Verint Makes the Case for Its Solutions in Turbulent Times at Engage 2022
The turbulent times of the past couple of years are likely to continue throughout 2022, but even with such a bleak prediction, companies have a tremendous opportunity to gain a competitive advantage, Jenni Palocsik, vice president of product strategy group operations at Verint, told the audience at the Verint Engage 2022 conference today.
Palocsik based her comment on a Verint survey in which 76 percent of customers said they expected the challenges to continue this year.
Verint is there to help, though, Palocsik said. "Helping you is at the core of what we believe. There are capabilities that we have that we barely imaged three years go to help you. When you're successful, we’re successful."
She added that Verint continues to work hard to improve its CX and customer success capabilities.
"We want to help you realize value," added Steve Thompson, Verint vice president of solution sales. "But we can’t do this alone. We want you to understand our capabilities and our vision, and we want to make sure that we understand your roadmap. Then the more effective we can be in developing a clear path to value together.
By combining digital, workforce, and customer experience solutions, Verint can provide customers the foundation for success, Thompson said, adding that Verint, its partners, and customer community enable companies to drive scale, capture customer data, and to take full advantage of that information with advanced AI.
"We can help you drive a total quality initiative," Thompson said, adding that the company seeks to provide customers a great experience as well as the ability to accelerate their success though different programs.
“We want to help you achieve your desired outcomes,” Thompson said.
One critical way Verint is seeking to aid its customers is through Verint Connect, an interactive engagement portal designed to provide customers and partners access to the information they need about Verint solutions, services, and training in a single location.
The customer online community gives customers a centralized location for details on new products and features, more than 300 partner listings, a Verint marketplace with packaged API solutions, and a connection to Verint Academy for those who want to learn more.
Verint Connect has a library of more than 17,000 articles. Customers are increasingly using the growing knowledge base and report a 95 percent satisfaction rate.
"We want to accelerate the path to value," said Jaimie Meritt, Verint's chief product officer. In coming months, he said, Verint will be adding tools to help customers receive value more quickly, whether they are using only a minimum of Verint products and features or they are much more immersed customers. The new tools, plus Verint support, will seek to help customers who might not be using all the features of their products and to alert them to best practices in using different tools.
By putting AI and APIs at the core of its cloud-based solution, Verint has improved its ability to roll out solution enhancements, according to Merritt. "We used to provide new solutions ever year or 18 months, now we provide them every two weeks."
For example, Verint Da Vinci provides advanced artificial intelligence for the Verint Cloud Platform. It's been developed over 25 years and now includes billions of transactions, from virtually every industry and every technology, Merritt said.
"We want to maximize your value," Meritt said. "We won’t over-survey you, but let us know what you think.”
Verint also used the conference's second day to highlight findings in its "2022 State of Customer Experience Report."
Among the data revealed, the report noted that poor customer service will push 64 percent of customers to competitors.
The surveys other findings included the following:
- 78 percent of consumers are likely to be a repeat customers if they had an excellent customer experience on a digital channel;
- More than two-thirds (69 percent) of consumers ranked companies responding quickly as the most important, or second-most important aspect of a good customer experience. More than half (55 percent) of those surveyed said effortless customer experiences are also vital.
- Consumers under 45 are more than twice as likely as older consumers to have engaged with companies through public social media channels, while 56 percent of those under 45 prefer digital channels.
- Half of consumers under 45 have used private messaging apps such as SMS texting, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to engage with companies.
- 37 percent of consumers expect messaging channels to have a significant technological impact on their customer experience strategy this year, with Facebook Messenger the digital messaging channel expected to see the greatest customer conversation growth.
- A third of consumers ranked needing to make multiple attempts to get a simple question answered as the most frustrating aspect of a poor customer experience. The most damaging characteristic to brand loyalty is the amount of effort needed to get a resolution (34 percent), followed by long hold times (25 percent) and bad bot experiences (22 percent).
"Customer patience is wearing thin," said Heather Richards, Verint's vice president of go-to-market strategy for digital-first engagement, in a prepared statement. "Although at one time, hearing "We're experiencing a high volume of calls"invoked a feeling of sympathy, that feeling has quickly been replaced by frustration. Brands have had more than two years to rectify issues relating to high volumes of inbound calls, messages, and queries. Customers now expect swift, effortless engagement on their channel of choice."
Richards added: "Verint is proud to be leading with innovation that assists brands in delivering the experiences customers expect, in their channel of choice. Self-service is delivered through conversational AI and contextual knowledge. Assisted interactions can be optimized through in-channel automation, and workforce orchestration provides the historical context needed to seamlessly deal with cross-channel customer journeys. Verint helps leading brands build lasting relationships through frictionless digital-first customer service."