According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a pipe dream is an illusory or fantastic hope or plan. Dictionary.com also defines a pipe dream as any fantastic notion or hope. I believe today’s enterprise would define a pipe dream as the ability to bring together customer interaction data from various silos throughout the organisation into a single hub, normalise the data and make it available in a usable form to the various organisational functions and departments.  

The strategic value of such an ability to the enterprise would be game-changing. 

Today’s collaborative environment within the organisation and competitive external market environment between organisations dictate the need for comprehensive customer intelligence.  Unfortunately for most organisations, silos of unstructured data are the norm. The contact centre, for example, is rich with customer intelligence but even the application of analytics does not make this data usable throughout the enterprise. 

Likewise, other departments within the organisation have their own means of gathering customer and business intelligence, typically thought of to be specific to their departmental needs. That is not to say, however, that this information wouldn’t be useful to other departments and users within the organisation.  

So, what we have are vast reservoirs of useful information stored in individual silos that don’t cooperate or talk to each other in any comprehensive, useful manner. 

The challenge with getting these silos of information to talk to each other has been the massive and often cost-prohibitive IT undertaking that would be required to make this pipe dream of the single hub of business intelligence a reality. The time and talent required to bring together the typically complex web of customer touchpoints and interactions within the enterprise has been enough to scare off even the most grizzled customer experience and corporate management veterans. 

Fortunately, the New Year brings with it a new approach to bringing together all enterprise interaction data sources, enriching that data, and making it available to the entire organisation.  That approach comes in the form of Verint’s recently announced Engagement Data Management (EDM) solution. EDM is now available as a part of Verint’s Open Cloud Platform. 

The Verint Customer Engagement Platform is uniquely designed to scale from small to large enterprises across many industries and use cases. It draws on the latest advancements in AI to connect work, data and experiences so brands can meet ever-increasing, ever-shifting demands and build enduring customer relationships. 

Verint has done the heavy lifting in terms of bringing together the various silos of enterprise information via EDM’s unique, innovative data hub that does the work for the user. EDM collects data from various sources within the enterprise, normalises the data so it can be retrieved and consistently analysed by all departments, and used in software that may be specific to each individual department. The greatest value comes in the fact that the wide variety of daily enterprise customer interactions become customer insights and common data, equally available to, and usable by, all departments. 

Verint EDM is delivered as a cloud service and is therefore platform-agnostic. This in and of itself is an impressive benefit of this undertaking, but it also means that Verint EDM is one of the most democratised solutions in the industry. Because pricing is usage-based, Verint EDM is cost-effective at any scale and within the reach of enterprises of all sizes. 

As stated at the beginning of this blog, Verint EDM stands to become a game-changer in terms of the way the post-pandemic enterprise views collaboration and information sharing. Tapping into the preferences of new generation Millennial and Gen Z managers, including their preference for working together toward a common goal, Verint EDM has the potential to redefine the strategic value of enterprise customer intelligence—and to create a new way of thinking about organisational collaborative cooperation today and in the future.