Nuance acquires TouchCommerce, aims to drive digital growth

Nuance Communications that delivers voice and language solutions for businesses has acquired cloud-based platform, TouchCommerce, a provider of cloud-based platform that offers digital customer experience and engagement solutions for enterprises. The acquisition aims at accelerating Nuance’s enterprise business and enhance its customer care solutions with TouchCommerce’s customer engagement cloud platform, with a new range of digital engagement offerings, including live chat, customer analytics and personalization solutions. The deal claims to have been sealed for a total consideration of $215 million and the is expected to close by the end of Nuance’s fiscal year 2016. According to Nuance, as the digital engagement grows across web, mobile and social platforms, customers want to interact and transact effortlessly by taking advantage of web chat and the connectivity of social media. Nuance claims that with TouchCommerce, it wants to tap into this growing opportunity and provide an end-to-end engagement platform that merges intelligent self-service with assisted service to increase customer satisfaction, strengthen customer loyalty and improve business results. Robert Weideman, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Nuance Enterprise Division said:

The combination of Nuance and TouchCommerce promises to disrupt the customer service industry by bringing together the best of self-service and the best of assisted-service solutions, each magnified by the power of artificial intelligence. The result provides enterprises with a customer engagement solution that connects with consumers anytime and anywhere, across voice, digital and mobile devices – delivering superior customer experiences and business results.

The acquisition includes:

• Self-Service and Assisted-Service Solutions: Addition of TouchCommerce assisted-service platform with Nuance’s AI-powered customer self-service solutions aims to provide enterprises with the ability to efficiently and effectively engage with customers across all channels – phone, web, mobile, social, and more.
• Strong Customer Relationships and Synergies: The acquisition of TouchCommerce is expected to add revenue streams and incremental organic growth. A majority of TouchCommerce customers already use Nuance solutions, less than 10 percent of Nuance enterprise customers currently use TouchCommerce, which is expected to create a significant growth opportunity for Nuance.
• Enhanced Nuance Analytics and AI Differentiation: Nuance aims to leverage TouchCommerce’s agent desktop to enable seamless escalation from virtual assistant to human-assisted service, with the system learning through every customer engagement.

Bernard Louvat, President and Chief Executive Officer, TouchCommerce said, “We are thrilled to join forces with our technology partner Nuance and to integrate our respective capabilities to deliver to our enterprise customers the best omni-channel customer engagement technology and solutions in the industry. Our respective capabilities are so complementary and our strategies so similar that it became obvious to both parties that joining forces was the logical next step beyond our existing technology partnership.”