Verint Launches 4 Products at Engage '23
Looking to close what it calls "The Customer Engagement Gap," Verint today on the opening day of its Verint Engage '23 user conference in Las Vegas launched Engagement Data Insights, Enterprise Experience Management, Open Contact Center as a Service (Open CCaaS), and a string of new DaVinci artificial intelligence capabilities.
Verint Engagement Data Insights provides business users no-code, no-training, self-service access to all of their engagement data using Verint DaVinci AI for natural language search. The technology uses a search-driven interface that leverages natural language search and generative AI. Users can simply ask or type their questions around what is happening in their businesses and the resulting actions they need to take. Its self-service dashboards and reports are designed to provide visibility into their customer engagement operations, transforming raw data into meaningful visualizations and metrics.
"Today organizations grapple with unifying, managing, and accessing huge amounts of siloed customer engagement data," said David Singer, Verint global vice president of go-market-strategy. "With Verint Engagement Data Insights, business leaders can now access and harness customer engagement data directly. There's no reliance on outside sources or IT to provide the reports needed to make data-driven decisions."
Verint is focused on helping companies make data-informed decisions to improve their customer experiences, said Dan Bodner, Verint's CEO.
Verint expects those data-driven decisions to be further enhanced by Verint Enterprise Experience Management, which it created to break down the silos and unify unstructured data for one enterprise-wide picture of the voice of the customer (VoC). Verint Enterprise XM offers direct and inferred feedback collection, advanced CX analysis, rich reporting, and automated actions and consolidates VoC data from across web, mobile, social, and survey feedback, store locations with geolocation capabilities, and contact center voice and text channels and post interaction surveys.
"Consumers today expect frictionless and personalized customer journeys. When something goes wrong, they expect issues to be resolved quickly," said Daniel Ziv, Verint's vice president of go-to-market strategy for experience management and analytics. "They also expect to be heard across any channel, including web, mobile, social messaging, chat, and phone, going beyond traditional surveys."
But unlike some other companies, Verint relies on an open system, which makes it much easier for companies to transition to the cloud using a variety of technologies rather than being forced to buy everything from a single platform, Bodner said.
Some companies can't make the full transition at one time, and an open platform enables them to migrate one or more pieces at a time so they can start with items that will make the largest impact to the organization.
"An open platform gives you the freedom to choose," Bodner said.
Verint’s open solution for contact centers, also announced today, is the Open Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform.
According to Verint, historically companies built their contact centers based on telephony infrastructure, and as the industry started to shift to the cloud, the first-generation cloud solutions were telephony-first and closed. Today, companies are focused on open solutions to increase automation so they can elevate CX across channels while lowering the operating cost.
"Industry labor spend is already very high at $2 trillion annually. Brands can no longer hire their way to providing better customer experiences. Verint is leading the industry with a CX automation platform, purposely built to address the most strategic challenges of the contact center," Bodner said. "In today's fast-paced technology environment, brands adopt platforms that are open in all dimensions to future-proof their contact centers. They need a platform that is designed to augment their human workforce with an effective team of specialized AI bots to deliver tangible business outcomes."
Verint uses dedicated bots for specific tasks rather than larger, general purpose bots that Rick Blair, its vice president of product strategy and experience, says wouldn't reach the same level of expertise.
The bots use AI that evolves and improves as the bots are trained.
AI is improving technology in many ways, and Verint's DaVinci AI is at the heart of many of its own product innovations. Not surprising, then, the company announced several new DaVinci capabilities today. They include a wrap-up capability that uses generative AI to free agents of the roughly 20 percent of their time currently spent on after-call work. According to Blair, the time agents spend between calls can cost millions of dollars in additional labor.
Another addition to the DaVinci portfolio is interaction transfer, a bot that provides seamless transitions from self-service to assisted service. The bot provides the agent with a summary of the self-service interaction.
"Verint is enabling our customers to inject AI innovation into business workflows, resulting in more automation and elevated customer experiences," said Heather Richards, Verint's vice president of go-to-market strategy for digital-first engagement. "With Verint DaVinci AI, the latest AI capabilities are embedded directly into business processes to enable humans and bots to work together like never before and deliver CX automation throughout the enterprise."
The four technological advancements announced today feed into a common theme for Verint--closing what it calls the Customer Engagement Gap. In their attempts to do so, companies can bring on additional people or technology, but adding staff isn’t a scalable solution, Elan Moriah, Verint's president, said during his opening keynote before a crowd of about 1,000 attendees.
The Customer Engagement Gap worsens as customers today expect real-time and consistent cross-channel customer service, and if they don't get it, they are likely to take their business elsewhere, Moriah said.
It's hard to deliver on customer expectations, he continued, noting that "consumers now have more choices; they want a holistic experiences.
"Companies that do this well are rewarded; companies that don't are punished," he concluded.