Calling it the most significant announcement since its acquisition of Kana Software in January 2014 for $514 million, Verint Systems has unveiled a retooled workforce optimization solution that promises to provide deeper customer engagements, streamline back-office tasks, and channel employee skills into improved productivity.
The WFO suite is comprised of three components: customer analytics, workforce optimization, and engagement management.
The new WFO offering is part of a rolling release around the entire customer engagement optimization line, says Kristyn Emenecker, global vice president of enterprise workforce optimization at Verint. In February, the company expanded its existing customer engagement solution.
“When it comes to our enterprise intelligence solutions business, it’s all about the concept of customer engagement optimization,” Emenecker says. “Verint’s customers are looking for ways to engage with their customers across channels, such as social media, mobile, the phone. But they’re also looking for ways to connect their functional groups within their broader organization, such as the back office, stores, and in field service. It’s about reaching all the people who have an impact on customers, whether directly communicating with a customer or impacting the customer’s experience.”
The customer analytics suite includes engagement, speech and text analytics, and enterprise feedback management. Emenecker says Verint’s speech analytics solution now offers better insight into recorded conversations, mining the audio to identify root causes and context. Additionally, embedded voice biometrics provides a layer of security against fraudsters.
Verint’s WFO toolset now includes quality monitoring and reporting; workforce management; process analytics; performance management; and e-learning and coaching. As part of its focus on customer engagement, Verint has drilled down its solutions for contact center employees. A redesigned agent desktop interface is widget-based and lets employees customize their workflows within the system to match their work styles. Real-time guidance and next-best-action suggestions can shorten the distance between seeing customer information and actively responding. Supervisors are also armed with technology that provides better insight into agent skill sets and opportunities for coaching.
“With our customer engagement portfolio, we’re making sure we’re creating a productive employee desktop for the contact center and managing some of those channels, such as email, chat, co-browsing, and Web self-service, directly for the end-user customer,” Emenecker says.
Emenecker acknowledges that Verint has “great competitors” in the market, but says no other company provides all three optimization portfolios in one offering.
“Verint is the only solution on the market that has these three necessary pieces of customer engagement optimization,” she says. “There are companies out there that have the analytics or the workforce optimization, but it’s the combination of the three pieces of the portfolio that work really well together. If a company has great insight and a great plan but doesn’t have a great toolset that’s connected to those pieces, the company is not living up to its potential.”