ORLANDO, Fla. -- Some 71 percent of corporate boardrooms consider customer experience as their most important performance metric, yet limit their efforts to improve those experiences to hiring additional contact center agents to handle the increasing communications from emails, text messages, social media, and other sources, Elan Moriah, president of Verint Systems, said during the opening keynote of his company's Engage users' conference Tuesday.
Moriah outlined Verint's strategy to change that, with a company focus on providing automation where businesses need and want it, using whatever telecom infrastructure they desire.
"We are focused on giving you the right solutions," Moriah told the crowd of about 1,500 attendees. "We are focused on innovation; automation is big."
As proof of that, he noted that Verint has introduced 45 product releases in the past year and offers more than 100 application programming interfaces to link to other companies' products. It also brings the capabilities of more than 100 cloud partners to its customers, Moriah said.
Verint used the conference to introduce its newest product, Verint Unified VoC, part of its larger Voice of the Customer strategy.
Verint Unified VoC provides a complete view of direct, indirect, and inferred voice of the customer feedback from across key customer engagement channels with an automated analytics engine to deliver actionable insights. It also natively taps into the rich customer experience insights available from contact center interactions through speech and text analytics.
Among Unified VOC's features are the following:
- Cross-channel structured and unstructured VoC data collection including email, SMS and post call IVR surveys, digital feedback from websites and mobile devices, as well as customer interactions from contact centers.
- Unified VoC data analysis allowing organizations to map data from multiple sources, create common metrics to provide identification, sizing and prioritization of CX issues from across all channels.
- Triggers, alerts and case management that work out-of-the-box on the unified data sets to solve operational issues, for example, leveraging digital feedback to alert the contact center of emerging issues and initiate actions to resolve those issues.
"We've heard from the majority of our customers that surveying their customers remains important, and yet is no longer enough to give them what they need to differentiate in an increasingly competitive marketplace," said Ben Smith, vice president and general manager of Verint's Voice of the Customer solutions, in a statement. "We're the only provider in the market to empower organizations with the automated ability to mine the millions of VoC interactions in their contact center and digital channels. With our ability to collect these insights and analyze them together with a variety of cross-channel survey and operational data to drive action across the enterprise, Verint has redefined the role of CX in the market."
The challenge for contact centers, according to Verint CEO Dan Bodnar, is that budgets are not increasing, even though 62 percent of those surveyed expect interactions to rise sharply in the next two years. The answer to that challenge, Bodnar said, is two-fold: accelerating automation and the cloud.
"The Verint cloud helps organizations simplify, organize, and innovate their customer engagement processes," Bodnar said. "We simplify it so companies can easily deploy it and fit it into their ecosystems."
The solution was developed in such a way that it can work with multiple telecom systems, even if a single company is using several different types and vendors for its telecom technology, Bodnar added. "Companies are moving to the cloud at a different pace, so we wanted to make it easy to migrate regardless of what stage a company is at. We also offer operational services to meet a customer's unique needs."
10 Ways to Save
Also key to Verint's strategy going forward is affordability, and to that end, the company offers a number of solutions that can save contact centers money, according to Kelly Koelliker, director of content marketing at Verint.
"A lot of people using self-service improves efficiency," she said. "But now every time a call comes into the contact center, it's not an easy one; it's a hard one. So contact centers are hiring more people."
That incurs additional costs, while technology can help these contact centers save money. This, she said, is possible in the following 10 ways:
- Help plan the right amount of staff rather than paying overtime or being caught short.
- Have an answer for everything. Using a single knowledge management repository saves wasted time looking for information. According to Koelliker, the typical contact center agent wastes 14 percent of her time looking for information.
- Use real-time speech analytics to propagate agents' screens with information during calls rather than putting customers on hold to look for it.
- Don't take certain calls. A good intelligent virtual agent can take a large percentage of calls.
- Let robots do the work by handling basic requests.
- Use performance management technology to improve agent skills.
- Improve quality of interactions through automated quality management, which can monitor exponentially more interactions than human monitoring.
- Keep everything in one place so agents don't have to reference several screens, which slows response times.
- Ask for customer feedback to uncover areas for improvement.
- Use both speech analytics and text analytics to better understand why the customer is interacting.