1. Verint made a major acquisition of Witness Systems in 2007. Please explain how you are integrating the Witness and Verint product lines into a new offering for the market?
In December 2007, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions announced the industry’s first end-to-end solution for analyzing customer service effectiveness and optimizing workforce performance – the new, next-generation Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite. This unified, analytics-driven, and enterprise-enabled software and services break new ground for organizations striving to analyze and extract critical information from customer interactions to optimize performance, improve the overall effectiveness of customer service operations and enhance the customer experience.
Impact 360 is designed to help improve the entire customer service delivery network – from contact centers to branch stores and remote offices to back-office operations. It includes a multitude of new functionality across quality monitoring and call recording, speech and data analytics, workforce management, customer feedback, eLearning and performance management to help improve the customer experience across virtually every customer touch point across an organization.
The suite enables organizations to streamline processes and ensure consistency in new ways for maximum customer service effectiveness. Global businesses can deploy Impact 360 to:
• Detect unknown trends through enhanced, proactive, integrated speech analytics
• Better understand contact center growth trends through tighter links between strategic planning and tactical daily forecasting and scheduling functions, so users can combine their strategic forecasts with their tactical forecasts to increase forecast accuracy
• Save time and reduce errors by automatically sending learning requests to schedulers and assigning learning automatically based on evaluation scores
2. How are the sales forces and R&D groups being aligned?
With our some 200 percent increase in R&D resources since the combination, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions was able to bring the next-generation Impact 360 solution to market faster then would have otherwise been feasible. This global alignment now only helps protect our customers’ investments; it also exemplifies our commitment to delivering new innovative solutions to the marketplace.
The company’s combined global sales force is now promoting the new Impact 360 to new customers, as well as communicating with our existing customers about our commitment to support existing applications and platforms, as well as the upgrade paths to new solutions.
In addition to a more effective sales and R&D organization with greater scale, our support and services teams have also been combined to offer customers enhanced support, as shown through a 150 percent increase in support/service resource. These groups are also sharing best practices to build a stronger support/service organization.
3. Verint has expanded their product suite, i.e. monitoring, performance management, analytics, significantly over the past year. What applications are achieving the highest level of interest from your users?
As the workforce optimization market is maturing, our customers are demanding more integrated software and services. We’re now delivering a robust performance management scorecard and/or deeply integrated speech analytics and eLearning capabilities with nearly every new sale. Packaged solutions from a single provider enable customers to benefit from easier installation and implementation, reduced learning curves and training expenses, and lower maintenance and software expenses – all of which translate into lower total cost of ownership and faster ROI. Even further, packaged solutions and services allow customers to draw on a structured upgrade path and single support organization. Combined functions through pre-packaged solutions deliver increased business value and help drive customer success.
Verint’s next-generation Impact 360 offers the industry with a complete workforce optimization solution — unifying quality monitoring, recording, workforce management, performance management, eLearning and customer feedback. Each package (i.e. Impact 360 Workforce Optimization, Workforce Management, Quality Monitoring) combines performance management, analytics and eLearning functionality to extend business value to our customers.
To implement and sustain customer-centric strategies, and to enable the required processes, companies are increasingly turning to a valuable combination of software and services we’re calling analytics-driven workforce optimization. Through advanced customer interaction analytics available today, a vast amount of data (including voice, video and text) can be captured and analyzed in real-time by the enterprise. Analytics can be a powerful way to monitor customer interactions across the entire enterprise.
The end result of analytics is actionable intelligence — insights culled from mountains of data that can be acted upon immediately by all stakeholders to drive quality and performance. This learning can then be fed back into the enterprise, creating a continuous feedback cycle to propel improvement.
4. What do you anticipate will be your “hot” applications in the upcoming year?
In addition to the entire analytics-driven workforce optimization capability, speech analytics and customer feedback surveys are quickly rising to the top of the list. Technology that allows enterprises to mine large volumes of recorded customer-agent voice interactions are among the solutions successfully addressing this need. Speech analytics solutions promote greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and value.
By measuring not just contact center performance, but many other customer touch points that shape customer perceptions, speech analytics extends the benefits of contact center recording from workforce quality to enterprise-wide customer process optimization.
In addition, organizations can capture customer intelligence and benefit from direct, first-hand customer feedback leveraging the software’s advanced, scalable phone (IVR), Web and email survey solution. With customer feedback management, companies can collect, report and incorporate customer-driven information, performance data and satisfaction level metrics based on the specific people, products and processes that impact the customer experience.
5. We have seen a strong interest in first call resolution issues on CRMXchange. Has Verint addressed this need?
Yes, in fact 33 percent of the audience ranked first contact resolution as the number one challenge facing their contact center today at our most recent user conference. With more than 300 attendees representing hundreds of companies throughout the U.S. and globally, this was the highest response and shows the continued strong interest in this business issue amongst our global customer base.
To effectively manage and achieve first call resolution, customer organizations need a 360 view of each of the customer touch points. A call is only one data point of the experience. In many cases, it takes more than a call to solve the problem, so the agent’s contribution is part of a larger service delivery chain process.
