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The Boardroom Report provides the CRM, customer interaction and call center industry’s view from the top, featuring in-depth interviews with leading executives regarding industry news, analysis, trends and the latest developments at their companies. As the industry’s leading publication since 1982, it is our responsibility to recognize leaders with the best minds in the industry and share their vision and wisdom with our valued readers. For this installment of The Boardroom Report, Technology Marketing Corp. founder/chairman/CEO Nadji Tehrani interviewed Verint Witness Actionable Solutions senior vice president and general manager Nancy Treaster.

Nadji Tehrani: Please tell us about your company and type of business.

Nancy Treaster: Verint Witness Actionable Solutions was formed in 2007 following Verint’s successful combination with workforce optimization provider Witness Systems. The company’s unified, analytics-driven, next-generation Impact 360 suite helps companies uncover business trends, discover the root cause of employee and customer behavior, and power the right decisions to help ensure service excellence and achieve continuous performance improvement across every aspect of customer care operations. With more than 11,000 global customers, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions software and services enable organizations to capture and analyze customer interactions, improve workforce performance and optimize service processes across contact center, branch and back-office operations.


Nadji Tehrani: In your opinion, what is the greatest need in our industry?

Nancy Treaster: There are several, but one significant need centers around the “voice of the customer.” Historically, capturing, communicating and analyzing the voice of the customer has proven challenging for organizations worldwide. The great divide between a company’s “inside-out” perspective of its service quality and customer satisfaction is often in direct contrast to the “outside-in” sales/service experiences customers have with the business. To attain more statistically valid and timely insight, many forward-thinking companies are moving beyond the traditional metrics that track internal successes. Leveraging applications such as speech analytics and customer feedback provides additional venues for collecting valuable information.
Speech analytics helps make sense out of the metrics being generated. We can categorize interactions based on specific challenges and objectives. We then identify the top reasons for calls within each category. The software reveals the “why” behind the “what” – providing a way for the contact center and enterprise to look closer at processes and determine the breakdown to improve operations.

Further, by collecting direct feedback following customer interactions, companies gain first-hand, actionable intelligence – more than two-thirds of all customer interactions are relevant for such feedback. While different communications channels, distributed service centers, and internal processes and systems across the enterprise capture fragments of the customer experience, they don’t provide a comprehensive picture. As a result, organizations can overlook critical information that affects repeat sales, customer loyalty and the bottom line. Implementing a customer feedback survey solution that can be integrated into existing contact center and back-office systems – allows organizations to capture and take action based on the voice of the customer – through real-time perspective on issues and drivers impacting sales, service and the customer experience.

Nadji Tehrani: Tell us about new developments in your company.

Nancy Treaster: In December 2007, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions announced the industry’s first end-to-end solution for analyzing customer service effectiveness and optimizing workforce performance – the new, next-generation Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite. Unified and analytics-driven, Impact 360 software and services break new ground for organizations striving to analyze and extract critical information from customer interactions to optimize performance, improve the overall effectiveness of customer service operations and enhance the customer experience.

Impact 360 is designed to help improve the entire customer service delivery network – from contact centers to branch stores and remote offices to back-office operations. It includes a multitude of new functionality across quality monitoring and call recording, speech and data analytics, workforce management, customer feedback, e-learning and performance management to help improve the customer experience across virtually every customer touch point across an organization.

Nadji Tehrani: What would be the impact of those developments on the bottom line?

Nancy Treaster: Organizations can deploy the next-generation Impact 360 to capture customer intelligence, optimize the customer experience, increase customer satisfaction, improve customer retention, achieve customer loyalty, seize revenue growth opportunities and reduce costs across multiple customer contact center channels and into remote office, branch and back-office operations.

The suite enables organizations to streamline processes and ensure consistency in new ways for maximum customer service effectiveness. Global businesses can deploy Impact 360 to detect unknown trends through enhanced, proactive, integrated speech analytics; better understand contact center growth trends through tighter links between strategic planning and tactical daily forecasting and scheduling functions, so users can combine their strategic forecasts with their tactical forecasts to increase forecast accuracy; and save time and reduce errors by automatically sending learning requests to schedulers and assigning learning automatically based on evaluation scores.

