Verint Offers Unified VoC to Help Solve Growing Interaction Challenge

Some 71 percent of corporate boardrooms consider customer experience their most important performance metric, but they respond simply by bringing on additional contact center agents to handle the increasing volume of communications from email, text messages, social media, and other sources, said Elan Moriah, president of customer engagement solutions at Verint Systems, during his company’s Engage user conference in Orlando in late May.

To change that, Verint is focused on providing automation where needed while allowing companies to hold on to whatever telecom infrastructure they are using, he said.

“We are focused to give you the right solutions,” Moriah said. “We are focused on innovation; automation is big.”

He pointed out that Verint introduced 45 product releases in the past year and offers more than 100 APIs and the capabilities of more than 100 cloud partners to its customers.

Verint used the conference to unveil its most recent release, Verint Unified VoC, a customer feedback tool designed to provide a complete view of direct, indirect, and inferred voice-of-the-customer (VoC) information from across customer engagement channels; its automated analytics engine aims to deliver actionable insights to help companies prioritize and implement the customer experience initiatives with the best financial returns.

Among Unified VoC’s features are the following:

• Cross-channel structured and unstructured VoC data collection for email, SMS, and post-call interactive voice response surveys, digital feedback from websites and mobile devices, and customer interactions from contact centers.
• Unified VoC data analysis, allowing organizations to map data from multiple sources and create common metrics to identify, size, and prioritize customer experience issues from across channels.
• Triggers, alerts, and case management that work on unified datasets to solve operational issues.

“We’ve heard from the majority of our customers that surveying their customers remains important and yet is no longer enough to give them what they need to differentiate in an increasingly competitive marketplace,” said Ben Smith, vice president and general manager of Verint’s VoC solutions. “With our ability to collect these insights and analyze them together with a variety of cross-channel survey and operational data to drive action across the enterprise, Verint has redefined the role of CX in the market.”

The challenge for contact centers, according to Verint CEO Dan Bodner, is that budgets are not increasing, even though 62 percent of those surveyed expect interactions to rise sharply in the next two years. The answer to that challenge, Bodner said, is twofold: accelerating automation and the cloud.

“The Verint cloud helps organizations simplify, organize, and innovate their customer engagement processes,” Bodner said. “We simplify it so companies can easily deploy it and fit it into their ecosystems.”

While the unified VoC solution was the newest technology Verint announced at the conference, the company also laid out some aggressive plans to improve its suite of VoC solutions in 2020. Among the major areas for advancements by the end of next year, according to Rick Blair, Verint’s vice president of VoC product strategy, are new tools to increase survey response rates and expand analysis of interactions.

Another company priority is continued expansion of data connectors. While Verint already has data connectors for popular programs such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and others, customers continue to seek additional data connectors, Blair said.

Verint is also looking to expand AI anomaly detection to help users better identify whether high or low scores from various metrics are anomalies or indicate larger trends that need to be addressed.

Finally, the company is focused on better closed-loop results, helping to ensure that analysis of contact center issues leads to actions to resolve them.