Verint Engage 2019 Conference Takeaways

I was in Orlando two weeks ago attending Verint’s annual user conference, Engage. The event was a great opportunity to get updates on Verint’s product capabilities, market messaging, and interact with company executives, partners and customers. Discussions with customers were particularly insightful — I was able to learn how they use various technologies such as workforce optimization, interactive virtual agents (IVA), voice biometrics, and analytics.

This article provides a brief summary of my takeaways from the event.

Go-to-Market Overview

The event opened with Verint highlighting its current product capabilities and how they come together to help companies manage customer experiences while ensuring compliance and preventing fraud.

There are four pillars of the company’s customer engagement product portfolio:

• Workforce engagement
• Self-service
• Voice of the customer (VoC)
• Fraud & compliance

Various company executives presenting on the main stage and in analyst breakout sessions noted that each of those pillars are supported with automation. In other words, the company weaves automation as a holistic capability throughout its customer engagement portfolio. This is important, as Aberdeen’s research on the top contact center & CX trends shows that automation is among the top five technology capabilities CX leaders plan to incorporate within their CX technology toolbox in 2019. In fact, data from this research shows that companies plan to increase their adoption of automation from 27% to 53% between early 2019 and mid-2020 — marking a year-over-year increase of 96%.

Simplify, Modernize & Automate

While CX leaders increasingly want to incorporate automation within their activities, many struggle finding ways to get started and plan how automation will impact their activities.  To help companies weave automation within their CX activities, Verint uses a three-step framework:

• Simplify – enable companies to use an open platform that supports their deployment model preferences while making it easier to integrate and use data captured across all channels by all systems.
• Modernize – build and manage a technology infrastructure with processes that enable firms to quickly adapt their activities to evolve with the pace of their customers.
• Automate – find opportunities across CX activities to automate repetitive, simple tasks while using AI capabilities such as next best action guidance to augment employees to do their jobs better.

Each step in this framework is designed to help companies transform their CX activities to modernize existing technologies and use new ones to address evolving customer expectations more efficiently.

To showcase how various capabilities such as self-service, voice biometrics, knowledge management, workforce management, and unified agent desktop come together through this three-step framework, Verint had several clients share their success stories. Dell highlighted how using an IVA helped the firm improve online conversion rates in its e-commerce program by 7.5x more, leading to 14% improvement in digital commerce revenue. AARP highlighted how it uses VoC and analytics capabilities to go beyond capturing customer feedback data through online surveys and IVR surveys, and generate actionable insights based on these results to improve customer retention rates.

Voice of the Customer

During the event, the company also announced its new product — Verint Unified VoC — which both combines and expands the capabilities of its existing VoC products from its prior acquisitions such as OpinionLab and Vovici, and will soon include capabilities from the company’s December 2018 ForeSee acquisition. The platform also enables companies with speech analytics capabilities that can be used to analyze phone calls and IVR interactions to determine customer sentiment and feedback — bringing invaluable contact center insights to the rest of the business. To this point, we learned that the Unified VoC platform is designed as a tool that all CX leaders can use to manage VoC insights and achieve unique goals for each department. Hence, it’s not only a tool that contact centers can use to gauge customer feedback and sentiment, but rather, a tool that offers a more holistic view into the voice of their customers for digital experience managers, e-commerce executives, and marketing leaders.

How to Properly Measure Customer Satisfaction

One of the most popular topics in the area of VoC is how to properly measure customer satisfaction results. There is a lot of discussion amongst CX leaders on the shortcomings of only relying on net promoter score (NPS) as a way to measure customer satisfaction. This isn’t unwarranted as Aberdeen’s July 2016 NPS research found that only 29% of customers identified as promoters according to the NPS methodology actually promote the company brand. As such, CX leaders are increasingly looking for ways to more accurately measure customer satisfaction results.

During the keynote session of the third day at the event, Ryan Hollenbeck, SVP of Marketing for Verint, shared results from recent research the company completed on what modern consumers expect from brands. The number one expectation was convenience — which resonates very well with Aberdeen’s related research that revealed brands are increasingly moving towards developing a customer health index.

Since every business is unique and have different priorities, this index is made up of different metrics for each organization. However, defining the top CX objectives for the business, determining the relevant methods of measurement and assigning weights to these measurements based on the importance of each goal is the most common way companies build a health index.

Savvy CX leaders are increasingly experimenting with best methods to gauge customer convenience. If your company doesn’t currently consider how easy it is for your customers to interact with your business throughout each stage of the customer journey across all channels, we highly recommend that you do to provide customers with convenient experiences.

Hybrid Workforce

One of the most interesting topics of the event was the concept of hybrid workforce. Verint executives used the term repeatedly across main stages and breakout sessions. They define the term as the coming together of AI-enabled robots and human employees to manage customer interactions — an interesting take on AI in customer experience. Using AI capabilities such machine learning, natural language understanding, and automated decision making enable companies to manage simple tasks across the contact center and the rest of the business. For example, responding to simple customer issues such as changes in investment portfolio value through an IVA, eliminating employee need to manage time-consuming low value-add tasks such as copy-pasting account information from one system to another.

It’s common for many businesses to expect their employees to do more within the workday while being more easily accessible during off hours to respond to customer needs on time. These expectations result in employee fatigue, which ultimately drives turnover across many businesses. Using automation to manage more simple tasks frees employee time during the day complete more complex tasks they are expected to handle. In turn, this helps minimize employee fatigue and boosts morale. Since happy employees are more likely to better manage customer experiences, blending automation with human employees ultimately helps businesses create happier customers.

Which of the above building blocks do you currently use or plan to use in your CX activities? Please share your insights in the comments box below.