How Verint is translating data into actionable intelligence for its customers
“We help our customers capture large amount of information from numerous data types and use analytics to glean valuable insights from this information that enables us to optimize customer engagement, enhance security, and mitigate risk,” says Ady Meretz, president, Asia Pacific, Verint. The New York based company holds 70 percent market share in India and is used by eight out of ten top Indian BPOs.
By Ankush Kumar
Tell us about Verint’s contact centre business vis-a-vis in the world and in India? How is technology changing the industry?
Verint is a global leader in actionable intelligence solutions with a key focus on customer engagement optimization. Today, more than 10,000 organizations in approximately 180 countries—including over 80 percent of the Fortune 100 – count on intelligence from Verint solutions to make more informed, effective and timely decisions.
As customers are spoilt for choice they can change their service providers in few seconds due to a bad experience. Our actionable intelligence solutions help organizations address three important challenges – customer engagement optimization; security intelligence; and fraud, risk and compliance. We help our customers capture large amounts of information from numerous data types and sources, use analytics to glean insights from the information, and leverage the resulting actionable intelligence to help optimize customer engagement, enhance security, and mitigate risk.
One of the main ways that organisations can really differentiate is through the customer service experience. That’s where Verint can provide significant value by combining the information sourced through different channels with an organisation’s employees who engage with the customers. Verint is empowering the trifecta of customer experience – the enterprise, the employee and the customer through its analytics platform. Analytics led customer insights can be then matched with the scalability of the solutions. Feedback coming from a customer could be very well replicated for a second call as well; so the organisation can really optimise their solution basis the feedback rendered in real time.
Many customer engagement initiatives fail to achieve their full potential as there is disconnect between employees, their tasks at hand and customer intent. Verint’s customer experience platform helps organizations assess customer feedback and sentiment, translating the data into actionable intelligence.
Can you share any analytics led use cases?
Today Verint is leading in the analytics space. For example day-to-day transactional activities are done through the e-mail, web or the mobile app. For a more complicated issue the customer would move to the voice channel to escalate the issue. The value of the voice call is very important as it gives insights into process failures and problems within the organisation which it needs to respond. Verint’s speech analytics solution transcribes 100 percent of these calls. We analyse why people are calling, why the call was on hold and why are the agents taking time to respond.
If you ask a CEO why people are calling he will not be aware of the root cause of the repetitive calls. There is a tussle as enterprises are trying to reduce the amount of calls and improve their digital channels of service but they don’t know why with all the means to improve the digital channels of engagement people are still calling. Analytics is the key to understand the root cause of many problems. It could be a back-office problem or the number of calls could have peaked due to the website not working.
For example with data in hand, Firstsource – a provider of business process outsourcing services headquartered in Mumbai decided to dive deeper and apply analytics on all the data that was available, including those from recorded customer calls and textual interactions, including free-form survey comments.
This descriptive analytics exercise provided rich insight for understanding the key drivers of customer dissatisfaction. The insights identified various process improvements that led to a $400,000 reduction in unnecessary callbacks, another $400,000 improvement in self-service efficiency on its IVR and additional $300,000 saved by improving web self-service. This effort also had a significant positive impact on their Net Promoter Score ( NPS) score and customer satisfaction.
What is the company’s market share in various verticals in India? What are the diversions in the market?
In Indian market we have clearly marked our leadership as Verint platform is used by eight out of ten top Indian BPOs, four out of five top telcos of the country and two out of three leading private sector banks. We have more than 70 percent market share in India.
We are the biggest vendor for contact centre solutions in the APAC market. We offer speech analytics platform in every major country. For the biggest bank in India we offer speech analytics for dialects in 10 different languages including english, hindi and hinglish.
What is Verint’s business model ?
Verint works through both direct and service channels. Additionally, Verint has alliances with other large systems vendors such as Cisco. Some partners offer complementary products and some offer reseller services on delivery channels.
Could you elaborate on some of the innovative solutions of the company and its deployment ?
In India BPO is a huge market which is also supported by back office activities, so we also leverage on the back office optimization solutions through workforce optimization and desktop analytics. Verint’s back office optimization is also backed by robotic process automation and leveraging the CRM platform for work allocation management. Verint offers an end to end solution to manage back office operations and branch operations.
Our digital feedback management platform can be integrated with our enterprise feedback management tool to help organisations to embrace the transition to digital customer engagement and gain great insights through end customer feedback.
Verint’s text analytics extracts actionable business intelligence from the unstructured information contained within multichannel text-based documents and interactions like web chat, email, social media outlets including facebook and twitter, call center notes and survey comments.
With Verint text analytics, organizations can dramatically reduce the time and resources required to analyze text-based interactions. By deploying the solution in combination with Verint speech analytics, one can capture the complete voice of the customer and employee across different channels of interaction, interpret it in the context of business objectives, and then act to drive enhanced customer experiences, loyalty, and revenue.
The newly formed government in the US has the strategy to get jobs back to their own country. How will it affect the Indian BPOs as most of the business comes from the US?
Firstly, I think Indian BPOs are fairly secured as they sign up for long term contracts which run for atleast 5-7 years. Government strategies cannot immediately nullify business contracts.
Secondly India’s Business Process Management (BPM) industry has already embarked on a global journey. In terms of the nature of the work delivered by the Indian BPMs they have already escalated to a higher value chain. Indian BPMs are no longer a low cost arbitrage model in terms of only supporting the outsourced voice calls but we are very much in the space of consultive knowledge management as KPOs. Indian BPMs are managing captive organisations, their internal processes, claims and other crucial aspects of the businesses. That kind of field is a developed market in India. When Verint came to India about 17 years back it was a pure play voice processing in India but now Indian BPMs are the changemakers.
We also cannot deny the robust financial health of the Indian BPMs. Some of the largest Indian BPOs have acquired BPOs in the US, Philippines and other countries. So they are not an Indian entity only but a global one. When deals are signed they are not necessarily US to India but it can be from US to US with different development methodologies. India has done very well in the BPO market vis-à-vis other countries.
Also the kind of technical expertise that India’s IT and IT enabled services bring in are second to none. India’s educational system, the proficiency is unparalleled. India as a market is more globalized today which changes the whole perspective of being just a domestic company.
