“There is now wider acceptance of the value that analytics can bring to enterprises across different verticals,” says Anil Chawla, Managing Director, Verint Systems
Tell us about Verint Systems.
We are a listed company on Nasdaq. This year we are celebrating 20 years of global operations. In India, we have been present for almost a decade. We are a close to 5,000 employees; we have recently acquired KANA, a leader in CRM (customer relation management) space. Together, we have come up with a customer engagement optimisation solution. Our joint go to market has been appreciated by the market and since the acquisition in February 2014, our stocks have moved upwards by 40%.
What are your plans for expanding in India?
Every market goes through a maturity curve. In India the BPM, the erstwhile BPO industry has reached a certain level of maturity and research agencies are now putting India at par with Australia. When you look at most of the voice engagements, you realise that these are largely happening at the BPO where you service the customer. Over the last decade there have been huge investments and up scale in this segment, which started with pure play voice and is now witnessing a significant shift.
In India, it is perhaps 50% voice and 50% non-voice processes, which means that these BPOs have now increased the value added business, and they are capturing lot of insights also. The market has realised that they need to provide seamless experience across multiple channels. For instance, e-Commerce companies have to keep in mind, multi-channel, personalisation.
Is there a need for more personalised form of communication between businesses and consumers?
Currently, about 80% of processes are IVR based, but such systems lack personalisation and compel people to look at web or email for more personalisation. So, businesses like the e-tailers and banks are working on developing new models for serving their customers. But the companies usually have information stored in silos, and when a customer tries to contact the company using different channels, the context is lost. To avoid that we have an offering in the market called the Customer Engagement Optimisation (CEO), the difference here is not about interaction or experience, but engagement.
An engagement necessarily starts before a customer calls the company. With an effective engagement, the customer becomes more loyal, more willing to participate, not only in purchasing, but also on the feedback side of it, and today customer loyalty has become the key.
You talked about India market gaining IT maturity. What kind of shift you see in deployment patterns in the market?
There are certain trends that you always observe in a matured market. At the inception level, enterprises like to control everything from the operations and infrastructure point of view, but that would entail a certain cost and lead to higher TCO. The flexibility can also get restricted because so much of investment has already gone into it.
The organisations are looking at options like managed services and cloud services. All these initiatives bring the cost down and give greater flexibility to the enterprise. Today operational challenges are more difficult to handle than infrastructure issues, which can be taken care of with the help cloud and managed services. Many enterprises find it difficult to gain a regional perspective. But we have an answer to this problem. We have a language model available for ten local languages in India.
We can do analysis on those and provide emotion-based analysis, which never existed before. Today the options are abundant and customers demand instant gratification. To manage all these internally, enterprises are looking at solutions that offer a complete picture.
What kind of response are you seeing in various segments of Indian market?
Of the 10 cellular operators, 8 are on Verint. Of the top 5 banks, 4 are using our solution. Our share in the market is quite high in terms of spread. New market trends are evolving, and we have identified some of the key growth verticals. A lot of investment is happening in Telecom and BPO. The BPOs are offering new services like speech and text analytics, which we can optimise and analyse.
They also have text-based interactions through emails, webchats, and social media. The companies are trying to mine all this information, run analytics on it and provide to their end-customers a comprehensive compilation of trends and opportunities.