Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

Recently Verint Witness Actionable Solutions announced the latest release of its Impact 360 Workforce Optimization software, which it calls the first “fifth-generation” product in this space. Verint has a comprehensive suite of applications that help companies get the best out of their agent workforce; it includes call recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, learning and coaching, customer feedback and analytics. I recently covered one of Verint advancements in multichannel interactions. Recently it enhanced the suite by adding several new analytics applications. It is marketing some of the applications to support activities not just in the contact center but in some back-office business units as well. Some of the suite has been developed in-house, some added by way of acquisitions and some gained through partnerships. This somewhat mottled history held the suite back in our evaluation in the recent Agent Performance Management Value Index 2010, where it lost out to suites that have been developed from inception as fully integrated, and architected to a common standard. Verint’s new release addresses this fundamental issue. The company describes it as a “strategic architectural” release that strengthens integration between the applications, making them easier to use, and making it easier to navigate between applications. The suite now provides a single point of administration and as well as numerous functional enhancements to meet the needs of a modern-day contact center. As part of the release Verint also announced the availability of Voice of the Customer Analytics. This platform brings together a variety of data sources and types of analytics to provide a comprehensive view of customers and customer-facing activities – something my research into customer analytics shows has become vitally important to companies. The suite includes analytics for structured data, speech, text, the Web, social media and other interaction sources. It also includes predictive and sentiment analysis capabilities so that companies can begin to predict future customer behaviors based on historic analysis. Voice of the Customer Analytics is linked into the rest of the suite, delivering to executives, managers and agents information they can use to improve customer-facing activities and back-office processes. In my experience not all companies like to buy a suite of applications from a single vendor, preferring niche products to address specific needs. The key advantages to buying a suite come through tight integration, a common user interface and ease of administration – but of course the components must deliver the required functionality. I never really trust marketing slogans like “first fifth-generation,” but from what I see this release contains the best aspects of buying a suite and delivers enhanced capabilities. I therefore expect in my next APM Value Index that this new release from Verint will climb the list of recommended products. Are you working to improve the performance of your agents? If so, which path are you going down – suite or niche? I’d love to know, so please come and let me know. Regards Richard Snow – VP & Research Director

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