By Daniel Ziv

Thank you to Ray LeBlanc for his help with this blog.

The last year has seen unprecedented change in the customer service industry.

• The significant increase in customer interaction volume and channel diversity. 50% of contact centres use 10 or more channels to interact with customers ¹
• The rapid changes of customer behaviours, demands and questions. 60% of global consumers say behaviour and preferences changed in 2020 ²
• The rise of customer expectations. Consumers state expertise, empathy and speed are the Top 3 most important qualities for service and support ³

Maintaining and increasing customer experience (CX) continues to be top of mind for senior executives.  A proprietary research study conducted by Verint found that 3 of the Top 5 business priorities for the next 12 months relate to customer engagement. Learn more: The Engagement Capacity Gap Study.

We are seeing a trend in organisations trying to leverage their customer interaction data, including both structured and unstructured insights, to uncover changes in consumer behaviour, sentiment, and demands for new products and services. Verint Interaction Insights powered by Speech, Text and Desktop Analytics provides advanced functionality that can automatically surface intelligence from millions of voice, text and desktop interactions, so you can take action quickly and drive organisational agility.

This next-generation analytics solution can help:

• Reveal the intelligence essential for pinpointing cost drivers, trends, and opportunities
• Identify strengths and weaknesses with processes and products
• Help you understand how your offerings are perceived by your customers.

Interaction Insights Helps Companies Pivot Quickly

The pandemic brought on many changes across industries. Some industries experienced unprecedented call volumes as customers responded to job loss or furloughs, reduced hours, and other financial strains. Thrivent Financial, a Fortune 500 not-for-profit financial services organisation servicing 2.3 million clients, sought to respond quickly to the dramatic shift in customer concerns and increase organisational agility. Verint Interaction Insights became a critical tool for the company to quickly understand escalating call volumes and call drivers while managing customer expectations around increased market volatility.

Thrivent created SWAT Teams to communicate and speed the company’s response to COVID-19 and market volatility updates. Leveraging insights from Interaction Insights, they provided daily metrics and listening insights to executive leadership team dashboards. Customer sentiment metrics in particular were highly desired by the executive team.

Within just four months, the company expanded Interaction Insights use across the organisation from 62 percent of four call centres to exceeding 80 percent for all seven of their call centres.

In addition to Covid-19 response, Thrivent used the insights to support their digital transformation journey. They created an “electronic forms” category to study and analyse the most common forms the financial professionals and clients called about. This category had the biggest impact on customer sentiment, and showed the most caller confusion and repeat callers, which were key performance indicators. 

Thrivent was able to prioritise the digitisation of forms based on call volumes and customer sentiment. The critical insights gained formed the business case for and underscored the value proposition of digital transformation while providing strategic guidance to maintain a customer-centric focus.

Interaction Insights Is Not Limited to the Front Office

Customer satisfaction and resolution may start with the initial customer interaction, but the transaction often continues through the enterprise to be completed. An enterprise view of customer interactions is becoming increasingly critical. In fact, Aberdeen Group found that errors and delays in the back-office are a top contributor to customer dissatisfaction. ⁴

Post initial contact behaviours may include additional interactions (call backs or additional information requests), but a lot of the activity occurs beyond the contact centre in supporting back-office operations. Here there is typically little interaction with the customer. Rather, most of the activity is processing work on the desktop. Desktop and Process Analytics captures valuable insights on employee activity and how work is processed, can help identify processing bottlenecks, non-compliant behaviour, and employee coaching needs. Combining Interaction Insights with Desktop and Process Analytics across the enterprise can help you understand the entire customer journey to help you improve speed, consistency, compliance.

Why Verint

Many Verint customers are turning to Interaction Insights to enable rapid strategy changes for meeting customer demands, increasing customer loyalty and reducing churn.

• Verint AI and analytics solutions achieved the highest overall vendor satisfaction rating and top customer satisfaction scores on 24 vendor satisfaction, product capability and product effectiveness criteria in DMG Consulting LLC’s 2021/2022 Interaction Analytics Product and Market Report. ⁵
• Opus Research named Verint’s artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics solutions the overall market leader in Conversational Intelligence out of a field of 11 vendors evaluated in its new Opus Research Conversational Intelligence Intelliview Report. ⁶
• Verint launched a new Marketplace with over 100 out-of-the-box speech and text categories and reports, including pandemic-related categories, customer and agent behaviour categories, and a new sentiment report that many customers are leveraging successfully.
• Verint’s unique text analytics solution was built specifically for analysing human-to-human conversations such as chat or email.
• Verint’s Interaction Insights includes a unified dashboard that combines both speech and text insights.
• Augmenting unstructured speech and text analytics data with desktop and process analytics data provides mission-critical metadata for deeper analysis and customer segmentation.

When paired with other Verint solutions, Interaction Insights can create even greater value.

Compliance Triggers: Add meta tags to interaction recordings and work item touch points for easy retrieval for quality reviews, analysis and audits.

Performance Management: Speech analytics categories as well as application data can help drive performance management KPIs, tracking items such as compliments and complaints per agent.

Unified Desktop: Verint’s unified call player combines the context of the conversation with the agent’s desktop activity and data inputs—a unique capability in the market!

Digital Transformation and Self Service:  Interaction Insights can automatically identify new customer interaction drivers, which can and should be automated with digital self-service applications. These insights not only identify new customer needs but also the specific words and phrases that should be used to improve the effectiveness of self-service across digital channels.  

Verint Engagement Data Management: The unique and rich data that Interaction Insights create, such as enriched transcripts, speech and text categories, and application insights are fed into our Engagement Data Hub and can be augmented with other data sources and exported into multiple third-party and partner applications. 

Conclusion

The rapidly changing environment and the growing Engagement Capacity Gap have increased the need for Interaction Insights across the enterprise. Verint is a pioneer and leader in AI-driven analytics with the largest global customer base and the most holistic and highest customer-rated analytics solution—powered by our cloud platform, Engagement Data Hub and Da Vinci AI Engine.⁷

Verint provides a comprehensive approach to Interaction Insights with diversity of data and workflows into customer engagement applications, driving faster and greater ROI compared with other solutions on the market.

Download the eBook: Strategy Guide: How to Adapt and Win in a New Era of CX

¹ CX Executive’s Agenda 2020, Aberdeen Group

² Perspectives on retail and consumer goods, Number 8, August 2020, McKinsey & Company

³ The most important customer service qualities in the next normal: Expertise, empathy, and speed, By Vala Afshar, zdnet.com, June 29, 2020

⁴ 2020 Customer Experience Survey Findings, Aberdeen Group

⁵ 2021/22 Interaction Analytics (IA) Product and Market Report, DMG Consulting LLC, June 2021

⁶ Conversational Intelligence Intelliview, Opus Research, August 2021

⁷ Verint achieved perfect scores in all 24 customer satisfaction categories for vendor satisfaction, product capabilities and product effectiveness in DMG Consulting LLC’s new 2021/2022 Interaction Analytics (IA) Product and Market Report, and represents the largest market share by number of customers in this report.