Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, a division within Verint Inc. which makes the popular Impact 360 workforce optimization suite, has raked up quite a few awards so far this year, including four from Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), as well as one each from the American Teleservices Association (ATA) and the European Confederation of Contact Centre Organisations. In addition the company earned finalist status in the “Eagle Star Gala Awards.”


Specifically, the company recently won a 2009 IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Award and a 2009 CRM Excellence Award from Customer Interaction Solutions magazine; a 2008 Product of the Year Award from Unified Communications magazine; and a 2008 Product of the Year Award from Communications Solutions.

Customer Interaction Solutions and Unified Communications magazines are both print and online publications, while Communications Solutions is a global online community, currently sponsored by PAETEC, found on TMC’s highly-trafficked Website, ContactCenterSolutions.com.

 

In addition the company won the American Teleservices Association (ATA)’s “Technology Innovator Award” and the European Confederation of Contact Centre Organisations (ECCCO) “Contact Center Leadership Award.”

The Customer Interaction Solutions IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Award recognizes the “best of the best” in IP contact center products and services, Verint won for its Impact 360 IP Recording solution, which was selected among many entries based onits “stand-out features, functions and capabilities.”
 

The Customer Interaction Solutions CRM Excellence Award is given “based on hard data, facts and figures demonstrating the improvements that each winner’s product has made in a customer’s business, as well as the solution’s ability to help extend and expand the customer relationship across the enterprise and full customer lifecycle.” Verint was recognized for its Impact 360 Quality Monitoring solution.

The Unified Communications Product of the Year Awards are given to companies that have introduced innovation and advancement to UC technologies over the past year.” This was the second year for the awards, as the magazine was launched in 2008. Winners were recognized for excellence in technological advancement and application refinements. Verint was named a winner for its Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite.

The Communications Solutions Product of the Year award recognizes innovative products that facilitate voice, data and video communications. The distinction was awarded to Verint for demonstrating vision, leadership and attention to detail with its Impact 360 workforce optimization solution.

In addition, attendees at this year’s ATA New York Metro Chapter Tech Forum selected Verint as the recipient of the ATA’s annual Technology Innovator Award. Verint’s Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite—which includes among other advancements new speech analytics functionality—was recognized for “innovation that has furthered the workforce optimization industry, along with helping set standards for integrated software and delivering real ROI to business operations.”

 

Verint also received a special Contact Center Leadership Award that was presented during the recent ECCCO annual awards ceremony in Manchester, England.  The award recognized the company for its ongoing commitment to the European contact center industry, and in particular, its support for ECCCO programs focused on best practices and continuous improvement within contact center operations.

 

The company also earned finalist status in the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce’s Eighth Annual Eagle Star Awards, which honor the people and companies that have contributed most to the Southeast-Israel business relationship. Verint was selected as a finalist for Company of the Year for its innovative solutions in contact center and enterprise workforce optimization and security, its leadership demonstrated by 400 patent registrations and applications, and continued momentum with major customers in the Southeast and worldwide.

 

“The recognition Verint and our workforce optimization solutions have received from industry and business associations, along with the media that cover our market, reinforces the innovation and business impact this type of technology delivers to organizations around the world,” said Nancy Treaster, senior vice president and general manager, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, in a release.

Verint Witness Actionable Solutions has reportedly seen steady growth and gained significant market share since it acquired Witness Systems in 2007 and integrated the two workforce optimization suites into one, all-encompassing WFO solution, dubbed Impact 360. The combined solution represents what the company calls “analytics-driven workforce optimization software,” with an emphasis on the word “analytics.” This tightly integrated suite of apps includes workforce management, performance management, call recording/monitoring, speech and data analytics, customer feedback and eLearning. Verint claims this suite of applications – which are available on a hosted or on-premises basis -- helps organizations “improve the entire customer service delivery network, from contact centers to branch stores and remote offices to back-office operations.”

Impact 360 is one of the only WFO suites on the market that combines speech and data analytics. Therefore it not only has the ability carry out speech analytics on recorded agent/customer interactions, it can carry out analytics on the data side too, and can combine the two sets of analytics to provide a fuller (360 degree) view of all contact center operations.

With Impact 360, organizations can uncover valuable, previously undiscovered information, gaining a new level of visibility into contact center and enterprise performance for faster, improved decision-making. With these new insights, they can streamline processes and ensure consistency in new ways for maximum customer service effectiveness. Organizations can also 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.

In May Verint Witness Actionable Solutions announced that it had further enhanced the speech analytics capabilities of Impact 360. Specifically it has added a new Automated Trend Analysis capability, designed to automatically reveal changes in customer behavior – in other words, the user no longer has to set parameters, or thresholds, in order to uncover changes in customer behavior, the system will now do that for you automatically. Using hundreds of thousands of term and phrase combinations, the new Complete Semantic Index automatically identifies significant changes in customer behavior, as expressed within recorded customer interactions. Such changes are proactively surfaced by the software’s Automated Trend Analysis, which identifies increases or decreases in terms and phrases used during customer/agent conversations. Delivered daily, trend reports can be tracked for up to 18 months.

The revamped solution also sports new guided search and context visualization capabilities. With the Complete Semantic Index, users do not need to know in advance what terms to search. Intuitive search engine-like, guided search capabilities—including contextual suggestions and search visualization functionality—help business users find relevant calls quickly to determine the underlying causes of rising call volumes, costs and customer dissatisfaction.

What’s more, the new speech analytics capabilities allow managers to use the content of captured customer interactions to route “contacts of interest” to users throughout the enterprise, such as quality supervisors, marketing managers and customer retention teams.
 

“We believe this is a technological breakthrough that has the potential to create a new wave of adoption for speech analytics, breaking down previous barriers to entry, such as set-up and configuration,” explains Nancy Treaster, senior vice president and general manager, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, in a release. “We know that the contact center holds a wealth of valuable business intelligence, and speech analytics is an automated, powerful solution that can help companies not only get to that information, but then determine what actions to take. Impact 360 Speech Analytics Essentials allows organizations with small and medium-sized centers to analyze captured conversations and rapidly benefit from valuable insight.”

“We’re excited to introduce this solution, as Verint is fulfilling a critical market need in enabling businesses with small and medium-sized centers to reap the same type of intelligence that their larger counterparts have used for years—all at an attractive price point, and at a time in our economy in which cost containment, retention and the customer experience are paramount,” Treaster added.