CUSTOMER PROFILE
National Grid, one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the U.S., sought to modernize its contact center operations to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency. As part of this transformation, National Grid partnered with NiCE to adopt a modern, open platform that empowers their business teams with improved interaction management, seamless access to data, and integration flexibility through extensive APIs. The NiCE CXone Mpower platform now supports custom reporting via Power BI and allows National Grid to operate in a way that’s uniquely aligned with their operational needs.
01 THE BEFORE
Challenges with on-premises systems
Before the transition, National Grid relied on disparate systems. Their teams maintained multiple legacy platforms, witness for historical and Calabrio for production recordings, resulting in fragmented data silos and inefficiencies. Users were required to know specific criteria to search and access interactions, limiting productivity and flexibility. The legacy workforce management system was not capable of handling the complexity of their union-based workforce rules, causing shift bidding to be manual. Stability issues, limited backend data access, and lack of integration with custom reporting tools like Power BI further hindered their operations.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
The desire to change
Recognizing the need for a modernized contact center, National Grid aimed to implement a full contact center as a service solution that would improve customer experience through optimized contact center operations and would support a phased transition without service disruption. National Grid sought to enhance operational efficiency by optimizing workforce management and automation and ensuring compliance assurance with advanced interaction analytics while leveraging real-time monitoring for quality purposes.
03 THE SOLUTION
Implementing NiCE CXone engagement hub
NiCE seamlessly migrated 30 million legacy interactions from Calabrio to the cloud, with unified playback and storage of historical and production calls through Interactions Hub.
With guidance from NiCE's Value Realization Services. National Grid began its phased implementation of the CXone Engagement Hub. The NiCE migration team provided a phased migration strategy, ensuring a smooth transition by integrating with National Grid’s existing Cisco ACD while preparing to transition to the CXone Mpower platform. Key components of the solution included multi-ACD support to allow continued use of its incumbent ACD until contract expiration, delivering an end-to-end workforce engagement suite, including compliance assurance, real-time recording, quality management, and interaction analytics with Enlighten AI for CSAT. This enabled the seamless migration of 30 million legacy interactions to the cloud, unifying playback of historical and production calls. Business teams now benefit from intuitive search capabilities and open API access, allowing custom integration and reporting through tools like Power BI and automated evaluations. Workforce Management provided support for complex union-based scheduling, including seamless shift bidding and seniority rules. Intelligent intraday automation with Employee Engagement Manager provided further self-service scheduling support including pre-approved time-off requests, swaps as well as extra hours and voluntary time off opportunities.
Interaction Analytics automates the identification of customer intents, actions and outcomes in each call. Used alongside AutoDiscovery, this data is used to create effortless organizational efficiencies. Interaction Analytics also includes Workspaces which create analytic dashboards available to all end users for quick access to “My Team” and data trending therein.
A key driver of success was the collaboration with VRS, which acted as both advisor and enabler through every phase of the implementation. VRS played a critical role in ensuring the successful implementation, optimization, and long-term adoption of CXone Mpower. The VRS team worked closely with National Grid to configure the platform to their unique successful implementation, optimization, and long-term adoption of CXone Mpower, providing ongoing process improvements to ensure their workforce was fully enabled to maximize the benefits of the new system.
“The fact that we were able to seamlessly migrate to NiCE has eased our shift from on-prem to cloud-based operations, without downtime,” says Stefan Singh, Customer Experience and Digital Product Manager at National Grid. “The ongoing engagement of the VRS team, with their insights, support, and process enhancements, has been invaluable in making sure we get the system that best suits our needs.”
04 THE RESULTS
Significant improvements across the board with VRS
The implementation of CXone Mpower multi-ACD resulted in a series of meaningful improvements. Unified historical and live interactions within Interactions Hub enabled quick and intuitive playback, leading to an increase in customer satisfaction. Business teams transitioned from manual tracking to automated scheduling and quality processes, resulting in a reduction in call-handling time and an improvement in agent productivity. This level of adoption was made possible through ongoing support and coaching from VRS.
With VRS guidance, National Grid progressed from an estimated 50% tool utilization to 80–90%, unlocking more of the platform’s capabilities. Transitioning to NiCE resolved previous system outages and reduced platform maintenance.
“Integrating NiCE solutions has enabled us to enhance our customer experience, operational flexibility, and compliance assurance,” says Singh. “It would usually take time to onboard staff to a new system, especially one as extensive as this, and we still may not actually use more than 30-40% of its capabilities. However, the VRS team worked closely with us, so that we have been able to learn the new tools in depth, unlock more of the NiCE platforms’ capabilities, and very quickly achieve utilization of 80-90%. This has allowed us to truly realize the value of our investment.”
05 THE FUTURE
Ready for continued innovation
National Grid’s cloud transformation is set to continue, with plans to transition to a full CCaaS solution in the coming years. Ongoing strategic engagement with VRS, ensuring continuous optimization and best practices across their NiCE ecosystem. By leveraging CXone Mpower’s AI-driven capabilities, the company is preparing for a deeper AI integration for advanced automation and predictive analytics. Plans are underway to activate Desktop Analytics and explore Agent Augmentation capabilities including AutoSummary. Through its strategic partnership with NiCE, National Grid is paving the way for a more agile, scalable, and customer-focused contact center operation.
