Last month Verint announced its acquisition of leading voice and mobility customer self-service software provider Contact Solutions. The acquisition extends Verint’s customer engagement optimization portfolio, and continues its strategic omnichannel customer engagement expertise by strengthening its self-service offerings to include voice-based and mobility self-service.
Loyalty360 caught up with Dave Capuano, Global Vice President, Integrated Marketing, Verint, to learn more about how this acquisition will impact its customer engagement portfolio.
What prompted this acquisition and how will it impact Verint’s customer engagement portfolio?
Capuano: As we continue to evolve our Customer Engagement Optimization strategy, Verint looked at Contact Solutions and saw many synergies between the two companies. We really like what Contact Solutions is doing because consumers are increasingly interested in using self-service channels. They like to have their needs met quickly and easily and without a lot of effort. For organizations, self-service is an appealing, cost-effective channel that allows customers to get what they need when it’s convenient for them—and Contact Solutions brings an innovative approach to making the IVR experience personalized with the help of advanced analytics. Its personalization engine really brings some new life to a channel that hasn’t seen much innovation. Contact Solutions is also making great progress in the area of fraud prevention with its adaptive personalization engine, which really complements what we’re doing in the voice biometric identity authentication and fraud protection space.
How does real-time, cloud-based contextual self-service work and how will this impact the customer experience?
Capuano: The rise of “digital-first” approaches to customer experience has opened the door for consumer engagement at any point in the customer journey. As customers continue to move across interaction channels, from wide variety of devices like smartphones, analytics is going to play a larger role in the customer engagement formula. Taking this into consideration, Verint continues to be focused on improving customer engagement through its suite of Customer Analytics, Engagement Management, and Workforce Optimization solutions. Our goal is to help customers put in place the infrastructure and analytics needed to help ensure that their customers achieve better outcomes with less effort.
Bring in Contact Solutions’ cloud-based software, and we believe it will help extend Verint’s solutions with best-of-breed, real-time contextual self-service through mobile channels and the traditional IVR. Its voice and mobile self-service solutions will complement Verint’s existing offerings—including community (Telligent) software, and the Verint solutions for web self-service and knowledge management. A great example is what Contact Solutions is doing with its adaptive personalization engine, tailoring the IVR experience by looking at over 200 data points within individual and across multiple calls.
If a caller most frequently selects “account balance” from a set of menu options, the personalization engine can detect this behavior and dynamically rearrange the menu so “account balance” is always the first option presented to that caller. This creates a better experience for customers, reducing time and effort, and decreasing interaction costs for the enterprise through higher automation rates and shorter calls.
It can also, for instance, speed up or slow down the pace of the call based on behavior. We think other areas of analytics will continue to be a big part of the broader customer engagement market, such as speech analytics, predictive analytics, and text analytics.
Why is understanding history such a key factor related to how customers rate their experiences?
Capuano: Having access to history gives you the ability to personalize the customer interaction. It also allows the customer to engage a business on their terms. Say you connect with a business through self-service from your house, but then have to jump into your car and run to the store. Technologies like Contact Solutions’ My:Time’s App2Agent functionality helps enable a seamless transition from self-service on your desktop, to assisted service within a mobile app, mobile web or web application. Its advanced, cross-channel messaging functionality enables customers to start a digital interaction on one device and continue it on another, allowing continuity and continued personalization of interactions.
This ability to start, stop and resume anytime on any device mirrors how consumers interact today. The software can also detect if a user has come or gone from a browser—so it knows and understands how you engage with a company. A closed web interaction generates a notification with a link so the customer can resume on another device. Again, all interaction information is retained: activity history, messages, attachments, notifications.
What will this acquisition allow Verint to do now that it couldn’t before?
Capuano: To extend Verint’s capability in digital self-service, the acquisition of Contact Solutions will help deliver solutions to companies that are engaging digitally-enabled consumer. Similar to Verint, its solutions help customers achieve better outcomes with less effort. For the consumer, it means meeting their expectations for fast, easy, consistent, contextual, and personalized experiences. For the business, it means engaged and satisfied customers, improved processes, and a highly productive and engaged workforce.
How would you characterize the current state of loyalty marketing, and what will impact its immediate future?
Capuano: I think the message consumers are sending businesses goes way beyond loyalty marketing. I read a quote from an article somewhere that said there is no customer experience without customer engagement. Businesses today and tomorrow are looking to put in the infrastructure needed to effectively connect customers and employees to provide easy ways to engage, get things done and hopefully meet or exceed customer expectations and improve the customer experience. Verint’s approach to Customer Engagement Optimization is true to our heritage centered on providing Actionable Intelligence. By engaging across multiple channels, there are huge amounts of structured and unstructured data that we think is going untapped or are trapped in siloes.
Our portfolio brings together three solution sets: Customer Analytics, Customer Engagement, and Workforce Optimization to gather data and operationalize insights that can equip every interaction channel in the enterprise with the knowledge, process, context, and guidance to deliver the best outcome for the customer and for the business. This functionality helps businesses deliver fast, easy, consistent, contextual, and personalized experiences that consumers are looking for, ultimately satisfying customers, improving processes, and creating a highly productive and engaged workforce.