Further, global organizations or small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can leverage Impact 360 to help progress through the customer service continuum to extend business value. For example, our operational solutions are comprised of functionality to help reduce risk and optimize agent performance, and are designed to help organizations decrease average handle time, improve quality scores, drive down average speed to answer, manage occupancy and enhance service levels. More advanced solutions focus on further optimizing contact center performance and using analytics designed to increase first-call resolution, improve upselling and cross-selling, heighten contact center customer satisfaction, and rebalance work across all channels based on employee availability and skills. Additional analytical functionality is available for organizations that work to differentiate themselves through customer service and/or strive to create seamless customer service across the enterprise. These functions help companies perform root cause analysis, grow overall customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty.

Nadji Tehrani: What is your vision for the future of our industry?

Nancy Treaster: There are several trends we have seen over the past year – some that are taking greater shape even as we enter 2008, and others have been on the rise over time. First and foremost, what we are seeing in terms of the contact center industry – and all industries, for that matter – is the consolidation of technologies. Businesses are interested in investing in solutions and systems that unify and integrate capabilities – operating on one platform, with single logon, common user interface and a single source that draws from a structured upgrade path and one support organization. Many are also looking to those that reach further into the enterprise to better align the internal customer service delivery network.

Industry experts are concluding that the customer service industry is maturing and that companies are demanding more integrated and robust software and services. Now, more than ever, analytics-driven workforce optimization is a focal point of successful contact centers, as well as thriving enterprises. As a result, capturing the customer experience and analyzing its effectiveness, as well as managing forecasting and scheduling, is critical. Other drivers and trends shaping the market include speech analytics as a key technology in the contact center and enterprise, IP telephony fueling change among customer organizations, extending technologies and solutions that have proven effective in the contact center to branch and remote offices as well as back-office operations, enterprise collaboration and sharing customer intelligence, and capturing customer feedback and making it actionable.

Nadji Tehrani: What is the significance of the following in the customer interaction industry – VOIP, speech technology and home agents?

Nancy Treaster: In terms of VoIP, one of the real values of IP is that it provides the opportunity for enterprises to think differently about their business strategy. Companies are starting to leverage the flexibility of IP recording to increase workforce productivity, impact training, support dispute resolution and improve service quality. As companies continue to focus on topics such as profitability, regulatory/compliance requirements, workforce/staffing and a renewed commitment to the customer experience, IP will become an integral part of the overall enterprise strategy.

Speech analytics can help find specific calls of interest that can impact quality monitoring, training and coaching. A speech analytics solution that is fully integrated into a quality monitoring and call recording platform will help streamline existing workflow, reduce total cost of ownership and increase ROI. Also verify compatibility – make sure that the speech analytics solution being considered is fully compatible and can be supported in current and future technical environments.
As for home agents, IP recording offers organizations new functionality and supports processes that were previously unavailable in the more traditional or earlier systems. According to a research study conducted by the Yankee Group, companies are implementing IP recording to effectively and efficiently place and manage remote agents. The “agent anywhere” strategy is gaining more attention among customer service organizations as it provides contact centers with new flexibility in managing their operations.

Nadji Tehrani: What is your company’s greatest core competency?

Nancy Treaster: Workforce optimization is our core competency. The new, next-generation Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite is comprised of proven, robust software and services for enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), as well as the public safety sector. The solution provides a combination of analytics-driven workforce optimization solutions such as: software and services for quality monitoring and call recording, workforce management, speech and data analytics, e-learning, performance management and customer feedback surveys.

Impact 360 helps enable more efficient operations, creating more loyal customers and driving more profitable business outcomes. Our solutions help organizations enhance the customer experience by providing visibility into a company’s entire customer service lifecycle – from planning and establishing goals, to scheduling and deploying the appropriate staff; from recording interactions and measuring performance, to meeting compliance requirements; from capturing structured and unstructured data, to turning information into sophisticated, actionable analytics that reveal trends, issues and their root causes; from changing business processes and goals based on this analysis, to honing employee skills to meet those goals; and then leveraging feedback surveys to capture and gauge the voice of the customer.

Nadji Tehrani: How do you differentiate your company?

Nancy Treaster: Via our solutions, as previously mentioned, our customers’ success, our market leadership and ongoing investment. In terms of our customers’ success, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions and the Impact 360 suite are focused on driving more profitable business outcomes based on a unified view of the customer, from the contact center to the C-suite, and from the back office to the branch office. Our solutions are designed to support the drive that customers should be at the heart of all programs. This underscores the company’s approach to partnering with our customers from pre-sales though implementation, consulting and support to help ensure their initial and ongoing success, protect their investments, and evolve with them as their business needs change and grow. It’s why organizations that rely on our solutions return as repeat customers, extending their investment.
Nadji Tehrani: Thank you for your time.

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