Verint Unveils Voice of the Customer Analytics Platform

Verint Systems yesterday released its new Voice of the Customer Analytics platform, part of the larger Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite from Verint Witness Actionable Solutions.

The new platform is designed to help organizations develop a centralized means of detecting, gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer insights and includes applications for speech analytics, text analytics, and customer feedback surveys, as well as the ability to integrate data from Web analytics, social media channels, and other customer interaction points.

The Voice of the Customer Analytics platform does the following:

• allows users to detect, gather, analyze, and act on insights from the voices of their customers;
• combines all sources of customer interaction data into a single holistic platform that allows cross-channel analysis, along with individual customer tracking capabilities;
• provides integrations that span from an ability to view a customer journey across channels, to cross-channel automatic trend analysis and combined root cause analysis, to the ability to forecast customer behavior given a full picture of interactions; and
• enables a deep understanding by leveraging unified customer data across communications channels for a singular view into experiences, issues, opportunities and trends.

The platform is unified with Verint's fifth-generation Impact 360 Enterprise Workforce Optimization (WFO) suite, which the company also released recently.

Designed to combine all sources of customer interaction data into a single platform, Verint's Voice of the Customer Analytics platform allows companies to view a customer journey across channels and forecast customer behavior, and provides cross-channel automatic trend and root cause analysis. These expand on Verint's patented Customer Behavior Indicators, which help automatically reveal critical customer experience information, along with sentiment analysis and emotion detection.

Within Verint's Voice of the Customer Analytics platform, patented speech analytics results flow directly into performance management scorecards and quality monitoring applications. Sophisticated text analytics mines customer interactions and intelligence derived through feedback across multichannel customer communications, including email messages, Web chat sessions, blogs, review sites, social media, and other text-based channels. Customer feedback surveys apply short, context-sensitive, dynamic surveys to capture customer insights and perspectives on products, processes, staff performance, and customer satisfaction levels in real time.

"Our fifth-generation enterprise workforce optimization solution sets a new standard for WFO and what it can bring to organizations in the way of acquiring voice of the customer and other key business insight, and then putting that intelligence into action through the most mature WFO platform in the market," said Nancy Treaster, senior vice president and general manager of Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, in a statement.

Ryan Hollenbeck, senior vice president of marketing, agrees. He calls the solution suite "market defining" and "a very strategic architectural release."

"You can now create a single window, a single view for all interactions, and you can see them by a specific customer for a specific date," he says.

The new Impact 360 solution suite provides a single point of access to all WFO functions, locations and data; single system administration; a single agent database; a single security model; and a single graphical user interface (GUI). Data is available in real time and provides visibility and intelligence to employees across roles, levels, and functions. Pop-up suggestions and alerts recommend best next steps based on desktop screen events and sequences.

The latest version of Impact 360 also features triple the recording capacity, unified recording management, and reporting across TDM, IP, and mixed telephony environments.

From a workforce management perspective, enhancements include cell- or pod-based scheduling to support smaller teams in back offices; analytics that identify and alert employees and managers about individual work items at risk of missing service level agreements; an extensible key performance indicator (KPI) dimension; and a richer Time Off Manager. Other changes to the solution include a new unified dashboard that allows users to move from one WFO function to the next via a central navigation bar; an enhanced enterprise architecture featuring new levels of scalability; an advanced technology stack, including support for the Windows 2008 operating system; virtualization; resiliency; redundancy; a single consolidated server; simplified installation and maintenance; and a clear path to add new applications.

"Customers will be able to add new modules just by punching in and activating a license key," Hollenbeck says.

The new Impact 360 solution allows customers to deploy a complete analytics solution on a single, consolidated server for up to 250 agent seats. This creates a smaller footprint, creating greater opportunities for smaller firms that don't have a lot of infrastructure or IT resources to deploy a complete speech and text analytics solution, Hollenbeck says.

It also brings the solution "to new business users," including marketing and sales teams and branch office and back-office personnel, he says.

"Speech and text analytics have been an important part of how the customer experience market has been defined. Now there are new roles and titles for people," Hollenbeck states. "The WFO market is really starting to take off now, and includes not just the back office any more."