Elan Moriah, President, Verint Systems Inc.

By Nadji Tehrani, CEO, Technology Marketing Corp.

Elan Moriah NT: Please tell us about your company and type of business.

EM: Verint Systems is a global provider of actionable intelligence solutions for an optimized enterprise and safer world. As part of the company, Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions® is the market leader in workforce optimization (WFO) software and services. Our next-generation Impact 360® suite is comprised of unified, analytics-driven, enterprise-enabled solutions designed to help organizations large and small reduce costs and improve the customer experience. With Impact 360, companies can capture customer intelligence, uncover business trends, discover the root cause of employee and customer behavior, and power informed decisions to drive service excellence and continuous performance improvement across customer care operations.

Software and services from Verint Witness Actionable Solutions comprise the industry’s broadest portfolio of innovative solutions for workforce optimization, quality monitoring and call recording, speech and data analytics, workforce management, eLearning and coaching, performance management and customer feedback surveys. With Impact 360, organizations can capture and analyze customer interactions, maximize resources, improve workforce performance, prioritize staff development and optimize service processes enterprise-wide—from the customer-facing contact center, to branch and back-office operations departments that help shape the customer experience.

NT: What is the greatest challenge facing your company?

EM: The uncertain economy is a uniform challenge facing all businesses, sectors and markets. As we all know, these are not easy, or predictable, times. Even so, it’s important to be reminded that this downturn will not last forever—there will be an upturn following the current cycle from which stronger technology providers and businesses emerge.

All companies are challenged today to invest in solutions, processes and people that produce results, keep customers at the forefront and deliver a strong, tangible return on investment (ROI).

Workforce optimization software is one technology that continues to be a prioritized investment area among business and IT decision makers—one that industry analysts have singled out for its ability to help drive down costs, maximize resources, increase sales, heighten service quality and retain customers. WFO can deliver on the quantifiable results and ROI that so many businesses today mandate in their technology decision procurement processes, both in up and down economies. This represents a significant opportunity for our business and our market as a whole.

NT: What do you feel are practical solutions to those challenges?

EM: Today’s business climate is forcing organizations to scrutinize costs more closely. Couple that with a renewed focus on maximizing staffing resources, retaining customers and achieving measurable and tangible ROI on technology and other customer-facing investments.

Workforce optimization solutions have delivered proven results that support each of these areas in terms of staffing, service, quality, efficiency and productivity. From recording customer interactions for compliance, quality and training, to leveraging analytics that automatically categorize and analyze call content to reveal the root causes of customer perceptions, business outcomes, and call volume drivers, companies can learn not only what customers are calling about, but why—and in turn make appropriate adjustments. Taken further, WFO customer surveys can capture real-time data on products, processes, staff performance, and customer loyalty and satisfaction levels, giving organizations insight into the effectiveness of their people, products and processes.

Sales and service organizations can use their forecasting and scheduling tools to make sure the right staff, with right skills are in the right place at the right time both in the contact center, branch and remote offices and back office operations. This helps ensure customer needs are met, queue times stay low and additional resources can be deployed as needed.

With the advances in IP infrastructures and workforce management systems, contact centers can now align customers with domain experts that may reside outside the physical contact center to assist more technical and detailed requests. This is especially important when technical support skills, bilingual capabilities, or years of experience with a certain product line/offering are needed. Home agents also have become a reality. Some businesses that have embraced remote staff models cite access to a broader, previously untapped labor pool among the benefits.

Not all customer issues originate in the contact center as businesses across verticals can attest. WFO solutions that have long been successfully used in this environment are now being more widely deployed across the enterprise. Take branch offices for instance. Just as in the traditional contact center, bank branches are focused on shortening wait times, providing timely, high-caliber service, selling new services, addressing customer issues and building a consistent experience.

Back-office operations departments are also embracing WFO to improve the quality, accuracy and timeliness of such functions as order fulfillment, billing and claims processing. Errors and unaddressed issues in one area of the business can negatively impact others—causing call volume spikes, customer frustration and even attrition.

In addition to the features that comprise WFO, companies are increasingly demanding more unified technology solutions. We’ve found the same among our customers who are choosing to invest in a unified suite that features the robust functionality they want with the cost-saving and less-resource intensive technical aspects that are inherent. The result is companies can experience easier installation and implementation, and reduced learning curves and training expenses—which translate into lower cost of ownership and a faster return, not to mention solutions and services that draw on a structured upgrade path and single support organization. This is all in line with the mandate businesses have around working smart, maximizing resources, cutting costs and the drive toward productivity and efficiency.

