1. Recently, Verint announced the acquisition of Witness Systems. What is the rationale for the acquisition? What can customers of both companies expect?
The convergence of Witness’ workforce optimization and Verint’s actionable intelligence visions create a foundation for growth that effectively addresses the most important needs of customer-centric enterprises, including innovative product development and world class delivery, service and support. Additionally, the Verint/Witness combination will provide a stronger global footprint, with offices around the globe, significant expansion of both direct, indirect and OEM sales channels, and create broad cross-sell opportunities across an extensive global customer base.
Customers of both companies – from small- to mid-sized companies and large organizations – will be able to leverage the combined portfolio of solutions to derive actionable intelligence for better business decisions and to optimize workforce, contact center and enterprise performance to deliver a compelling customer service advantage.
2. Verint has been a strong proponent of actionable intelligence. What is the demand for this type of capability in the marketplace? Is actionable intelligence showing up as a check off item on RFPs?
We have experienced strong demand over the past 18 months for actionable intelligence solutions that help customers leverage customer interactions to make better business decisions. In and outside the contact center, this actionable intelligence is delivering meaningful insight into business processes ranging from agent training and retention to marketing, billing and other back-office operations. Verint is seeing increasing demand for these capabilities and actionable intelligence capabilities have become a short list criteria in almost every major enterprise RFP.
3. As we all know, Verint is a major provider of quality monitoring systems. Are there any new significant developments in this area that you can share with us?
Traditional quality monitoring has been primarily based on evaluating a random sample of calls, assessing them against quality standards and then generating a monthly report of average quality scores. The next generation of analytics-driven quality monitoring is transforming contact centers into enterprise-wide intelligence centers. An analytics-driven quality monitoring solution that automatically focuses on the most important calls allows companies to identify the “why” behind contact center performance and outcomes and then determine the best courses of action to improve them.
4. Last month, Verint announced a new version of its Performance management solution. Can you give us a quick update on this solution and Verint’s value proposition for this segment of the market?
Verint Performance Management is the industry’s first solution to combine speech analytics with performance analytics to enhance performance across contact centers, back office and enterprise departments.
Leveraging the voice of the customer as a key source of performance intelligence, Verint Performance management analyzes customer interactions captured in the contact center and back office for insight about ongoing customer issues, process breakdowns and service challenges. Verint’s Performance Management solution also incorporates a variety of consulting services programs designed to apply this performance and customer intelligence to optimize business processes, enhance performance training and improve customer loyalty and retention.
5. How have customer requirements changed in recent years? How has the sales cycle changed?
Initially, call recording was mainly driven by compliance requirements. Viewed as more of an “insurance policy,” organizations historically accessed recordings for disputes or to address regulatory issues. Today, quality monitoring that incorporates speech, screen and performance analytics technology is being layered on top of traditional recording to provide organizations access to a goldmine of information about contact center performance.
The sales cycle has always been long and now there are new players. Historically, telecom and IT buyers have driven projects and product feature requirements, which is no longer true. These solutions are now viewed as business tools and senior contact center management and enterprise decision makers beyond the contact center are becoming more engaged in the overall buying process. An increasing number of committees involving members across the enterprise are being pulled into the sales process as different departments -- from sales to marketing and billing -- see the value that actionable intelligence delivers to their respective organizations.
6. Speech analytics has been an important aspect of Verint’s leadership in the market. What recent developments are there in this technology? How are Verint customers using speech analytics today?
Verint’s award-winning speech analytics have proven to help organizations enhance customer retention and satisfaction, increase first call resolution and improve sales and self service effectiveness. With the advent of Customer Interaction (CI) Analytics, Verint expanded the power of speech analytics technology beyond the contact center, delivering value to virtually every department in the enterprise.
Designed to operate independently of the call recording infrastructure that may already exist in the enterprise, Verint’s speech analytics solutions can be flexibly deployed in any environment and delivered as a managed service. To date, more than 50,000 seats of Verint speech analytics have been deployed and are helping customers to address some of their most pervasive service challenges.
7. Can you elaborate on Verint’s vision for the customer centric enterprise?
Verint believes that customers should be at the heart of all programs. We look at the performance and behavior of every link in the service value change, no matter where it is located in the enterprise, and then use our solutions and services expertise to enhance performance and the customer experience. For example, Verint ULTRA Analytics enables businesses to understand not only what is happening in their operations, but to also identify the underlying causes. Providing actionable intelligence on a wide array of customer-centric enterprise and back office programs, Verint analytics provide the foundation for quality service and support.
In addition, the convergence of Witness’ workforce optimization and Verint’s actionable intelligence will enable Verint to continue to deliver on this compelling vision for the customer-centric enterprise through a broad portfolio of contact center and enterprise performance solutions.
Mariann McDonagh is VP of Global Marketing for Verint Systems Inc. Verint Systems is a leading global provider of analytic software-based solutions for communications interception, networked video, and business intelligence. Verint solutions transform voice, video, and text into actionable intelligence — timely, mission-critical insights for achieving strategic goals. Since 1994, Verint has been committed to developing innovative solutions that help our customers achieve their most important objectives. Today, more than 1000 organizations in over 50 countries use Verint’s actionable intelligence solutions to enhance security, boost operational efficiency, and fuel profitability.