Verint Launches “5th-Generation” WFO Solution and New “Voice of the Customer” Analytics Platform

Verint has long been known as one of the leaders in customer experience management and workforce optimization (WFO), and recently made two big product launch announcements - the market’s first “5^th-generation WFO suite” and the new “Voice of the Customer” analytics platform. Each of these announcements are significant in and of themselves and, put together, will have a huge impact on the way enterprises gather and utilize information to enhance business operations and, most important, the customer experience.

Verint has been offering its WFO solution for several years and some of the applications within Verint’s WFO suite have been on the market for some time. Given this, as would be expected, some elements of the recent WFO announcement are simply enhancements to existing capabilities. However, others are brand new features and functions that significantly enhance an organization’s customer experience management capabilities. In fact, there are several things that stand out in the latest version of Verint’s WFO solution:

• Enhanced Navigation and Ease of Use: Cascading solution drop-downs and a centralized view across all applications, with users able to access the system via a single entry point and readily move from one WFO function to the next;
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Single server for all WFO applications, including speech analytics, for up to 250 agent seats;
• Easier Installation and Implementation: With the entire software suite provided to customers, additional Verint WFO modules can be added to those already in use and functionality enabled by simply activating a license key;
• Deeper Enterprise WFM Functionality: Numerous advancements have been made to more dynamically support front-office contact center, branch, and back-office operations staff scheduling, such as “cell or pod”-based scheduling to support smaller teams in back offices, extensible key performance indicator (KPI) dimension for more detailed queue-level information, additional rules to control and improve shift swaps, and more shift assignment rules;
• Recorder and Application Convergence: Single converged recorder has superset of existing recording capabilities, while providing triple the recording capacity and unified recording management and centralized administration, and coaching functionality is included standard as part of the company’s QM packaged solution; and
• Improved User Management: Single organizational hierarchy with role-based security, centralized enterprise management, and rules-based, distributed archiving with scheduled data transfers.

What’s really different and unique, and perhaps most advantageous to organizations, is that everything is now on a single server, with applications running on virtual machines. Verint can now offer a complete WFO implementation on a single server for contact centers up to 250 agent seats. Such an implementation includes call recording, quality monitoring (including coaching), workforce management, speech analytics, performance management scorecards, and eLearning. In a previous release, this would have taken a minimum of four or five servers. The obvious benefit to organizations is in TCO. In fact, Verint notes that one customer deploying its 5^th-generation WFO solution using virtualized servers went from approximately 140 servers down to roughly 22, resulting in huge cost savings. In addition, by having all of the capabilities on a single server for up to 250 users, Verint now further offers an attractive, cost-effective solution for the mid market.

There’ve also been a number of functionality enhancements made across the Verint WFO suite. As noted earlier, many enterprise WFM advancements have been made to further meet the specific operational and staffing requirements of branch and back-office operations. Also, coaching is now part of the company’s QM application, so that all customers active on maintenance  with the QM module get coaching for no additional cost when they upgrade. Overall, enhancements are evident across the entire WFO suite, adding to the overall unification and enterprise capabilities of the solution set.

The second announcement is the new Voice of the Customer (VoC) Analytics platform (available later in May 2011), which focuses on analytics and holistically brings various communication channels together. VoC is an integral part of Verint’s 5^th-generation Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite. Despite the name, VoC is not just about voice. A significant portion of consumers use three or more channels to communicate with companies, which means that organizations need to do more than just track telephone interactions. In addition, companies need to understand structured and unstructured data and customer interactions, such as blogs and social media where customers may share and post information about their experience with a company.

Verint married its text and speech analytics capabilities inside a single platform and layered its customer survey capabilities over it, providing triangulation into the VoC - not only what they’re saying, but where they are saying it, be it a phone interaction, an email to the company, a comment on a blog or social networking site, or feedback to a post-interaction survey. This lets companies “get inside the heads of their customers,” according to Verint’s Bill Durr, Principal, Global Solutions Consultant. Durr notes that Verint’s VoC Analytics platform lets you track and cross-correlate communications across channels, combining all sources of customer interaction data into one holistic platform for cross-channel analytics and single customer experience tracking.

