The 2016 Speech Industry Star Performers: Verint
Verint Commits to the Cloud and Fraud Prevention
Verint Systems captured more than a little attention in February when it acquired Contact Solutions, a provider of cloud-based voice and mobile customer self-service and business intelligence software, from North Bridge Growth Equity for an undisclosed amount.
Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, expects the acquisition to give Verint a lot of new capabilities and enable it to enhance some of its existing offerings. “Verint is buying its way into some new channels, but also complementing its offerings,” she says.
The addition of Contact Solutions advances the Verint Customer Engagement Optimization portfolio with cloud-based solutions that enhance voice and mobile self-service through automation and analytics-driven personalization. It also added functionality to Verint’s Identity Authentication and Fraud Detection, which delivers passive voice biometrics to profile and recognize the voice prints of fraudulent callers. The agreement incorporates the use of Contact Solutions’ advanced upstream fraud detection functionality that can identify suspicious caller behavior within voice self-service interactions.
“There are two major areas of access for fraudsters in the contact center—the agents and the IVR. Verint helps the agents, and Contact Solutions protects the IVR,” Fluss says.
The Contact Solutions announcement builds on Verint’s August 2015 acquisition of Teligent, which provides community solutions in a self-service environment. By comparison, Fluss calls the Contact Solutions acquisition “a smaller deal that gives Verint a lot of capabilities in IVR, mobile, and cloud-based contact center infrastructure.”
But while the acquisition might be relatively small, she adds, “it’s significant because we’re seeing a WFO vendor acquiring a transaction processing vendor.”
The two acquisitions weren’t the only significant developments coming out of Verint this past year. Following years of investment in cloud technologies and more than 1,000 active cloud deployments, in June, Verint officially announced that its entire Customer Engagement Optimization portfolio is available for cloud deployment.
Verint’s full solution set, which includes software for customer analytics, engagement management, call recording, performance management, feedback management, knowledge management, workforce optimization, and more, is now available in cloud, on-premises, and hybrid.
Kristyn Emenecker, senior vice president of product strategy at Verint, says the final piece of the company’s cloud puzzle was workforce optimization, which recently became available through multitenant, private, and hybrid cloud services.
In addition to granting deployment flexibility, the move gives Verint’s customers a range of choices in licensing options. With Verint’s hybrid model, large enterprises can select which applications to deploy on-premises or in the cloud while laying the foundation to gradually evolve to a full cloud deployment over time.
But despite the strong push toward the cloud, Verint has no plans to abandon its on-premises offerings, Emenecker stresses. “We will continue to support our customers who want the full control of on-premises [deployments],” she says. “This is all about giving our customers options.”
Having its entire portfolio available in the cloud “allows us to continue our specialized position,” Emenecker adds. “Customers and partners can have all of their [contact center] solutions from one vendor, and now they can have them in whatever deployment model they want.”
Verint also this year scored a number of very large contracts, including one with the Hong Kong government’s Efficiency Unit, which is implementing Verint Speech Analytics in its 1823 contact center. The 1823 contact center covers 22 participating government departments and each year receives about 4.1 million calls and 360,000 emails.
Through a partnership announced in May with RedOwl, a provider of human risk analytics, Verint expanded its capabilities in the financial services sector, allowing firms to closely monitor the thousands of daily phone calls that occur on the trading floor. The RedOwl platform combines key communications sources—such as email content, chat, and now voice—with structured data, including trades, physical access logs, human resources records, news feeds, and print logs. The insight into these numerous data sources enables companies to spot insider trading, market manipulation, conduct risk, and other critical issues.
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