December 6, 2010
By Koa Beck, Editorial Assistant, CRM magazine

Verint Systems Releases New Impact 360 Text Analytics Solution

Verint Systems has launched its new Impact 360 Text Analytics solution, part of the Customer Interaction Analytics portfolio from Verint Witness Actionable Solutions.

The new offering provides organizations with a unified view of customer service, experiences, and opinions across customer communications channels. Impact 360 Text and Sentiment Analytics includes Impact 360 Speech Analytics, Impact 360 Data Analytics, and survey insights derived from the Impact 360 Customer Feedback software.

The actionable intelligence provided by Verint's Customer Interaction Analytics detects surface customer experience, behavior, and other dynamic trends internally before they become widespread via the Web or social media channels. For determining customer sentiment, the solution helps companies leverage unified customer data, such as tonality, word usage, or speaking volume, across channels.

Verint's Customer Interaction Analytics portfolio, Impact 360 Text Analytics, mines customer interactions and feedback across many multichannel customer communications, including email, Web chat sessions, blogs, review sites, and social media.

"Organizations have never before had the benefit of such timely, multichannel voice-of-the-customer insights," Ran Achituv, senior vice president of customer interaction analytics at Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, said in a statement. "As the market innovator in customer interaction analytics, Verint's sophisticated capabilities extend across multiple channels of customer interaction. With prebuilt workforce optimization business integrations, organizations can capture, analyze and take rapid, informed action to advance their service operations and customer experiences."

"A lot of our customers have been wanting something like this for a long time," says Diego Lomanto, senior product marketing manager at Verint Systems.

Keith Dawson, principal analyst of information and communication technologies of Frost & Sullivan agrees. "One of the historic problems has been that enormous amounts of information are collected in what amounts to very discreet silos," he says. "From the point of view of the contact center, designed to establish a certain baseline for good service, there hasn't been way to combine the analysis tools of lots of different kinds of data into one holistic picture of what's going on. That's a direction we have been expecting to evolve: a more unified approach to overall contact center data."

Dawson points out that analytics must be seen as much more expansive, as evidenced by Verint Systems' inclusion of sentiment and text analytics.

"Although we have been talking about analytics in the industry for 10 years now....speech analytics has sucked the oxygen out of the room in terms of how much attention and hype it has gotten," Dawson explains. " It's better to think of analytics as a broad endeavor. This move to generate text analytics opens up a contact center manager's mind."