Tags: analytics

Elevating the Travel Experience at World Aviation Festival

Posted by Bill Carleton on Posted in Aviation, Biometrics, Events Tagged , , ,

NEC is proud to be Silver Sponsor at the World Aviation Festival, October 8-10, 2024 in RAI Exhibition and Convention Center, Amsterdam.

The popular, global event attracts 5,000+ attendees eager to discover the latest innovations, trends, and technological advancements in the aviation industry.

We invite you to visit our booth at Hall 1, Stand 406. Experience our latest biometric, AI and analytics technologies that are taking travel to new heights:

Airport Analytics

  • Dynamic, real-time situational awareness
  • Streamlined operations and cost savings

Mobile Biometric Boarding

  • Secure, automated passenger boarding
  • Unparalleled convenience for agents and passengers

Baggage Analytics

  • AI-driven to minimize lost luggage and maximize revenue
  • Revolutionizing baggage handling for an enhanced passenger experience

Digital ID

  • Enabling secure, personalized and interoperable identity profiles
  • Enhanced contactless customer experiences

Also, join our Fireside Chat with United Airlines on October 9, 12:30pm at Keynote 2 – Hall 5. I’m presenting, “Rewards and Challenges in Delivering a Touchless Travel Experience; A Conversation with United Airlines,” along with Ricky Barr, Managing Director of Customer Strategy and Innovation at United Airlines.

To schedule an on-site meeting or booth tour, please contact Jim Nation (Jim.Nation@necam.com), NEC Business Development Manager.

We look forward to connecting with you at the conference!

Make 2024 The Year You Commit To A Better Customer Experience With These Best Practices

Posted by Josh Loinette on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Unified Communications Tagged , ,

As the new year gets underway, everyone is setting goals – both individually and as an organization. One area that businesses should think long and hard about is customer experience. 52% of customers would switch to a company’s competitor after just one bad experience. There’s no calculating the value of making a good first impression – and following through on it. A cloud-hosted business intelligence solution – like UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE – can provide a tremendous amount of insight into how a business communicates with its customers and turns those insights in action for managers and frontline employees.

Here are several best practices to follow if you want to transform your customer experience in 2024:

Use Sentiment Analysis To Better Understand How Your Customers Are Feeling

Every customer interaction presents an opportunity to understand how they feel about your business. If you want your customers to keep coming back – and bring new ones with them via referrals – then it’s critical to know when they’re excited about a new purchase or frustrated by recent poor service so you can address them accordingly. Your customer experience has implications for all aspects of your business, which is why you need a solution that has some form of sentiment analysis included. With sentiment analysis, you can help improve your entire organization:

Support – Customer support managers can input key phrases such as “cancel”. If it finds that key phrase, supervisors can establish rules that will assign the recorded conversation to a manager to see how front-line users handle the situation and can use that evaluator tool to give feedback.

Product – Product teams can input keywords or phrases, such as “broken” and “missing”. If the system finds those specific keywords, supervisors will be assigned to review the recording for further evaluation to identify opportunities for improvements, new products, or features.

Sales – Sales managers can search negative and positive conversations to identify best practices and coaching opportunities.

Marketing – Marketing can look at positive conversations to identify customers who could give a good review or testimonial.

Keep Your Frontline Employees Happy With Advanced Analytics and Reporting

It’s not just your customers you need to pay attention to. The old cliché still holds true today: good help is hard to find! Salesforce found that 65% of mobile workers feel the weight of customer expectations and 82% struggle to balance speed with quality of service. Employees want to know how they’re performing and what areas they need to improve upon. You need to be able to provide them with high quality performance data and analytics. The business intelligence solution you use should be able to clearly indicate these metrics – preferably in an intuitive, user friendly dashboard for individuals and the entire organization as a whole:

  • Time spent on customer service calls
  • Number of calls transferred
  • Number of calls handled
  • Average talk times
  • Abandoned calls

All of this information allows you to identify your strongest and weakest employees and reward or coach them accordingly. It also tells you whether shortcomings – or successes! – are happening on an individual basis or if the trends are occurring across the entire organization.

