1. The workforce optimization (WFO) market has continued to grow, even in a down economy. What does Verint attribute this to?
Today’s economic climate has caused organizations to closely examine cost reduction and what it takes to lower expenses, while continuing to take a customer-centric approach to their customer service and broader business operations. For some, this push has involved a brand new strategy; for others, a renewed focus. Either way, workforce optimization (WFO) strategies and technologies are relevant and playing an impactful role.
When times are tough, C-level, IT and customer service operations decision makers have prioritized and turned to solutions that can help them address inefficient internal business processes, better manage their staff, and mine enterprise data for insight into their customers’ wants and needs. Yet understanding and working toward the balance between optimum cost structures and the customer experience can be challenging. According to the analyst community, in today’s business climate, WFO solutions have been ranked among the top investment areas based on the incremental, tangible value they can bring to the business. They offer both near-term return on investment (ROI) and help enable greater business efficiencies that can yield stronger customer relationships. In today’s day and age, both are key.
WFO has proven its impact in elevating service quality; supporting sales; identifying and addressing customer trends, likes and dislikes; better aligning and maximizing resources; unifying and measuring the impact of customer service operations objectives with broader enterprise goals; and advancing the skills and proficiencies of those who interact with consumers regardless of where they sit in the organization. Whether in an up or down economy, the results attainable through WFO are attractive, achievable and most certain to remain. These are the types of measures organizations across the board are looking to attain. With a WFO strategy and solution set, they can.
2. In a growing, competitive Workforce Optimization market, how does Verint differentiate itself? What are Verint’s strongest attributes and how is it unique?
With financial strength, technology designed to meet real-world business needs, and dedication to customer success, Verint has continued to be recognized as a market leader. This is a testament to our technology, customers, partners and our amazing employees located all around the world.
We’ve been named by AMR Research as a Top 20 global enterprise application provider. More than 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Verint solutions. Our company-wide portfolio carries more than 450 patent registrations and applications worldwide, and is backed by industry-leading research and development. Behind our leadership is a history of innovation and market-firsts, affording great advantages to our global customers.
The Impact 360® software and services from Verint comprise the industry’s broadest portfolio of innovative solutions for workforce optimization (WFO)—including quality monitoring and call recording, customer interaction analytics (speech analytics, data analytics and customer feedback surveys), workforce management, desktop and process analytics, performance management, eLearning and coaching.
Our solutions are designed for large-scale enterprises and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) alike—and provide a unique, unparalleled combination of three key differentiators: they are unified, analytics-driven and enterprise-enabled. Operating on a single architecture delivered through Verint as the single provider, this carries all the advantages of easier installation and implementation, reduced learning curves, lower training expenses, a structured upgrade path and a single support organization—all of which translate into significant benefits, lower total cost of ownership and a faster ROI.
Add to this customer satisfaction, which continues to be an important gauge in how we measure success. Throughout the year, Verint performs a host of internal satisfaction trackers, surveys and measures to closely gauge customer satisfaction across a scorecard of metrics that we feel are vital to our customers and our company as we continue to evolve. In the market, we’ve continued to receive positive reaction to our focus on this area. We’ve been named #1 in vendor reputation by the National Association of Call Centers (NACC), and in CRM Magazine’s 2010 WFO “Service Winner” awards, Verint outscored all vendors in the area of “reputation for customer satisfaction.”
These accomplishments are a testament to our commitment to delivering world-class WFO solutions that address real-world problems, to our partners who make Impact 360 widely available across the markets we serve, and to the customers who partner with us to make it a valued asset in their day-to-day business operations.
3. In the analyst community and other circles, the term “customer interaction analytics” is becoming more prevalent. What is “customer interaction analytics,” and are there core technologies that comprise it?
Knowing what customers think about your business is important, but knowing why is equally important, since it opens the door to processes, products, services—and even staffing—that may need closer examination and refinement. Often, customers provide the reasons for their frustration or satisfaction in their interactions with your company—interactions that are often recorded. Although many companies capture these conversations, they often do not use or aggregate the insights within effectively.
Customer Interaction Analytics from Verint Witness Actionable Solutions brings speech analytics, data analytics, and customer feedback analytics together, helping organizations turn these vast amounts of data into actionable intelligence. Armed with this knowledge, businesses can hone in on customer requirements in order to transform that knowledge into new products and services, improved processes—including those that take part in back-office functions within the enterprise (i.e., order fulfillment, claims processing and billing)—targeted marketing programs, enhanced employee skills and more.
With Customer Interaction Analytics, organizations can identify the root causes driving repeat customer calls, hone in on emerging trends and opportunities, pinpoint and correct broken processes, reduce costs, improve staff training, enhance the customer experience and sharpen their competitive edge. It can transform the areas of an organization that touch customers into strategic assets, capable of providing insights to drive informed decision making across the business.
This continues to be an exciting segment of the market, one we’re seeing greater interest in year-on-year. These “voice of the customer” insights are powerful and actionable, bringing companies the vital “outside in” perspectives they need to help take their customer operations to the next level.
