patterns.
Some of NICE CXone’s additional WEM modules also focus on engaging support agents through gamification, facilitating support supervisors in their real-time decision-making efforts, and streamlining compliance with centralized recording storage.
Agent Training Tools: In terms of training your support agents, the platform includes a robust suite of tools aimed at empowering agents with resources for continuing education. To start, the platform’s engagement features optimize the schedules of your support agents to balance customer demand with agent availability and capacity. This ensures reasonable workloads for your agents and gives them more flexibility in their schedules, improving the morale across your support teams.
The platform also comes ready with microlearning video content, gamification through point systems and badges, and skill certifications across your company’s unique support systems and processes. As a result, when agents cross-train across channels, their profiles will automatically update for accurate routing and assignments to support requests.
Process Automation: The platform’s chatbots and virtual assistants can fully manage common customer inquiries over digital channels like web chat, Facebook Messenger, and SMS. This works via natural language processing that determines an appropriate response to customer support queries from the company’s knowledge base—handling everything from checking balances to scheduling appointments.
The platform also has functionality built around automating processes to manage routine workflows from end-to-end—including post-call documentation, appointment follow-ups, lead hand-offs between teams, and more.
Likewise, NICE CXone can also automate contact center quality assurance by programmatically scoring random call samples on key metrics. Using these scores, the platform can notify your contact center managers of high performers and those in need of remediation.
CX Analytics: Most support professionals know that you can solve many support problems with CX analytics, a few platforms do this as well as NICE CXone. It has an analytics suite focused on extracting and activating customer service insights using artificial intelligence techniques and machine learning for pattern recognition, predictive modeling, and prescriptive recommendations.
Some of the platform’s biggest strengths include the ability to ask questions with natural language through its ‘Enlighten Actions’ conversational interface. This allows users to explore customer support data without needing to know advanced languages like SQL to find what they need.
Omnichannel visibility is another key differentiator for NICE CXone. Support agents can view keywords and terms of interest to understand which support requests are most popular across regions, customer cohorts, product lines, and more.
Open Cloud Platform: Finally, the NICE CXone Open Cloud Platform leverages its own dedicated cloud infrastructure to guarantee extremely high availability levels—ensuring that businesses can consistently serve consumers without unexpected support outages. At the same time, the platform’s rigorous data protections also safeguard sensitive information so that subscribers don’t have to worry about meeting global compliance standards.
In short, the Open Cloud Platform handles the heavy-lifting pieces of security, resilience, and connectivity, allowing different types of contact centers to focus on helping customers rather than repetitive administrative work.
The Bad
Complex and Expensive Pricing: The many packages and optional add-ons can make the pricing structure too complex for some customers. It also ends up being expensive in comparison to other solutions.
Heavy Footprint: The extensive platform may be perceived as bloated overkill for companies with basic needs. There’s a lot to it, resulting in a steep learning curve and extended implementation period.
No On-Premises Version: NICE CXone currently does not offer an on-premises deployment option for organizations wanting to keep the platform on dedicated infrastructure.
NICE CXone Plans and Pricing
NICE CXone is priced using a per-agent, per-month model that scales based on the number of agents on the platform, with no long-term contracts required. The packages are then structured to focus on specific channel support needs and targeted group capabilities.
The pricing breaks down between these packages as follows:
Agent Packages
- Digital: $71 per agent per month. Supports email, chat, and digital channels.
- Voice: $94 per agent per month. Tailored for high-volume voice operations.
- Omnichannel: $110 per agent per month. Manages interactions across all channels.
Suite Packages
- Essential: $135 per agent per month. Adds interaction analytics, evaluations, and recording on top of the Omnichannel package.
- Core: $169 per agent per month. Enhances Essential bundle with workforce optimization, performance evaluation, and integration tools.
- Complete: $209 per agent per month. Full suite, including feedback management and advanced analytics.
There are also several a la carte add-ons available, including AI-driven assistants, analytics expansions, and targeted solutions for verticals. If you plan on deploying a high number of agents, you may also be eligible for NICE CXone’s volume discounts.
That said, if you already know your CCaaS implementation is going to be fairly complex, you may consider reaching out directly for a custom enterprise quote.
How We Reviewed Contact Center Solutions
Evaluating a sophisticated customer experience platform like NICE CXone requires going beyond just product demos and free trials. To make this review, we gathered unbiased insights from industry experts, customer communities, and third-party review platforms like G2.
To start, we compare capabilities after configuring multiple test accounts and piloting common service workflow scenarios. We look closely at things like call handling, agent training and coaching, automations, inbound vs outbound functionality, advanced call routing options, ease of use, implementation, and customer service.
We also tune into CX analyst briefings, check buyer review sites like G2 Crowd, and monitor customer forums to collect candid feedback covering platform strengths, weaknesses, and competitive comparisons.
After doing all the above, Nextiva is our favorite contact center solution. Check out our full list of the best options to learn more.
NICE CXone FAQs
What Does NICE CXone Do?
NICE CXone is an integrated customer experience platform consolidating omnichannel routing, analytics, workforce optimization, automation, and artificial intelligence into a unified operating system. This complete toolset manages end-to-end customer journeys across the entirety of the CX workflow.
In other words, NICE CXone offers seamless transitions between support channels, informed by holistic data insights and continuous improvements through layered AI. It aims to drive mutually beneficial brand experiences by empowering enterprise customer service teams.
Is NICE CXone Cloud-Based?
Yes, NICE CXone is delivered exclusively as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service platform. The multi-tenant architecture provides scalability to expand and contract usage based on variable business needs. Its cloud delivery also expedites the roll-out of the latest features and minimizes customer requirements around hardware or maintenance.
Which Companies Use NICE CXone?
NICE CXone supports customer experience operations across all major verticals globally, including leaders in telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, retail, and technology. Notable brands using NICE CXone include T-Mobile, Rakuten, Standard Bank, British Airways, and TD Bank.
What Are NICE CXone’s Standout Features?
Omnichannel routing engines, integrated workforce optimization modules, advanced interaction analytics that leverage AI, an extensive automation toolkit based on machine learning, robust APIs that enable third-party integrations, configurable support for industry compliance standards, and expertise in delivering reliable and scalable cloud-based software services.
How Much Does NICE CXone Cost?
NICE CXone pricing follows a per-agent, per-month model based on channel support needs, feature set requirements, and deployment size. A base digital agent license begins at $71 monthly, with voice and omnichannel packages at higher tiers. Suite bundles group additional capabilities together for $135 to over $200 per agent per month. Enterprise quotes are customized and require getting in touch.