Generative AI Can Help Employees Save Time And Keep Customers Happy

If your organization wants to commit to providing superior customer experience, it needs to be able to record and retain notes on each customer interaction. Typically, this is done manually by frontline employees but new advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) allow these notes to be automatically transcribed in interaction summaries and saved for future use. This has incredible benefits for your business:

Better than manual call notes – The summary of the call is automatically generated, creating a timely and accurate account of the interaction saving the frontline user time and increasing accuracy.

Faster call answering – Completing call notes can take 5 to 10 minutes depending on the length and complexity of a customer interaction, but an automatically created summary of the interaction allows frontline employees to assist the next caller even faster.

Better coaching and training – Accurate, timely and summarized call notes allow supervisors more time for coaching without needing to sift through long call recording or call transcriptions.

Happier customers – Caller experience improves when frontline employees already know what was discussed the last time they called. A summary of the last interaction is presented to the frontline user along with the incoming call to help them engage deeper with the customer and solve their issue quicker.

A solution like UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE that combines sentiment analysis, analytics and reporting dashboards, and AI-generated interaction summaries is the perfect tool to help your business take its customer experience to the next level in 2024. You’ll know exactly how your customers are feeling – and how to approach them – and your employees will be grateful for the chance to perform better so the entire organization benefits.

If you are looking for a way to significantly improve your customer experience this year, consider switching to UNIVERGE BLUE. Contact one of our representatives today for more information!

10 Strategic Smart Enterprise Drivers for 2023

Posted by Josh Loinette on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Enterprise, Healthcare, Hospitality, Servers and Storage, Unified Communications Tagged , , ,

Businesses are currently weighing the impact of rapidly changing economic conditions, as well as disruptions in supply chains, and energy sourcing. Digital Transformation is recreating business models, changing the way customers and employees interact and altering entire industries. Making sense of such disruptive changes has never been so important in order to transform smartly instead of being left behind.

As an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) leader with over 120 years of expertise and experience, NEC is sharing its views on leading and emerging trends and technologies to help your Smart Enterprise anchor its strategic investments. Explore NEC’s Top 10 Strategic Drivers and discover how to navigate through the developments to simplify your organization, realize workforce efficiencies, deliver superior customer services, and gain a competitive advantage.

Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is key for enterprises to enrich their operations with innovative solutions that optimize business practices, drive workforce engagement, and create a competitive edge. Digital adoption and automation are key to operational excellence and indispensable for organizations to survive. Equipment, functions and processes becoming more and more software driven, makes them more responsive to changing requirements.

Ubiquitous Connectedness
Organizations are capitalizing on mobility solutions that enable employees to work from just about anywhere, at any given time, whether on-site, at home, between appointments, or while traveling. Technology ensures they remain fully integrated with their organizations, colleagues and customers. Work/life balance is enriched by the power of the smart-phone, serving both business and private communications.

Smart, Collaborative Workspaces
The traditional office is shrinking and working from home is fully accepted. With hybrid work being the new normal workstyle, tools that support a flexible, open and agile way of working, like Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C), are a mandatory part of running a successful business. Remote workers need to feel engaged and included in company culture. At the same time, Smart enterprises must adopt workplace management solutions that create environments for maximizing not only employee productivity and well-being, but also workplace safety and efficiency as some workers return to the office. Automated reservation and touchless check-in allow both workers and visitors to quickly and safely use office space as often as needed.

Driving Engagement
Companies are pushing hard to deliver connected Customer Experiences (CX) across media, channels, processes, and departments – making contact easy and pleasant, lowering thresholds, presenting options most relevant to the customer, and ensuring swift response to queries. Smart enterprises reinvent their customer engagement models to deliver customers a distinctive, personalized experience and ensure a long-lasting relationship.