4. Recently, Verint acquired Iontas. What is the rationale behind the acquisition? How does Iontas compare with some of the other desktop analytics solutions on the market?
Expanding our workforce optimization (WFO) suite to deliver the most innovative technologies to meet customers’ existing and future requirements is a top priority for Verint. In February 2010, we acquired Iontas, the leader and innovator of desktop and process analytics solutions that measure application usage and analyze workflows.
Verint has worked with Iontas for several years, and in that time, has closely monitored the emergence of desktop analytics. Such software and services are designed to monitor application usage, and help provide process visibility and consistency throughout the enterprise, including in contact center, customer service and other key back-office operations functions. The addition of the Iontas technology has added some exciting analytical capabilities to our suite.
Industry analysts have cited Iontas as an innovator in the market, and believe that desktop analytics is an ideal fit into WFO, as it helps improve productivity while enhancing quality and the overall customer experience.
DMG Consulting projects that desktop analytics will begin to see increased adoption in 2010/2011. Defined by the firm as “an automated and systemic approach to monitor, capture, structure, analyze, report and react to all agent desktop activity and process workflows,” it views the desktop analytics market as a valuable component of the analytically-enabled contact center.1 Says Donna Fluss, president, DMG Consulting, “It delivers actionable results and recommendations for both contact center and back-office operating areas that, if addressed, can yield significant cost savings, improved quality and a better overall customer experience. Iontas is a pioneer in the concept and functionality for what has become desktop analytics. Desktop analytics is a high-value application that is increasingly considered a component of workforce optimization suites.”
1 DMG Consulting LLC, 2009 Contact Center Analytics: Emerging Customer Experience Analytics and Desktop Analytics Solutions Report
5. Verint is one of the core vendors in the Quality Monitoring and Workforce Management markets. What new trends are you seeing in these areas? Do you consider these markets saturated?
Quality monitoring (QM) and workforce management (WFM) are the anchor segments of Workforce Optimization (WFO), and serve as core business functions in today’s customer service operations.
These technologies have become more widespread in some mainstream markets, like the U.S., and less so in others. We see that in the contact center, where some may consider the QM market to be heading toward a saturation point. While it’s a mainstream technology, this sector continues to thrive and grow, especially as new guidance and mandates have come forward via the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Because call recordings can contain sensitive credit card details, they require protection through an added level of encryption and a secure storage environment, as well as options not to record certain credit card authentication data at all. This has, in part, changed how companies look at the overlying solutions and how they make those purchase decisions.
There also continues to be growing needs for those companies that must record customer interactions for compliance purposes—both in the contact center and into other market segments. For instance, Verint recording is used in trading room floor environments. It’s also leveraged in public safety and emergency service operations.
Likewise, WFM solutions continue to deliver attractive and demonstrable rates of return. While prevalent in contact centers, more and more organizations are taking this proven technology and applying it to other areas of their business. Aside from uptake and more widespread enterprise use, Verint continues to advance its WFM offerings. Among the newest capabilities are those that enable more flexible scheduling options, such as time banking, time off accrual, and capabilities that further the ability to swap and bid for shifts if those involved have exact matching skills. Other additions include those that monitor back-office work activities more efficiently, and manage backlog and model forecasts to meet service levels and processing deadlines. For instance, work item tracking enables simplified set-up, viewing and drill-down into workloads by age of individual items. Linked queue forecasting expands on existing multi-queue forecasting by defining linkages based on workflow from one queue to the next—which is especially beneficial in back-office environments where it is common for a given work item to pass through many steps, often involving many people.
Says Dick Bucci, principal, Pelorus Associates, “Forward-thinking vendors are extending and offering workforce management software beyond the contact center, and Verint Witness Actionable Solutions is showing substantial growth in this area. In fact, the organization experienced the strongest gain in overall market share over the last couple of years in workforce management.”
Striking a balance between managing multiple sites, staff schedules and customer expectations has only compounded the challenges an enterprise already experiences. Our latest enhancements are in response to customer needs and compliance standards, and are designed to keep pace with where the industry is headed in respect to scheduling practices and trends.
6. Verint has expanded its reach into the back office/enterprise through its Impact 360 offering. What is Verint’s experienced up-take in this area? What benefits have you seen it deliver?
Workforce optimization (WFO) is alive and well in the back office today. When we use the term “back office” we’re referring to the part of a company that performs non-customer facing administrative, processing and operations tasks that impact the customer experience (such as payment processing, new account set up, claims, research and order fulfillment). Errors and inefficiencies in these types of transactions can result in additional calls into a company’s contact center, repeat work for back-office departments and dissatisfied customers—all of which translate into added costs to an organization.
A number of years back, we made some strategic acquisitions and built some additional capabilities to create a targeted, first-of-its-kind, back-office WFO offering. What’s happened since? Customer organizations have taken an interest in extending WFO capabilities proven in their contact centers into back-office departments, as well as branch and remote office environments. 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 have similar needs—ensuring claims processing and order fulfillment, for example, are efficient, accurate and timely. Errors or unaddressed issues in one area of the business can ripple into others causing call volume spikes and customer frustration.