Rather than focusing on first call resolution as another metric in our contact centers, we’re seeing the industry move more toward a true customer experience rating, in which the customer tells us how we are doing, rather than telling ourselves how we think the customers would rate us. The fact that several studies show there’s a huge disparity between the level of service that companies believe they are delivering to their customers and what customers actually perceive they are receiving demonstrates that something is not right.
To get to the bottom of this perception issue, organizations must move outside traditional measures that track success based on internally established metrics. By enabling companies to go a step further to collect direct customer feedback, or by mining thousands of recorded interactions, they can gain first-hand, actionable intelligence. According to research, more than two-thirds of all customer interactions are relevant for such feedback. For example, it has been found that more than half of a company’s customers will consistently provide feedback on initiated interactions if the survey is in context, intelligent and a part of a single process.
Impact 360 Customer Feedback – offered through Verint Witness Actionable Solutions – can help solicit valuable input from customers. It uses short, context-sensitive, dynamic surveys to capture data on products, processes, staff performance, and customer loyalty and satisfaction levels in real time. Impact 360 Speech Analytics, as discussed earlier, is another solution that can help solve first contact resolution problems. Armed with this information, organizations can take the actions needed to increase first-call resolution rates, reduce escalations, enhance customer satisfaction and retention, and improve agent coaching and training.
6. Has the users’ selection criteria/requirements changed over the past year? If so, how?
It’s more that the requirements have evolved than changed. Businesses are interested in investing in simplified solutions that unify and integrate capabilities – operating on one platform, with single logon, common user interface, and native integrations that draws from a structured upgrade path and one support organization. Many are also looking to those that reach further into the enterprise to better align the internal customer service delivery network. For example, we’re now seeing an increased demand for a workforce management system that operates across the contact center and back office operations. Further, we’re now seeing demand for workforce optimization in branch banking and other remote offices.
Verint’s next-generation Impact 360 suite helps address these very needs through its analytics-driven, enterprise-enabled and unified structure. It streamlines workforce optimization architectural framework with a single sign-on to quality monitoring/call recording, speech/data analytics, workforce management, performance management, eLearning and customer feedback.
Industry experts are concluding that the customer service industry is maturing and that leading companies are demanding more integrated and robust software and services. Now, more than ever, analytics-driven workforce optimization is a focal point of successful contact centers, as well as thriving enterprises. As a result, capturing the customer experience and analyzing its effectiveness, as well as managing to excellence through forecasting and scheduling, is critical.
Other selection criteria include applications that enable shared customer intelligence across the enterprise. When asked if they regularly share customer interactions with departments/groups outside their contact center, more than half of our customers reported that they do. The groups they share the most interactions with are executive management at 52 percent, marketing at 14 percent, and IT at 12 percent.
Even further, we are seeing customer organizations taking interest in extending the capabilities of contact center technology into branch and remote offices, as well as back-office operations. Just as in the traditional contact center, bank branches, for instance, are focused on short wait times, providing timely, high caliber service, selling new services, addressing customer issues and building a constant experience.
Back-office operations departments have the same needs – ensuring claims processing and order fulfillment, for example, are efficient, accurate and timely. Regardless of environment scorecards and key performance indicators, and eLearning for staff, are key to ensuring goals are aligned, performance is in check and employees are knowledge and up-to-speed on system use, process changes, new campaigns and more.
7. What do you consider will be your major challenges in 2008?
As customer service becomes an increasingly important differentiator amongst enterprises, contact center managers and executives need to rise to the challenge by proactively implementing technology and processes – including surveys to capture customer feedback, speech technology for mining and analyzing calls and workforce optimization solutions to better integrate and streamline contact center and enterprise sales/service activities.
The findings of Witness Actionable Solutions’ customer survey validate the idea that the contact center is at the forefront of improving customer service through workforce optimization and actionable intelligence. For example, customer loyalty and satisfaction are of the utmost importance to contact center managers, with half of attendees tagging this measurement as a primary objective in the contact center. Building upon a concern for delivering world-class service, first-call resolution was cited as the number one challenge facing contact centers today by 33 percent of respondents.
The survey also points out a keen focus on trends including training and home-based agents. When asked how managers categorize their organizations’ investment in staff training this year as compared to last year, nearly half reported that training efforts have increased. When asked if they employ home-based agents, 45 percent said they currently do or plan to next year.
Findings also indicate that more and more companies are planning to use speech technology for mining and analyzing their calls, or plan to do so in 2008. Respondents report that their organizations also plan to leverage kiosks, IVRs and/or e-mail to capture feedback following a customer interaction/transaction. And over half – 55 percent – report they currently use or have plans to deploy IP telephony across their contact center operations in the next year; and of that figure 17 percent have plans to do so across their enterprises.
It also noted that executive management is taking notice of the forward-thinking practices being employed in the contact center. A majority of respondents – 52 percent – report sharing captured interactions with members of the executive management team.