The State of CX: Share in our abundance of data riches

NICE is lucky to have an abundance of riches—we’re speaking of data, of course. Through our proprietary AI built just for CX, we’ve gathered data for over three decades amounting to billions of interactions and we have the data expertise to interpret it and identify the most powerful CX insights.?

Here’s how these insights benefit CX leaders, C-suite executives and contact center supervisors to help drive their next critical business decision.

Insight 1: Happy customers deliver outsized stock gains to the business?

Crunching all the reams of data uncovered a firm validation on the value of CX. When comparing companies’ sentiment scores with their stock prices, it’s clear that these metrics have a direct correlation—companies with higher sentiment scores outperform their peers in stock value.??

The upshot of this correlation to business leaders is obvious: the better the customer experiences they can deliver to their customers and outperform their competition, the more their business will succeed in the most tangible of returns.?

Insight 2: Agents are your best brand ambassadors for customer satisfaction

Nested within this insight is good news and also a challenge to companies. First, the good news. Your agents are the best representatives of the company to your customer. A top-performing agent is worth their proverbial weight in gold for the positive impact they have on your CX.

The challenge, however, are variable agent performances. Agents in the lower half give different experiences to customers, disappointing them. Yet, if their performance scores are brought up closer to the average, overall KPIs for CX and in the contact center are boosted.?

Insight 3: Positive agent soft-skill behaviors significantly boost customer sentiment?

But what, exactly, can agents do while on a call with a customer to boost customer sentiment? It comes down to soft skills. Treating the customer with empathy, respect, and concern goes a very long way to making customers feel valued. The right soft skills can help calm a customer, rather than escalating the situation. The right soft skills also help the agent efficiently gather the information they need to resolve the issue promptly.??

We found that when agents demonstrate more soft skills, customer sentiment scores follow. Investing in soft skills over mere process and technical training is a sure-fire way to deliver standout experiences in a crowded market.?

Insight 4: Customer sentiment soars with unified AI hyper platform adoption?

You can measure customer sentiment via surveys, but it’s only capturing from one angle what customers are thinking. Industry survey data offers a starting point for understanding customer sentiment, but they are limited in providing insights that show next best steps.??

Instead, when organizations learn from their own customer interactions via sentiment data, they can take targeted action to improve that metric. Our data analysis shows that our customers outperform industry survey trends.

Insight 5: The stakes of CX are higher than ever, yet most customer interactions with an agent are highly inefficient

Customers want more, they want better, and they want it now. Expectation transfer due to the best CX out there makes these expectations rise even further. The pressure is on agents to deliver customer experiences to remember.??

Yet, our analysis found that only a small percentage of time in a customer interaction with an agent is spent on activities that positively influence customer sentiment. The rest of the time is squandered on other tasks.?

This interaction time is critical for your brand because your agents are often the only people that your customers will interact with at your company—they are the face and voice of your brand. Inefficient interactions are also problematic because every wasted second on one interaction is a second that could have been spent with another waiting customer.

The sky’s the limit?

With billions of CX interactions and purpose-built AI, NICE partners with customers to bring sharp insights to strategize the next phase of your CX. If there’s one take-away message from our data analysis—it’s that improving customer interactions to boost customer sentiment has a measurable, positive impact on a business’s bottom line. Read the blog by Andrew Traba of NICE for more details.

More CX insights

Win CX in 2025

Tired of inconsistent CX that is hurting your bottom line? Win CX in 2025 with powerful data, key tech trends and investment strategies to set up your success. Check out the NICE CX Strategy Week 2025 webinar series for pointers on prepping for the year ahead. Explore why CX consistency matters, and how to power positive customer interactions. Register now to see the on-demand webinars.

Ignite the CX conversation

We want to hear from you:??

What business gains have you experienced since improving CX KPIs??

Let us know in the comments.