Verint Introduces Solutions to Address Engagement Capacity Gap at Engage 2022
Embracing a channel-less mentality and a single workforce approach for all workers involved is critical for customer engagement success, Verint CEO Dan Bodner told the audience today at the company's Engage 2022 conference in Orlando, Fla.
To kick off the conference, the first in-person Engage event since 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bodner posited that, "The shift to digital starts with the consumer."
An increasing number of transactions start with the mobile phone, which is only rarely used to make calls, Bodner said. But many of those transactions cross channels to bots or human agents, and both need to be able to respond quickly.
The demand for digital transactions and for multichannel transactions continues to expand, Bodner said. In the past, companies would handle increases in volume by adding people, but that can no longer solve the issue. Companies invested $2 trillion in additional human customer support last year and $65 billion in additional tech, but it hasn't been enough to handle the increase in demand, creating what Verint had defined as a "Customer Engagement Gap."
To address this problem, Verint used the conference kickoff to introduce its One Workforce based on the Verint Cloud Platform, which is designed to leverage artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation to bring together all customer touchpoints, eliminate silos, and combine the strengths of bots and humans in customer support.
"You no longer need to organize your workforce by channels and dedicate teams to individual channels, something that can create organizational silos and pockets of inefficiency and limit customer journey flexibility," Bodner said. "A one-workforce approach offers the ability to orchestrate the workforce as one large of pool of resources, to allocate the right work to the right resource at the right time. With a one-workforce approach, you have the flexibility to allocate work to resources based on business priorities, and, because such priorities can change quickly, the agility to make such changes in real time."
Another issue is that as customers and companies add communication channels, the number of silos are increasing as well, according to Bodner.
The one-workforce strategy is designed to provide high-quality customer experiences regardless of the channel and regardless of who (human, bot, hybrid) handles the engagement.
"Throughout the conference, attendees will gain insight on how the Verint Cloud Platform supports the one-workforce approach, supported by new innovations in engagement orchestration, knowledge management, and workforce management to empower employees and bots as they engage with the customer across all channels," said David Singer, Verint's vice president of go-to-market strategy for workforce engagement.
Bodner said some companies are already using the One Workforce approach and have achieved significant benefits. They include the following
- A net promoter score increase of 41 percent;
- An absenteeism decline of 10 percent;
- An employee turnover decline of 30 percent; and
- A self-service increase of 40 percent.
Verint's One Workforce portfolio includes the following:
- Orchestration, knowledge, and real-time support to enable people and bots to perform the right work at the right time;
- Intelligent hiring, forecasting, and scheduling across the entire enterprise, including all kinds of engagements, whether with humans, bots, or a combination;
- Quality and compliance checks; and
- Advanced analytics to analyze interactions for process efficiency and CX improvement opportunities.
"One Workforce is not a single Verint product, rather it is an approach enabled by our platform that organizations can acquire in individual or multiple phases," Singer said. "One of the important aspects of the Verint Cloud Platform is that our products can work together to multiply their value in ways that a single product cannot. Today, our customers can achieve the benefits of One Workforce by gradually deploying new capabilities available on our cloud platform."
Verint also used the conference to introduce Verint Total Quality, a strategic, holistic approach to elevating quality across the enterprise. The company claims that while traditional quality management solutions monitor and evaluate only a small sampling of interactions and exclude the customer perspective, the Verint Total Quality approach ienables companies to increase the number of channels and interactions monitored and reduce non-compliance risk.
The customer perspective of quality and automated real-time coaching are included as well. Verint Customer Cloud Engagement Cloud Platform customers can start anywhere in the quality model and add any level of analytics, AI, or automation as they go along.
Verint Cloud Platform solutions comprising the company's Total Quality approach include the following:
- Verint Automated Quality Management, which autoscores up to 100 percent of voice and digital interactions for greater quality and compliance;
- Verint Interaction Quality, which integrates the customers' perception of quality into quality management scorecards and evaluations;
- Verint Real-Time Coaching, which uses advanced AI to listen to customer calls in real time to identify coaching opportunities and offer immediate advice to agents regarding knowledge, empathy, and compliance.
- Verint Performance Management, which displays employee key performance indicators (KPIs) in role-appropriate scorecards.
"The explosion in digital channels, more onerous compliance regulations, and increasing choice for customers mean traditional quality management programs no longer meet the needs of today's businesses," said McGee-Smith Analytics founder and principal analyst Sheila McGee-Smith in a statement. "Organizations need a complete, connected total quality management program across all human and digital interaction channels and all stages of the customer experience."
"Verint's innovative Total Quality approach ensures that organizations can automate evaluations and incorporate the customer perspective of quality across all channels to provide the right feedback and coaching to their workforces, avoid and mitigate compliance issues, and achieve further reductions of handle time, all while increasing customer satisfaction,” Singer said.
He pointed to the following successes that early adopters of the Total Quality approach have had:
- 98 percent increase in first call resolutions;
- 20 percent reductions in hold times; and
- Cross-sell increases of up to 60 percent.