Verint Systems Blog

On July 20th Avaya announced new and enhanced capabilities across several of its AURA product family areas including messaging, contact centers, enterprise voice telephony, conferencing, session managers and border controllers and communications-enabled business applications. While the flurry of activity was impressive because of its shear breadth and depth, those announcements most relevant to Customer Interaction Group, given our customer care focus, have to do with contact center application enhancements and the incorporation of the related planned Nortel product line into the Avaya Contact Center Suite that will take the company and its merged customer base into the future.

Not surprisingly, as outlined by Jorge Blanco, Avaya’s VP Product Marketing, Contact Center Solutions, Avaya’s forward thrust in contact centers will focus on “experience management” or, in other words, the management of the customer’s overall experience as he/she move through multimedia interactions with an enterprise. The newly-announced Avaya AuraTM Contact Center is a multimedia contact center application designed to more effectively deal with multiple streams of customer information channels including voice, e-mail, web chat, and instant messaging/short message service (SMS) and standardize interactions across customer access channels. The new offering was designed to simultaneously improve the midsize enterprise’s ability to manage customer service while enhancing the end user’s experience. continue reading…

By: Brynn Palmer – Customer Experience Doctor

The promise of Workforce Optimization to improve enterprise performance and lower operating costs makes it the new darling of the contact center world.  And why not?

The ability to collect and act on enterprise data validates the contact center’s role as a strategic business unit.  For those of us who have lived the contact center life of being considered “a cost center”, this is a victory long in the making.

While I celebrate the opportunity Workforce Optimization holds for the transformation of the contact center, the greatest victory is reserved for the customer.  

According to a recent American Express Global Customer Service Barometer, nine in ten Americans (91%) consider the level of customer service important when deciding to do business with a company.  But only one-quarter (24%) believe companies value their business.  In essence, the majority of customers have no faith in a company’s interest in a long term relationship; although 86% indicated they would “stick around” after a bad experience if their prior experiences had been positive. Nine %, the study shows, will even spend more with companies that provide excellent service. continue reading…

Workforce Optimization, Quality Monitoring, Speech Analytics, Coaching and PCI Serve as Popular Themes at Upcoming Industry Events

Industry experts from Verint^® Witness Actionable Solutions^® will present on the value and benefits associated with workforce optimization, quality monitoring, speech analytics and coaching software during upcoming events.  The sessions will impart tips and best practices for maximizing the value of each solution, while placing an emphasis on how they help improve enterprise performance and customer loyalty.  Additional sessions will explore ways to balance customer security with industry regulations related to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

continue reading…

New Patent Validates Company as an Innovator in Network Recording and Offers Global Customers Reliable, Secure Solution  

MELVILLE, N.Y., July 28, 2010 — Verint^® Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has issued a fundamental patent to Verint in the area of recording as a network service.  This patent and its related families of issued and pending patents significantly strengthen the company’s industry-leading patent portfolio comprised of more than 460 patents and applications worldwide across the company’s enterprise workforce optimization and security intelligence solutions.  The patent also reinforces Verint’s leadership with more than 160 patents and applications relating to recording.

“Behind our leadership is a history of innovation represented by our portfolio of patents.  This essential patent covers recording as a network service, an emerging technology trend that gives business users more control of managing recordings, while also minimizing complex technology integration support issues,” says Dan Bodner, president and CEO, Verint Systems.  “This is yet another example of our commitment to innovation through our strong patent portfolio, which provides us significant competitive advantages in the market, increases barriers to entry for our competitors, and delivers reliable, secure solutions to our customers and partners globally.”  

The recently issued network recording patent (U.S. Pat. 7,660,307), entitled “Systems and Methods for Providing Recording as Network Service,” covers methods and systems for a network or switch to receive instructions that IP packets associated with a communication are to be recorded.  The issuance of this patent further validates the company’s domain leadership and demonstrates its ability to foresee and shape the evolution of recording technology.  The network, it believes, is becoming increasingly capable of absorbing some of the lower level functions that previously had to be undertaken by external recording hardware and software.  Through this patent, Verint enables the network to become a more powerful platform for the sort of applications that businesses have come to expect as essential in managing their workforce and communications. 

For more information about the patent see this page.

