USA: Implementation of NICE SmartCenter expanded to improve customer service for major US electric utility 

NICE Systems a leading global provider of advanced solutions that enable organizations to extract Insight from Interactions to drive performance announced that Atlanta-based Southern Company, a leading U.S. electricity company, has expanded its strategic implementation of NICE SmartCenter in order to create a more integrated, comprehensive contact center technology environment.

Southern Company will replace competing recording and quality management solutions, and will also add screen content analytics. Southern Company is a long-time user of NICE's workforce management solution, IEX TotalView, and will now expand its NICE environment to help improve agent performance and deliver the highest quality of customer service possible to the company's over 4 million customers.

NICE will provide supervisors of the 850 agents in Southern Company's four contact center locations with enhanced technology and tools to support precision quality management for improving agent performance, customer satisfaction, and training effectiveness.

It will also enable Southern Company's contact center supervisors to proactively evaluate the quality of service provided to customers. By identifying key interactions and correlating them with agent screen activity, supervisors can more effectively determine what steps agents can take to deliver world-class customer service, as well as to develop programs for performance improvement.

"This strategic implementation of the NICE solutions presents an opportunity for Southern Company to upgrade to the most robust, comprehensive solution, which will enable us to improve the process of managing agents and their interactions with customers," said Harvey Ellis, Call Center Operations Support Manager, Southern Company. "We have been using NICE's workforce management solution successfully for ten years, so it was completely natural to make NICE SmartCenter the standard across our contact centers."

"We see leading companies across an array of industries looking to improve customer service and operational efficiency," said Eran Gorev, Chief Business Officer, NICE Systems Inc. "By choosing to expand their implementation of NICE SmartCenter, Southern Company is demonstrating its drive to provide the level of quality service that customers expect from an industry leader, while operating in a more efficient and comprehensive manner."

About NICE Systems

NICE Systems is the leading provider of Insight from Interactions solutions and value-added services, powered by the convergence of advanced analytics of unstructured multimedia content and transactional data - from telephony, web, email, radio, video, and other data sources.

NICE's solutions address the needs of the enterprise and security markets, enabling organizations to operate in an insightful and proactive manner, and take immediate action to improve business and operational performance and ensure safety and security. NICE has over 24,000 customers in more than 135 countries, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies.

More information is available at http://www.nice.com.

Date - 02/12/2008