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

EM: Customer Interaction Analytics
Knowing what customers think about your business is important—but knowing why is equally important, since it opens the door to processes, products, services—and even staffing—that may need closer examination and refinement. Often, customers provide the reasons for their frustration or satisfaction in their interactions with your company—interactions that are often recorded. Although many companies capture these conversations, they seldom use or aggregate them effectively. Speech analytics can provide that insight by converting conversations from unstructured audio data into data that is structured in an index that can be readily searched and analyzed. By automatically building an index of words exchanged with customers, companies can mine it for insights to find out why customers feel and act the way they do.

Coaching and Training
As the most customer-facing department in a company, the contact center, along with its supporting back-office departments, needs to strike the delicate balance between cost management and service delivery. Prioritizing the customer service “basics” become critical in times like these, making it more important than ever to prioritize staff development. By placing emphasis on the agent, branch and back-office employee, organizations can experience gains that range from better service delivery and greater sales closures, to higher retention rates.

Historically, many centers have done a poor job of creating environments rich with learning and training opportunities for agents. With so much to do and so little time, development can quickly fall toward the bottom of the list. This is especially important today given agents are doing more than ever—handling diverse and complex customer interactions, multi-tasking across multiple applications and systems, meeting up-sell and cross-sell targets, and adhering to what can be very rigorous and sometimes regulated processes.

As such, the need for regular, consistent training to brush up on skill gaps and master new procedures and best practices is on the rise. By placing more emphasis on training agents to handle calls effectively, companies can experience a direct connection between building professional, skilled staff and delivering high-caliber customer experiences. And when such development is part of a company’s workforce optimization strategy and solution set, it can become a natural automated process that’s prioritized and scheduled.

Enterprise WFO
In addition to maximizing resources and prioritizing staff training, uptake of WFO technology into other customer-affecting areas of the business—such as branch and back-office departments— represents great opportunities for organizations today.

Many companies underestimate the impact back-office operations and functions have—and how inefficiencies in any one department can ripple into others, resulting in call volume spikes into the customer-facing contact center, mounting customer frustration, and when extreme, churn. For instance, when companies identify the underlying motives for repeat visits or calls into their stores, branches and centers, they may find incorrect order fulfillment, processing delays and improper billing prompting customer calls. Unnecessary repeat calls or visits due to a lack of quality and process controls in the back office not only impacts the bottom line, but also can signal declines in customer satisfaction.

It’s been said that for every one customer-facing service representative, there are up to 10 back-office workers in customer-affecting roles. As such, in many organizations, this area represents a great opportunity for improvements in operational efficiencies and productivity.

NT: Tell us about adjacent markets your company is targeting.

EM: Security / Encryption
In response to the guidelines established by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions introduced new functionality to its quality monitoring and call recording solutions to help customers encrypt captured interactions in the contact center and throughout the enterprise. Because recordings can contain sensitive credit card details, they require protection through an added level of encryption and a secure storage environment, as well as options not to record certain credit card authentication data at all.

Public Safety
Verint’s Impact 360 for Public Safety solution, launched in 2008, has taken functionality that has already been proven in the contact center and introduced it to the public safety sector. Going beyond recording for compliance and liability, it brings together voice and screen recording, quality assurance, analytics, scorecards, call taker training and citizen surveys into a flexible, packaged offering. As the first solution of its kind in the public safety market, it introduces a host of WFO functionality to complex and rapidly-evolving 9-1-1 operations—and helps emergency dispatch and response operators achieve liability reduction, accuracy and immediacy, and efficient investigation analysis and reconstruction, and works in support of new, next-generation 9-1-1 standards.

Branch and Back-Office Operations
Regardless of environment, workforce optimization solutions are instrumental in helping ensure goals are aligned, performance is in-check, and employees are knowledgeable and up-to-speed on products/services, system use, process changes, new campaigns and more.

The contact center is one functional business group found in most organizations that is ahead of the curve in maximizing value, minimizing costs and keeping the customer experience at the forefront. Prevalent is the use of WFO strategies and solutions that have helped lay the foundation for operations, efficiency and productivity gains, and higher-caliber service delivered through better trained personnel.

