Analyst Perspectives

Recently Verint announced a new development in its workforce optimization suite Impact 360 Workforce Optimization that it calls Personalized Guidance. It aims to improve the customer experience by prompting anyone handling customer interactions with what they should do next. The principle is simple and logical: Analyze all the data you can so you understand the customer and context of the interaction, identify best next action, and prompt the person handling the interaction with this action so the customer receives a response best related to the interaction. Ideally, customers are happier and more interactions are resolved at the first attempt. The software also closes the loop and feeds information back to all other related lines of business so people there can also take appropriate action, which might mean changing a process, improving a product or updating a use guide, for example.

To build this simple but effective solution, Verint has connected several of its existing products. It uses real-time speech, desktop and process analytics to identify the customer and the context of the interaction, it extracts additional data about the customer and the agent from other parts of workforce optimization, and it uses rules-based software inherited and subsequently enhanced from the Iontas acquisitions to decide best next action. It then pops the action onto the agent desktop and emails other lines of business on the customer’s issue and the action taken to resolve it. These final two steps ensure customers receive personalized, in-context responses and thus improved experiences. Other lines of business can decide what action they need to take to improve their interactions or indeed remove the need for future interactions because the issue goes away.

Connecting its software allows Verint to take more advantage of having such a wide suite of products. I have written in the past that possibly its biggest issue is integrating the products it has acquired. Verint is getting to grips with this issue and delivering more integrated solutions, as other niche vendors cannot. Personalized Guidance is also a prime example of joining up processes and providing integrated products that support a more holistic approach to customer-facing activities. As I recently wrote, smart companies are beginning to take this approach to voice of the customer, and this new development extends that into customer experience.

Providing enhanced customer care is becoming more complex as customers change communication habits, as more lines of business become involved in handling customer interactions, as more competitors enter traditional markets with new Internet-based business models, and as social media gives customers a global voice when things go wrong. During the coming year I will be looking for more examples of companies that join up their processes and vendors that do the same with their products. Please collaborate with us and share any examples you know about.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director