Analyst Perspectives

Verint entered the enterprise market for customer feedback management when it acquired Vovici in August 2011. Since then the Vovici products have been integrated into Verint’s Customer Engagement Optimization suite, which includes products originally developed by Verint and Kana, which it also acquired. The current suite supports a range of capabilities that Verint groups into three categories: customer analytics (various types of analytics and Enterprise Feedback Management), customer engagement (which is largely the Kana products that support the agent desktop, email, chat and co-browsing, knowledge and case management, and Web-based self-service) and workforce optimization (quality monitoring, workforce management, desktop and process analytics, performance management and e-learning and coaching). Having this broad array of capabilities allows Verint to support a closed-loop approach to customer feedback and connect it to the processes with which to identify issues raised through feedback and take action to improve (through process change, training and coaching, for example).

Verint Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) supports the end-to-end feedback process and includes:

• Multichannel surveying for capturing customer input across telephone, email, Web and mobile channels.
• Panel management for organizing groups of customers to actively participate in surveys.
• Built-in case management to open cases automatically based on survey responses, speeding action to help resolve customer issues.
• Real-time analytics, dashboards and reporting to help users quickly understand customer sentiment, detect trends and rising issues, and share information across the enterprise.

The latest release of this product enhances many of these areas. Enhancements to the design tools make it easier for users to design customer-friendly surveys and enable designers to build surveys using corporate branding styles and content. Others reflect the trend for mobile surveys, making it easier to design SMS-based surveys suited to delivery on smartphones; advanced capabilities help set up and run SMS campaigns to selected groups of customers, and specific analysis and dashboards can assess the success of such campaigns. Richer analysis and reporting capabilities are linked with case management to help drive actions based on surveys, and other features make it easier to distribute reports and analysis to relevant users, thus ensuring they have consistent information available in formats that meet their needs. To enable this, EFM includes capabilities to build a model of the organizational hierarchy, along with rules that define who gets what reports and analysis. Our benchmark research into customer feedback management suggests that these two capabilities will be of interest to companies, since the most popular option (selected by 38% of participants) to ensure that action is taken on feedback is to distribute responsibility across the organization. Verint EFM allows organizations to automate more of this process and help facilitate that appropriate action is taken by the most qualified group.

Our customer-related research shows that managing the customer experience is now the top priority for many companies. It goes without saying that if you don’t understand the experiences customers have during interactions, it will be impossible to take action to improve them; thus collecting customer feedback through multiple channels is the foundation for improving the customer experience. Our feedback management research shows that companies that collect and analyze feedback realize a range of benefits that impact the whole organization, most prominently improving customer satisfaction and loyalty (cited by 65%), being able to improve products and services (45%) and institute more focused training and coaching (44%). To achieve such benefits, we advise companies to take an enterprise-wide approach so that decisions and actions are not taken in isolation; doing so with incomplete knowledge can have negative effects on customer satisfaction and the customer experience. The Verint Customer Engagement Optimization suite supports such an approach, and I believe the new enterprise hierarchy capabilities will make it easier for companies to share information across the organization and make sure the most appropriate person takes action. I recommend that companies seeking to improve the customer experience examine how these capabilities can support such efforts.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director