Verint’s VoC Analytics platform looks at all channels through native integrations, mainly through speech and text analytics and surveys, providing a holistic view of what’s going on with the customer. Sometimes the phone is the last resort, and customers want to use email or other channels to interact with a company. Regardless of the channel, these interactions need to be understood. Companies have to bring this information together and use the intelligence to provide visibility to the stakeholders who will be impacted by it or who can act on it. This provides real-time visibility and intelligence at the right time to the right people and can help drive better and wider enterprise collaboration.

With the VoC Analytics platform, companies can identify trends based on phrases that are detected in phone calls or text-based interactions. Using speech or text analytics, you can uncover root causes of problems, as well as find warning signals. By using insights gathered through direct customer feedback, emails, phone calls, social media, etc., and leveraging speech and text analytics in unison, companies can identify and address potential issues before they become major problems, thus, in a sense, gaining access to an early warning system. With these capabilities, the contact center can be seen as a bridge between the market and the organization, making it possible to gather intelligence that can be used throughout the enterprise.

This can also help to prevent the viral spread of negative comments on social software sites. More and more often, the phone isn’t the main point of contact with a company, and it may even be the last resort. A customer may initially contact a company about a problem via email or web chat and then, when there’s no resolution, they may call the company or, perhaps, tweet about the negative experience. Companies need tools to help prevent this from happening or, at a bare minimum, understand when it is happening. Usually a customer will have interacted with a company a couple times – through voice or email or both – before criticizing them on a social software site. Using speech and text analytics, companies can get insights into what’s upsetting or making a customer happy, making it possible to detect trends and issues before they end up “going viral” so companies can intervene to minimize or avoid damage.

Verint’s new solution is extremely competitive, but lacks one thing – real-time speech analytics. NICE and Nexidia have both announced this capability, providing real-time alerts and screen-pops directly into agent and supervisor desktops based on real-time speech analytics. Verint states that it decided that real-time speech analytics is not commercially viable at this time, specifically noting the penchant for false positives in phonetics-based speech analytics solutions. Instead, Verint believes that a more structured approach is a better way to go. For example, many of the same alerts and screen-pops provided by real-time speech analytics to provide agent guidance can be accomplished easily with Verint’s Desktop and Process Analytics based on actions on the agent’s desktop screen. In addition, although Verint believes that real time is important, it sees “real time at the right time” - taking appropriate action based on a thorough understanding of what happens during the course of customer interaction -as providing significantly more value to organizations by “enabling more profound enterprise results and overall customer experience improvements.” Overall, while Verint cites good reasons not to use real-time speech analytics, it’s a capability that some competitors have and customers may be looking for.

While Verint’s new capabilities are impressive, I have to wonder how easy or difficult it will be for companies to use them properly and get the most out of them. Many contact centers haven’t figured out how to bring the practice of speech and text analytics into their organizations. In addition, there needs to be an evangelist or someone dedicated to understanding the VoC and how to drive these applications. Companies need to figure out the roles of the various departments - what’s the role of the marketing organization, which back office departments should have access to the information gathered, what information should stay in the contact center and what should be shared and when should it be shared, where should the information reside, and who “owns” the information? There are many issues that organizations need to think through in respect to 5^th-generation WFO, particularly VoC analytics, as these tools go beyond the sphere of the contact center. This is not simple workforce scheduling. This is valuable data that can be used or potentially misused by various stakeholders in an organization, and companies will have to figure things out as they go along. Verint’s expertise has been in the contact center and it has many loyal customers. However, as the company continues to expand beyond the contact center and starts to deal with people in marketing, business analysis, and other functional departments and roles, things might get more challenging as the company is not as well known in those areas.

Verint’s new offerings can go a long way in helping companies better understand what their customers are saying and help them solve issues before they become widespread or business-disrupting problems. With a reduced TCO and additional functionality, Verint can ultimately help organizations save money while enhancing the customer experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction and, hopefully, increased revenues and bottom line.

Also on UCStrategies.com about this announcement: "Ryan Hollenbeck on Verint’s Industry-First “5th-Generation” Enterprise Workforce Optimization Solution," Industry Buzz podcast with Jim Burton.