Verint Advances Voice of the Customer

Verint is an established vendor of contact center systems. Its portfolio of products includes digital customer engagement, knowledge management, agent desktop, workforce optimization (for which it was recently rated the top vendor in the Ventana Research 2016 Value Index), voice of the customer and multiple forms of analytics - including text. Verint has built its portfolio through internal developments and acquisitions, the latest of which is OpinionLab. This merger adds two significant capabilities to its already extensive voice of the customer capabilities, giving organizations the ability to measure customer feedback across all channels, including digital.

The first feature enables organizations to insert a “click to give feedback” button into their digital channels, such as the website or a mobile app. Using it customers can give feedback proactively as they encounter features on the digital channel; clicking on the button causes a comment card to pop up into which they can enter comments. These inputs are captured and analyzed in real time using Verint’s existing text analytics tool.

With the second capability the system can be programmed to take action based on customers’ comments. For example, based on the analysis,

• Further information can be extracted from a knowledge base to give the customer an immediate, contextual response.
• The system can generate a personalized response through the same or an alternate channel.
• It also can generate a customer service ticket to ensure the issue is followed up.
• Furthermore, it can be used as input to the agent assessment process so, for example, a task can be created to deliver specific agent coaching.

Overall this process effectively turns the usual customer feedback process upside down, moving from the organization soliciting feedback to the customer initiating it.

Our benchmark research into customer feedback management shows the importance of understanding issues customers have with the range of how their interactions are handled, as well as related issues. Although the most commonly cited benefit is improved customer satisfaction and loyalty (for 65%), feedback can be used to drive improvement in products and services (45%), focus training and coaching and improve back-office processes (37%). However, the research also highlights a major issue in that the majority of companies don’t have a consistent process for acting on feedback; in the worst case 4 percent don’t take any action.

Verint already offers several methods of ensuring that action is taken on feedback, and as it integrates OpinionLab into its portfolio, more are planned. There is an old expression familiar to computer users that says, “rubbish in, rubbish out”; applied to customer feedback I take this to mean that feedback collected and not used is pointless. I fail to see how organizations can have a plan to improve customer experience if they don’t understand the consequences of how they engage with customers in each and every channel. Verint enables organizations to collect feedback from any source and take action on it. So I recommend to any company that wants to develop an information-driven plan for customer experience management that it assess how Verint can help those efforts.

Regards,

Richard Snow

VP & Research Director Customer Engagement

Follow Me on Twitter  and Connect with me on LinkedIn.