Cloud computing…it seems you can’t turn around without hearing something about this new megatrend.  How will it affect the contact center?  Is it already having an impact on how the contact center does business?  Applications that are able to operate with relatively moderate bandwidth requirements seem to flourish but what about systems that require massive amounts of bandwidth and processing capability.  Are the global networks ready to deal with that kind of sustained traffic?  Do we have sufficient redundancy built into the system to protect against data loss and service outages?  I want to believe in a cloud nirvana where all systems can be secure, fast, always up, available from anywhere, and reliable…I really do.  What about you my fellow cloud chasers…where do you see limitations?  How do see the cloud evolving? 

July 12th: Reported in the June 28th issue of Time Magazine in the Global Business section: Car-insurance discounters gain ground as changing consumer habits transform the industry. Kathleen Kingbury reported that the car-insurance industry is being wracked by change. All the insurance vendors are pining for those days way back in 2002 when the industry grew at a sizzling 15% a year. Today, thanks to the Great Recession, the industry is growing at just 3%. And, that growth’s not evenly distributed among the players.

The upstart discounters like Geico and Progressive are giving the traditional industry giants like State Farm and Allstate a run for their money through technology, direct-sales prowess and sharp branding.

The smart marketing is a drumbeat on a single message: You just might be paying too much for your car insurance. The smart direct selling is what’s really changing the game.

The traditional vendors rely on the insurance agent model. The upstarts leverage the Internet and contact center technology where consumers can shop for and purchase policies direct from the insurer.

Buried in the report was this nugget: A recent poll by J.D. Power found that more than half of drivers born from 1977 to 1992 report buying coverage directly from an insurer – either on the Internet or by phone – rather than through an insurance agent; only 36% of baby boomers did so. Jeremy Bowler, senior director of J.D. Power’s insurance practice had this to say, “At more than 70 million strong, this group will have a dramatic impact on the insurance-distribution landscape in the years ahead.”

My friends, the Millennials are going to change much more than the staid, old insurance industry. Contact center management ought to be having strategic planning conversations with senior management now. We are beginning the second decade of the 21st Century. Warp 2, Commander Data. Engage.

The opinions expressed in this post are exclusively those of William Durr and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, Verint Systems.

The technology convergence of all forms of business communications between people has been labeled as “unified communications” or “UC.” What it really means is that individual end-users in a business environment can now choose any form of communication to either initiate a contact with another person or group of persons, or to receive and respond to such a contact in any modality (real-time, asynchronous messaging) or medium (voice, text, visual) that is available to them. This flexibility is defined as “multi-modal” communications, as well as “trans-modal” communications, where individual users can dynamically change from their original form of contact to a mode of communication suitable to their immediate circumstantial needs.

This dynamic flexibility of communication is largely being driven by the increase in mobile communications, which requires users to communicate under real-time limitations of their changing environments. Can they talk? Can they listen? Can they look at a screen? Can they push buttons for input? Rather than wait until they can communicate in any particular way, UC enables communication tasks to be done selectively and immediately in one form or another, thus reducing the inherent latency in business communications due simply to a lack of a specific network access connection or device interface.   Read the full article here.

News item, June 29, 2010 it was reported that Apple Inc. said it sold more than 1.7 million of its new iPhones in its first three days.  Sales of the iPhone 4 beat last year’s iPhone 3GS, which sold 1 million in the same time.

So, why is this news of concern to the contact center industry? 

Are you getting ready for video chat?

An app available only on the iPhone 4 is FaceTime, Apple’s video chat software and the reviews are positive.  Here’s how it works.  Make a voice call on the iPhone 4 to someone else on an iPhone 4.  If you’re both connected to Wi-Fi, you’ll see the option to convert the call to FaceTime.  Press the FaceTime button and the app asks your call participant if they will accept the video chat.  Once they do, the phone connects you and turns on the user-facing camera built into the iPhone 4.

Most of the screen displays your friend or colleague.  You can see everything their iPhone sees.  There’s a thumbnail in the corner that shows you what you look like to the other caller.

With millions of users beginning to play around with video chat (I think it’s a video phonecall, myself), it won’t be long before someone builds a business case around premium customer service involving video chat.  And you can bet it will appear in contact centers.  The contact center industry in on the cusp of an explosion in new communication channels.  Substantive shifts like this always produce winners and losers.  Winners aren’t usually luckier than losers, they just usually prepare for the contest better.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of William Durr and do not necessarily reflect those held by my employer, Verint Systems.