Yet while branch and back-office operations face similar challenges, they differ structurally. There are multiple departments that work from disparate systems, each leveraging different metrics to gauge success. Few can view enterprise operations holistically, and even fewer have the capability to effectively manage resources across the various functions. The back office also tends to have multiple organizational structures, each with many processing requirements. Instead of average handle time and time in queue, they have processing deadlines, quotas and service level agreements to meet.

Fundamentally, back offices repetitively process large volumes of transactions involving both simple, routine tasks—and complex, multi-step, multi-touch processes. Personnel involved in the processing of work can include data entry clerks, auditors, account and case managers, and IT professionals. But regardless the function, the business objectives remain essentially the same—to process work as quickly and accurately as possible, at the lowest cost, meeting service delivery deadlines, and ensuring customer satisfaction. In branch and back-office environments, the impact of WFO can be significant—providing a systematic, data-driven process for aligning work volumes to resources, monitoring the effectiveness and productivity of employees, measuring performance, identifying skill gaps, and delivering coaching and training.

NT: What trends do you envision for the future of our industry?

EM: Following are some of the trends we anticipate will continue to shape the market.

Speech and Data Analytics Go Mainstream
Typically collected in the contact center, recorded customer interactions have been used for internal purposes, such as monitoring the quality of service provided by agents or ascertaining how quickly calls are answered. Now, enterprises are taking an external perspective and examining the captured interactions for customer complaints, issues, trends and more.

Breaking Enterprise Silos with VoIP
There’s more to VoIP than reduced costs for toll calls. By enabling voice and data to be routed seamlessly throughout the organization, VoIP can link contact centers with branch offices and back-office operations, enabling them to share information and applications, as well as staff and resources. In fact, the IP handset and network can bring different forms of communication together into a single interface. In industry terms, this is unified communications (UC), and it represents a radically different way of doing business. WFO can help make UC significantly more effective through scheduling and monitoring remote agents, as well as analyzing internal and external customer interactions.

NT: What is the significance of the following in the customer interaction industry?

EM: VoIP
One of the real values of IP is that it provides the opportunity for enterprises to think differently about their business strategy. Companies leveraging the flexibility of IP to expand their workforce composite, take workforce management to the next level, and schedule and deliver training at opportune times. In both up and down economies, IP is increasingly becoming an integral part of overall enterprise strategies.

Evolving “Agent” Composition
IP serves as one of the greatest enablers of the virtual contact center model, helping facilitate dynamic remote interactions by allowing access to a broad group of knowledge workers or experts who reside in different locations within an organization, and often outside the contact center itself. The most common method is the institution of the virtual agent. Even further, organizations are looking to leverage home agents for the “green” benefits among others.

Speech Technology
Speech analytics gives organizations the ability to tap into existing recorded customer interactions, gaining actionable intelligence for improving business performance. This customer and even competitive intelligence helps organizations look beyond simply tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), such as first-contact resolution, average talk time and number of contacts handled, to address the root causes that prompt customer contacts to begin with. Through functionality that shows what drives costs and customer satisfaction, and why it is happening, global companies can make more informed decisions.

NT: What is your company’s greatest core competency; how do you differentiate yourselves?

EM: Verint Witness Actionable Solutions is a recognized market innovator and market share leader. We are squarely focused on the enterprise WFO market. Our 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.

Impact 360 provides a combination of unified, analytics-driven WFO solutions, helping organizations enhance the customer experience by providing visibility into a company’s entire customer service lifecycle.

With solutions backed by industry-leading research and development investments, Verint surpassed its 400th patent and patent applications worldwide. Behind our market leadership is a history of innovation and market-firsts, backed by a robust patent portfolio that provides competitive advantages in the market, increasing barriers to entry for our competitors, and affording great advantages to our global customers.

Last, and most importantly, it’s our people and our customer centric culture that drives corporate success and product innovation. Verint Witness Actionable Solutions continues to place focus on the customer and build upon its heritage of developing solutions that address real market needs. This underscores our approach to partnering with our customers from pre-sales through implementation, consulting and support to help ensure their initial and ongoing success, and evolve with them as their business needs change and grow. It’s why organizations that rely on our solutions return as repeat customers, adding sites and solutions in extending their investments with Verint.

NT: Thank you for your time.

Elan Moriah, President, Verint Systems Inc.

By Nadji Tehrani, CEO, Technology Marketing Corp.

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