Verint Systems Blog

The social media phenomenon is proving to be one of the most powerful forms of communication impacting brands. Customers are sharing thoughts on products and services, good and bad service experiences, and much more. This new social “word of mouth” is the number one decision factor of 20-50 percent of all customer decisions. Furthermore, social networking is most influential for first time buyers or when products are relatively expensive-the most important transactions for most organizations.

Facebook has more than 500 million global users, and Twitter has seen over 20 billion “tweets” of which 20 percent are estimated to be related to product and services requests. There is a shear mass of consumer-generated information that transpires and increasingly influences buying decisions. Marketing departments no longer own their corporate brands… the customers do!

This can pose a threat especially for organizations that have spent years building their brand. For a customer-centric enterprise, capturing and mining this new social voice of the customer is critical, yet separating the insights from the ‘noise” may be a daunting task. Once something goes social, it’s very hard to control.  See the full article here.

Products and services are becoming more complex, whether you’re evaluating a new insurance policy or the latest smart phone. Consumers can spend days reading reviews and comparing features and functionalities. However, there are also those customers who don’t have time for this level of research and simply rely on their gut feeling — which is another way of saying that brand perception carries great influence in today’s purchase decisions.

It takes years, a large investment, and a corporate culture backed by business practices built around innovation, quality, customer-centricity, and service excellence to establish a strong brand. The return can be very rewarding especially in today’s increasingly complex world. However, in the era of social networking, even strong brands can be undermined. The impact of social media has only proven that perception plays a much larger role in the power and vulnerability of a brand.   See the full article here.

Most companies have the ability to estimate expenses associated with customer interactions. The formula is fairly straightforward. Take the cost of a live customer interaction — which is often measured by average handle time — and then multiply it by the “per minute” cost associated with having a live agent on the phone, including any additional relevant overhead. These same organizations, however, don’t always have an effective parallel process to measure the value created by the same customer interaction. 

This unbalanced management style focuses more on cost and less on value, causing contact center and enterprise strategies to look more heavily at cost reduction and less on increasing the actual value created. This alone can be an expensive mistake. A recent Forrester study looked at interactions across 12 industries, and in doing so discovered that quality customer experiences can generate as much as $311 million per year.   See the full article on MediaPost.

There’s a lot of talk about customer service and the customer experience in today’s business media.  Many organizations seem to understand that they need to provide a quality experience when dealing with their customers; however do these organizations truly understand how big of an impact a good customer relationship can have on their bottom line?  Do they understand what it really means to have a good customer experience? 

It might be shocking to learn that many companies don’t really know who their customers are or what they need. They’ve built products and services based on an inside-out viewpoint, without doing enough research into what and how products are being used by their customers. Companies also develop service plans, policies, and procedures from the perspective of what’s best for the business, not realizing that what’s best for the customer is truly what’s best for the business.

Do organizations do this out of sheer blindness to reality? Not usually. Providing a good customer experience is more difficult than it sounds, but it is a process that when implemented and nurtured correctly, can have dramatic impacts on an organization’s bottom line, customer retention rates, and employee productivity.

See Bill Pryor-Verint’s Director of Public Safety-discuss the ways in which Impact 360^® Workforce Optimization impacts the performance of contact center agents in the public safety sector.  The following video clip also highlights the innovative solutions that Verint^® Systems has introduced specifically for these communications centers, enabling higher quality interactions for citizen communities.    

Announced at this year’s APCO conference is new functionality that automates workforce forecasting and scheduling, and introduces capabilities that enable monitoring schedule adherence in real time.  Helping emergency communications and dispatch center management plan and appropriately staff to meet their workloads and requirements, the Verint Impact 360 solution can produce optimal schedules by balancing defined shift rules, work patterns, breaks, off-phone times, and individual skills, proficiencies and preferences.  In addition to intra-day management abilities, Impact 360 for Public Safety also automates such routine tasks as time off management and shift swapping, which provides managers with insight into individual and group performance.

Click here to watch the video.

For many years companies have been using CSAT (customer satisfaction) survey scores as a way to gauge how they are doing in eyes of their customers. Most recently there was the introduction of Net Promoter^® Score, would you recommend our company to a friend or colleague? Many said this was the only question that you really needed to focus on and many companies did. What we have learned, however is that both these measurements could show positive results and you could still lose customers! continue reading…

by: Paul Stockford, Chief Analyst, Saddletree Research

Lots of people have commitment issues. So do a lot of companies. Take, for example, the larger vendors in the contact center industry. Look at the “Partners” tab on the website of companies like Avaya and Cisco and you’ll see a list of partner companies as long as your arm. Whether these large companies are trying to cover all their bases or whether they are compensating for single-partner anxiety, it has always been this way. That’s why I was so surprised to see that Avaya, with their recent announcement of the new Avaya Aura Contact Center, has settled down and made a commitment to a single WFO partner – Verint.

New product announcements are scary enough for lots of vendors, and new product announcements that represent a completely new product concept that will likely replace a customer’s trusted, if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it contact center solution can be absolutely terrifying. So, why not lessen customer and prospect apprehension by adding a proven, reliable, cost-effective and efficiency-boosting solution under the covers of the new system. That’s exactly what Avaya has done with the addition of Verint WFO under the hood of the Aura Contact Center.

Avaya could have gone with any number of WFO suppliers as its partner but the fact that it chose Verint is a testament to Impact 360’s standing in the contact center community. I don’t have any insider information, but I would bet that Verint was put through the ringer before Avaya made the commitment to Impact 360 and I understand that there was more than one dog in the fight.

If I were one of the marketing geniuses at Avaya I would definitely want to be able to point to the stability of a Verint product under the hood of my new product to ease customer’s fears about upgrading to an untested product. Although Aura Contact Center introduces several new concepts to potential users, it also offers the security of proven Verint WFO technology under the Avaya label.

Avaya has undergone many changes over the past few years and I’m not convinced that all the changes have been for the better, but in this case Avaya has made a wise choice. Not only has Avaya acknowledged the strategic importance of WFO in a customer service productivity strategy, it has chosen a partner that has proven over the years that it can deliver the goods.

Global Organizations Continue to Receive Tangible Return on Investment from Analytics Solutions

SpeechTEK 2010
New York Marriott Marquis, New York City
Booth #617

Verint^® Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) today announced that it has advanced its market standing in analyst firm Ovum’s Decision Matrix: Selecting a Speech Analytics Vendor research, published in July 2010.  Recipient of the firm’s highest-issued valuation-a “shortlist” rating-Verint^® Witness Actionable Solutions^® led in the areas of market impact and technical assessment with high scores in end-user sentiment.  Coupled with its strong position in the firm’s report, the company also has been named a “2010 Market Leader” award winner by Speech Technology magazine.    continue reading…

Leading companies around the world have recognized a dramatic impact to their bottom lines through the use of pre-employment talent assessment testing, according to a study involving 37 business outcome discoveries across multiple industries, including financial and business services, healthcare, retail, transportation, hospitality and telecommunications. These studies represent a wide range of industries and focus on a variety of job types including hourly, professional, managerial, sales and customer service. continue reading…

In today’s world of demanding customers, Kathy van de Laar writes, customer experience is more important than ever. The right customer experience takes five things into consideration.

Your Brand
Your brand is who you say you are. It’s imperative that the overall experience that your customers receive in customer contacts across all channels delivers on your brand’s promise. Customers need to feel your brand values in practice.

The first step is knowing what your brand values are. Then you can mobilize your organization to proactively translate them into your daily activities. The right customer experience delivers on your brand promise.
continue reading…