The Return Of Cost Consciousness
Until recently businesses were predominantly focused on post-pandemic growth. Now, cost reduction and optimization will play a more prominent role in decision making in 2023. Rising interest rates and volatile labor, materials, and energy prices are forcing enterprises to revisit their balance sheets and cut costs by optimizing out of pocket spendings such as IT infrastructure and office space. Businesses that adopt pay-per-use and flexible models will be able to reduce upfront costs and pay only for what is currently needed, while also giving themselves the flexibility for future expansion. Customers will benefit from easier financial management and predictable overall monthly costs. Smart enterprises will embrace the cost-effectiveness and flexibility of month-to-month contracts with the flexibility to scale up or down as needed.

Cloud-Centric Optimization
Cloud computing has revolutionized IT and software delivery. Applications running in the cloud make it incredibly easy for users to signup, access, and draw on solutions available on demand and within minutes. Cloud-based deployments consequently adopt new functionality much faster and more easily than their on-premises counterparts, with new applications driving rapid innovation.

Securing The Data-Driven Enterprise
The power of capturing, processing, and analyzing data offers tremendous opportunities to drive better business intelligence, product development, and customer service. Real-time business processes and workflows also require swift retrieval of data at the moment of need. As data sets grow, storage solutions need to become more flexible and scalable as organizations find it increasingly complex to store, protect, and manage all collected information.

Business Resilience And Continuity
Today’s enterprises depend on reliable access to applications, information, and people to persistently operate smartly and compete effectively. This requires a robust communications and IT infrastructure capable of providing always-on availability that can also self-heal should potential service disruptions occur. Navigating these disruptions calls for a more holistic and proactive strategy with respect to sourcing and securing resources across a variety of key areas.

Extended Reality
Analytics tools have historically been focused on descriptive outcomes, but now their applications are shifting towards predicting future events and behavior and recommending how to react to outcomes. In 2023, AI tools will become widely available through cloud platforms and open-source software. Businesses will ramp up their usage to streamline efficiency for the organization and achieve new levels of engagement, drawing on elements such as emotion recognition and behavior analysis.

Smart, Sustainable Society
Important steps are being made towards building smarter societies – where information and communications technologies ensure energy efficiency, sustainable economic development, safety and security, along with wise management of natural resources. Connected processes and collaboration will save time and reduce costs, scope, and impact of physical travel and transportation. Digital technologies will support the incorporation of circular economy principles into businesses and society, facilitating the redesign of products and value chains.

By embracing Digital Transformation and enabling advanced approaches to how Communications and IT services are delivered and managed, NEC provides new ways for Smart Enterprises to thrive and grow.

To learn more, visit https://www.necam.com/.

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NEC Maintains Top Rank in 2022 NIST FRVT Report

Posted by Kathleen Kiernan on Posted in Analytics, Biometrics, Cloud, Events, Government, Law Enforcement, Security Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

NIST Ranked #1 Globally

  • #1 in Mugshot Identification
  • #1 in Border Security Identification
  • #1 in Mugshot Identification over age differences

At NEC Corporation, we take great pride in our legacy of creating the best technology in our field and our biometric authentication algorithms are no exception. Our #1-ranked National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) algorithms are trusted every day to provide accurate and secure results across sectors including commercial aviation, hospitality and the United States government.

Adding to this legacy, we are excited to share that NEC’s facial recognition algorithm earned the top ranking from NIST’s most recent Face Recognition Vendor Test across multiple categories.

NEC earned top recognition in the categories of Mugshot Identification both globally and in the United States, Global Border Security Identification, and Global Mugshot Identification over age differences, as well as Mugshot to Webcam Identification here in the U.S.

These rankings match the very real, positive impact our technology has on society every day. For example, U.S. CBP Deputy Commissioner, Troy Miller, recently shared in an interview1 that facial recognition technology, including our algorithm, has identified more than 1,000 imposters attempting to enter the country with false documents since 2018 – decreasing potential crime and creating safer communities.

