New Solutions Support Interaction Analytics and Enforce PCI Compliance

CARY, NC and ATLANTA, GA - August 10, 2015 - Cicero Inc. (BB: CICN), a leading provider of analytics and automation software for the back office and contact center, and Nexidia, a leading provider of customer interaction analytics solutions for business transformation and financial trading compliance, today announced a partnership that will deliver an innovative approach to recording and desktop analytics for PCI compliance and deeper insight into customer interactions. The solution is being deployed for a large communications company who will utilize pause and resume, a capability that suspends the recording of sensitive information during the call, as well as screen capture to gather valuable metadata from the agent's desktop.

Cicero Discovery is a lightweight and configurable tool that easily collects targeted data and events from existing applications running on the agents' desktops, for the purposes of analyzing agent call handling behavior, identifying customer characteristics, and driving particular agent workflows. Specifically, Cicero Discovery augments Nexidia's recording platform, Nexidia Capture, to provide Desktop Trigger, an enhanced PCI-compliant capability for the agent desktop. Nexidia Desktop Trigger automatically triggers the call muting and screen masking features of Nexidia Capture during the portions of a call where sensitive information is discussed, e.g. when agents gather credit card information during payment processing. Nexidia Desktop Trigger integrates with any desktop application (CRM, CTI etc.) and can be deployed without any changes to the target application. In addition, Nexidia Desktop Trigger tags call recordings and screen captures with business event data gathered from the desktop application(s), as well as the point in time specific events occurred during an interaction with a customer, e.g. the point in the call where the order was placed, the order number, the order resolution status, etc. This information can be used with Nexidia Interaction Analytics, a complete customer interactions analytics solution, as additional metadata to further refine insights into agent efficiency and customer experience. These new solutions extend Nexidia's capabilities to derive actionable intelligence from the customer interactions while ensuring regulatory compliance.

"Together with Cicero Discovery, Nexidia offers a simple and low cost way to bypass the sometimes difficult task of acquiring data from other parts of an enterprise. Nexidia's Desktop Trigger integrates with any desktop application and can be deployed without any changes to the actual application," says John Willcutts, Nexidia's CEO. "That level of functionality ensures less complexity upfront and more security and PCI-compliance."

Benefits of the partnership include:

  • Real-time call muting and masking of sensitive information at the agent desktop ensures PCI compliance
  • Tagging calls with new metadata from the agent desktop maximizes speech analytics insights
  • Pause and resume functionality prevents credit card and other sensitive data from being recorded, complying with security best practices
  • Reliable desktop triggering enables the complete value chain of interaction analytics

"Since the passage of Dodd-Frank legislation in 2010, regulatory compliance in the contact center has become a fact of business life, the power of which cannot be underestimated," said Saddletree Research Chief Analyst, Paul Stockford. "Likewise, the desire to better understand and automate activities at the agent desktop has become an overriding industry issue as demonstrated by current industry demand for desktop and other analytics solutions. This multi-dimensional partnership between Nexidia and Cicero represents a unique value proposition for the contact center; one in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This powerful technology combination addresses customer experience optimization and regulatory compliance with equal authority and benefit, creating a new class of customer care solution for today's rapidly evolving business and customer service environment."

The partnership will, in essence, eliminate the difficulty associated with retrieving vital application and process data that is normally out of reach, resulting in both improved customer and agent experiences.

"Cicero Discovery is delivering new actionable information about how employees use technology that companies have not had access to in the past. This new wealth of data is being used to identify key moments during customer interactions and employee tasks that need to be addressed, resulting in new training, processes, or technologies," stated John Broderick, CEO of Cicero Inc. "We look forward to working with Nexidia by providing this new operational data they can use with their contact center customers."

About Nexidia
Nexidia provides customer interaction analytics solutions with patented technologies and breakthrough applications that enable companies to drive business transformation by capturing, making sense of, and using the full range of communications they have with customers. As the traditional voice of the customer expands from the contact center to include surveys, email, chats, and social media sites, Nexidia provides software and service expertise to help companies synthesize this data into both a tactical tool for operational improvements and a catalyst for strategic business transformation. For more information, please visit www.nexidia.com.

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About Cicero Inc.
Cicero provides analytics and automation software that help organizations isolate process issues and automate employee tasks in the contact center and back office. Leveraging a suite of sensors, Cicero Discovery provides user endpoint analytics by collecting activity data and mapping employee effort to highlight areas for improvement in business processes, compliance, training and application utilization. Business analysts and IT then target these areas with Cicero Discovery Automation to automate tasks and simplify employee work. By realizing and removing the barriers to productivity, customers such as Nationwide and UBS use Cicero solutions to build enterprise value by improving performance, reducing cost, and transforming the employee and customer experience. Learn more at ciceroinc.com.

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©2015 Cicero Inc. All rights reserved. Cicero®, Cicero Discovery™, Cicero Discovery Automation™, Cicero Discovery Sensor™, and United Desktop® are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cicero Inc. and/or its affiliates. Other company names and/or products are for identification purposes and are the property of, and may be trademarks of, their respective owners.

Safe Harbor: Except for any historical information contained herein, this news release may contain forward-looking statements on such matters as strategic direction, anticipated return on investment, business prospects, the development and capabilities of the Cicero product group, new products and similar matters. Actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results or other expectations expressed in this release of a variety of factors, including risks that customers may not adopt the Cicero technology, which Cicero Inc. may not successfully execute its new strategic initiative and other risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. For a description of other factors that could cause such a difference, please see Cicero Inc.'s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

For more information:
Cicero Contact
Keith Anderson
Director, Communications and Marketing
919-380-5092
kanderson@ciceroinc.com

Nexidia Contact
Renee Maler
Philosophy PR + Marketing
925.968.9495
renee@philosophypr.com

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