Voice of the Customer Makes a Comeback at Verint's Engage 2025
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Verint's artificial intelligence-driven solutions have resulted in a 1,400 percent increase in sales orders and a 15 percent rise in online scores, Jasen Williams, Verint's senior vice president of corporate marketing, said on day 2 of his company's Engage 2025 conference.
The opening general sessions highlighted the company's innovations in customer experience automation and AI, which company officials said are delivering stronger, faster, and measurable outcomes, estimated to provide $2 trillion in value.
Chief among them is Verint's voice of the customer technology, which was highlighted in the 2025 Gartner VoC Magic Quadrant report. The research firm said Verint's VoC solutions typically excel in equipping service leaders with new customer insight. Unique features that stood out for Gartner included customer effort detection, advanced data mapping, and AI-led outreach triggers, based on social sentiment.
AI in particular has entirely revamped VoC, Ram Swery, Verint vice president and go-to-market for consulting services, and Samantha McDougall, group vice president and general manager of VoC solutions for Canada, said in an interview with DestinationCRM.
"About two years ago, voice of the customer was in decline, traditional survey responses were falling," Swery recalled. "AI increased the capability to do self service."
AI can detect when a customer is stuck with self-service or other applications, using signals, like when someone is hovering on an area of a web page for a long time or going back and forth on a web page, and then offer a "Can I help" or similar message, McDougall said, adding that the solution continues to learn and evolve to ensure it offers help at critical moments without being annoying.
Additionally, rather than offering multiple-question VoC surveys, which customers are unlikely to complete, AI-powered solutions can ask quick thumbs up or thumbs down questions at critical points in the customer journey, she added.
For example, Swery received seven such pop-up questions between check-in and boarding a flight. Though some customers might not answer any of the queries, the quick nature of the questions and responses means more customer are apt to answer more often, providing companies with better and more actionable VoC responses.
Another AI innovation that Verint introduced at the conference was the spike bot, designed to help when interactions spike at a contact center, such a during a new product drop or unexpected severe weather event.
"We used to be able to do this in days, now it takes just minutes," said Daniel Ziv, Verint vice president of speech and text analytics, noting the unexpected spikes have been an issue for contact centers for decades.
The patent-pending tool includes the following four basic capabilities:
- It identifies when a spike happens. While the easiest function, it's not trivial, Ziv points out. Users set thresholds to define what they qualifies as a spike.
- It analyzes the cause of the spike.
- It uses agentic AI to drill deeper into what the spike is about.
- It quantifies the financial impact of the spike. If the financial impact is insignificant, nothing else is likely to happen. If the impact is significant, however, a change in strategy could be warranted, as happened recently with a Verint customer in the insurance industry.
That customer, who Ziv declined to identify, received an unexpected spike in contacts from customers after it started a foray into renter’s insurance. The offering was new to the company, and marketing materials didn't answer all of customers' questions.
In terms of agent time and lost CX, the spike bot calculated the issue was costing the insurance company $30,000 an hour. The spike bot determined that most of the questions were around pricing, so it gathered that information to have it ready to present to customers. With the spike issue solved, agents are now aggressively selling the product, Ziv added.
The spike bot is converting what had been a $30,000 an hour problem into untold millions in revenue, according to Ziv.
Customers tend to prefer AI-generated answers and digital assistance like this rather than talking to human agents, according to the Verint State of Customer Experience 2025 report, which Harry Rollason, Verint senior director of content management, and Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, discussed at length during one of the breakout sessions.
The report found that over the past year, there has been double-digit growth in preference for digital across all age groups, with 73 percent of consumers now preferring digital interactions.
That's a phenomenal number," Fluss said, pointing out that the earliest versions of AI came out about 20 years ago, but the technology didn't really start taking off until the last couple of years.
"AI is no longer optional," Fluss said. "People want the benefits that we hear about. It's about productivity."
Fluss adds that companies need the techonlogy to meet customer demand while interactions continue to go up at a faster pace than companies can staff to handle.
Another factor is that AI can usually answer a query more quickly than a human. According to the Verint research, more than half of customers (56 percent) view receiving information quickly as the most critical aspect of good CX, followed by resolving issues without human interaction (52 percent).
Customer demand for fast service is particularly important because consumers are increasingly unforgiving: 78 percent are likely to switch to a competitor after a terrible customer experience, a sharp rise from 67 percent in the 2024 Verint report.
Beyond providing faster service directly to customers, AI is also helping provide agents with the right information at their fingertips for human-assisted interactions.
Fluss points out that despite the fear by some that human agents are going away, such fears were postulated, without coming to fruition, when interactive voice respoinse and other earlier technology debuted. Agents aren't going away now or in the next five years, she said.