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.