As forward-thinking companies focus on their broader customer service operations, Verint has seen those in financial services, insurance and healthcare organizations especially among the early adopters of back-office WFO technologies—including volume and data capture, capacity modeling, forecasting and scheduling, strategic planning, application analysis, process analysis, eLearning/lesson management, and performance management/scorecards.
WFO in back-office operations delivers measurable and meaningful enterprise and customer service improvements on a number of fronts—faster turnaround time, improved quality, greater throughput and improved productivity to name but a few. Examples include:
• A large insurance company installed Verint’s Impact 360 solution in its customer account maintenance department to reduce turnaround time from nine days to an average of five days—a more than 50 percent improvement that also lowered calls to the contact center.
• Using Verint software, an order fulfillment company identified 10 percent idle time due to inappropriate assignments on workflow queues, which have now been realigned to utilize this idle capacity.
• One of the U.S.’s largest payment processing banks was able to increase overall volume activity by 11 percent, while reducing headcount by six percent and increasing operating margins by 38 percent by implementing forecasting and scheduling.
• A large, multi-national financial services company is managing its back office on an intraday basis against real work volumes to meet deadlines and reduce status inquiries, with Verint technology playing a key role.
It’s been said that for every one customer-facing service representative, there are up to 10 back-office workers in customer-affecting roles. As such, in many organizations, this area represents a great opportunity for improvements in cost reduction and operational excellence.
7. Workforce Optimization in contact centers is becoming mainstream. What adjacent markets is Verint focused on?
The need for and investment in workforce optimization (WFO) solutions in the contact center will remain. What we see evolving is how this type of technology and how WFO strategies are put into play across the broader customer service operations environment—including branch, remote office and back-office operations that support the customer experience.
Public safety and emergency services organizations represent another growing area that has embraced WFO to make its operations more efficient and better able to respond to new requirements and guidelines, such as Next-Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1). And as mentioned earlier, trading room floor environments also leverage the technology, particularly call recording, to adhere to stringent compliance guidelines and mandates.
Those we are seeing the greatest momentum in and uptake around are branch and back-office operations and public safety.
• Branch and Back-Office Operations
Regardless of environment, WFO solutions are instrumental in helping ensure goals are aligned, performance is in-check, and employees are knowledgeable and up-to-speed on products/services, system use, process changes, new campaigns and more. The contact center is one functional business group found in most organizations that is ahead of the curve in maximizing value, minimizing costs and keeping the customer experience at the forefront. Prevalent is the use of WFO strategies and solutions that have helped lay the foundation for operations, efficiency and productivity gains, and higher-caliber service delivered through better trained personnel.
Yet while branch and back-office operations face similar challenges, they differ structurally. There are multiple departments that work from disparate systems, each leveraging different metrics to gauge success. Few can view enterprise operations holistically, and even fewer have the capability to effectively manage resources across the various functions. The back office also tends to have multiple organizational structures, each with many processing requirements. Instead of average handle time and time in queue, they have processing deadlines, quotas and service level agreements to meet.
Fundamentally, back offices repetitively process large volumes of transactions involving both simple, routine tasks—and complex, multi-step, multi-touch processes. Personnel involved in the processing of work can include data entry clerks, auditors, account and case managers, and IT professionals. Regardless the function, the business objectives remain essentially the same—to process work as quickly and accurately as possible, at the lowest cost, meeting service delivery deadlines, and ensuring customer satisfaction. In branch and back-office environments, the impact of WFO can be significant—providing a systematic, data-driven process for aligning work volumes to resources, monitoring the effectiveness and productivity of employees, measuring performance, identifying skill gaps and delivering coaching/training.
• Public Safety
Verint’s Impact 360 for Public Safety solution, launched in 2008, has applied functionality already proven in the contact center and introduced it to the public safety sector. Going beyond recording for compliance and liability, it brings together voice and screen recording, quality assurance, analytics, scorecards, call taker training and citizen surveys into a flexible, packaged offering. As the first solution of its kind in the public safety market, it introduces a host of WFO functionality to complex and rapidly-evolving 9-1-1 and public safety operations—and helps emergency dispatch and response operators achieve liability reduction, accuracy and immediacy, and efficient investigation analysis and reconstruction, as well as working in support of new, NG9-1-1 standards.
Other areas we are seeing the technology pave the way for is the enablement of newer workforce models and synergies—such as the rise of remote/home agents workers and “anywhere agents”—in-house domain experts that handle highly specific customer queries or requirements. Through the power of WFO and IP, workers that reside outside the traditional four walls of the contact center are accessible and available to serve customers and help build lasting relationships.
About the Author:
Ryan Hollenbeck serves as Senior Vice President of Global Marketing for Verint Systems, including the company’s Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions® business line. As the leader in enterprise workforce optimization software and services, Verint solutions are designed to help organizations capture customer intelligence, uncover business trends, discover the root cause of employee and customer behavior, and optimize the customer experience across contact center, branch, and back-office operations. Contact the author at ryan.hollenbeck@verint.com.