For more than two decades, NEC has consistently surpassed competitors’ algorithms in the categories of accuracy and speed. This remains true even when demographic differentials including race and sex are accounted for and when subjects wear protective face masks. Our algorithm passed internal tests with a rate of over 99.9% in 1:1 verification when face masks of various colors and patterns were worn by individuals – ensuring security and supporting public health.

The latest NIST results showed NEC’s algorithm outperformed the entire field of 329 entries submitted from all over the world on mugshot identification. Our NEC-005 algorithm demonstrated a False Negative Identification Rate (FNIR) of just 0.0017 at a False Positive Rate (FPIR) of 0.001, respectively.

This same algorithm outperformed a field of 289 entries on Mugshot to Webcam identification with an FNIR of .0120 at a FPIR of .001.

NEC’s facial recognition algorithm is called upon by professionals across a diverse range of use cases in critical moments and is counted on for its reliable and accurate results. These use cases include criminal investigation, immigration, military security and national identification within the entertainment industry.

We have implemented more than 1,000 systems with our top-ranked fingerprint and face recognition technologies in more than 70 countries and regions around the world.

Our team works to create the most accurate and reliable product possible to ensure safe, accessible and enjoyable experiences for every person who uses our technology. While navigating access points can often be a hassle, we see a touchless and frictionless future made possible through our first-ranked biometric authentication algorithm.

To read more, you can access the full NIST report, here.

Learn more about our #1 ranked algorithm’s use cases here.

1. https://about.bgov.com/news/facial-scans-catch-impostors-at-border-as-agencies-embrace-use/

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NEC National Security Systems Showcases Digital Identity Solutions

Posted by Kathleen Kiernan on Posted in Analytics, Biometrics, Cloud, Events, Government, Law Enforcement, Security Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

NEC National Security Systems (NEC NSS) showcased its robust, cloud-native digital management platform, body worn solutions and iris recognition capabilities at the connect:ID 2021 conference, October 5-6 in Washington, D.C.

Enlightening Speeches & Future-Focused Conversations

NEC speakers presented and participated in illuminating interviews and discussions during connect:ID, including company leaders: Dr. Kathleen Kiernan, the newly appointed president of NEC NSS; Raffie Beroukhim, SVP and Chief Experience Officer and NEC NSS board member; and Kris Ranganath, Chief Technology Officer.

  • Dr. Kiernan delivered an opening keynote focusing on “Putting a Face on the Digital ID Generation.”
  • Ranganath presented “Decentralized Identity” during a summit speech regarding the benefits of decentralized identity management solutions.
  • As a board member of the International Biometric Identity Association (IBIA), Raffie participated in a panel discussion on key topics in advanced recognition for government agencies.

In addition, Allen Ganz, Vice President of Customer Experience, was interviewed on the topic of “The Future of Digital Travel.” Ganz, who has implemented biometric solutions in the aviation industry, shared information about the first curb-to-gate system for a commercial airline in the United States, which was unveiled at Atlanta’s Terminal F in 2019.

Authentication & Digital Identity Solutions

At the conference NEC NSS hosted a prominent booth showcasing their digital identity management and body worn solutions, that provide identity intelligence, by combining NEC’s best of breed matching algorithms with cutting edge wearable cameras.

They also displayed NEC Digital Platform, a highly secure and scalable digital identity management platform that effortlessly brings touchless experiences to countless use cases. The platform provides a unified experience for a variety of services and transactions by using a unique, multi-factor Digital ID based on biometric authentication and AI technology. It streamlines both physical and digital identities into a secure, privacy-driven ecosystem for a seamless, secure, more personalized, and intuitive customer experience.

Also featured was the new iris-face combo kiosk that seamlessly matches a user’s iris or face—or both modalities simultaneously—against an existing document. Using NEC’s proprietary eye detection technology and remote gaze detection, this solution provides biometric authentication under a variety of conditions.

To learn how NEC NSS provides vital biometric, AI and computer support to U.S. government agencies, please visit the website. You can also follow NEC NSS on Twitter at @NECNSSFed and on its LinkedIn page.

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