Verint Systems specializes in big data and business intelligence solutions, helping organizations take a holistic approach to managing customer interactions.
Big data is gaining relevance in India as organizations try to establish their cross-channel customer interaction strategies to thrive in the age of social media and mobility. Verint’s Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite supports many of these activities, so it has become the focus area of Verint’s outreach efforts in India.
Verint also provides Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions to improve customer experience. Verint’s VoC solution portfolio includes Speech Analytics, Text Analytics, and Enterprise Feedback Management, unified under a single platform.
Daniel Ziv, vice president, Voice of the Customer Analytics, Verint Systems, recently shared his views to Infotech Lead on the growing relevance of big data and analytics in organizations. Our exchange follows:
What are your tips and solutions to enterprise CIOs to improve RoI from Big Data deployments?
· Focus on issues that have the highest priority for your enterprise. After a proven win, take on the next challenge. Set up clear goals and how these will be measured and pre-defining the potential and expected ROI. These should be initiatives that some teams are already focused on, there is willingness to take action and make changes and there can be a significant impact to the business.
· In addition to monitoring your top priorities, look for a solution that can also provide an early warning on issues you didn’t think of in advance. This is especially critical as part of a social media strategy. Many issues that end up on social media could be detected earlier on through internal interactions such as phone calls and emails.
· Find an executive sponsor – make sure that there’s somebody senior who will help drive the success of the project.
· Define a holistic customer strategy, incorporating all customer channels such as email, web chat and social media even in branch interactions. Survey and engage with your customers proactively across different channels.
What are the demands of your enterprise customers?
The demand for more Big Data and analytics solutions specifically around understanding customer needs fuels more innovation in the vendor community. The opportunity goes beyond technology into the realm of managed services and consulting capabilities to help organizations leverage these insights and capabilities effectively.
What are your new strategies in the big data segment?
Through Verint’s Voice of the Customer Analytics and Enterprise Workforce Optimization solution we:
- Help organizations optimize customer service and gain insight into customer interactions, sentiments, and trends across multiple communications channels and organizational areas
- Provide unprecedented visibility into enterprise performance, operations, and customer intelligence
- Include solutions tailored to the needs of large, medium, and small enterprises
- Provide functionality for marketing and customer care departments, contact centres, branch and remote offices, and back-office operations
The Impact 360 VoC analytics and workforce optimization solution:
- Includes the industry’s first 5th generation workforce optimization solution for contact centers, back office operations, and branch locations
- Provides unprecedented visibility into enterprise performance, operations, and customer intelligence
- Offers solutions tailored to the needs of large, medium, and small organizations
- Used by over 10,000 customers in over 150 counties including over 80% of fortune 100 companies.
What are the latest trends in Big Data?
Marketing departments are collaborating more often than ever with the contact center, mining phone conversations, email and other text interactions to gain early insight into the voice of their customers before they appear in the social sphere. In addition to the VoC insights, they also want to ensure that agents are trained and prepared to provide the desired brand experience, and be successful in cross- and up-selling products and services, and new campaign offers.
On my recent trip to India I found that many outsourcing firms are now deploying advanced voice of the customer analytics solutions to provide their clients with the visibility, feedback and customer insight associated with the customer interactions they handle. Innovative outsourcers are leveraging these capabilities as significant differentiators in the marketplace, increasing their allocation of “seats”, adding new customer channels and elevating their client relationships from a cost-driven vendor to a strategic partner. Leading outsourcers are also developing analytics expertise and achieving similar economies of scale with analytics technology as they do with human labor. Some outsourcers are already charging a premium for these services by contracting not just with the customer service departments, but also with the marketing departments that seek this new source of customer intelligence and feedback.
According to Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific Contact Center Applications Market 2012 report, the Indian multimedia applications market is expected to grow with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.3 percent from 2012 to 2019, the rapid growth in multi-media and multi-channel customer interactions provides a rich data pool to use BI analytics to mine for actionable insights.
Many executives are seeing Big Data and analytics as a fundamental capability and resource, especially as price differentiation based on labor arbitrage has leveled off and in some cases migrated to other countries like the Philippines.
While in the past BI and analytics may have been viewed as a “nice to have” option, they are now becoming staple technologies for many organizations especially business process optimization. The Indian market may experience a shift from organizations leveraging traditional BI—which has been focused mostly on the expansion of structured data—to using analytics technology that mines unstructured data including voice, video, images and text. Most of the growth in volume of data is unstructured, but more importantly, unstructured data when mined appropriately typically provides much richer insights and deeper explanations of customer behaviors, wishes and emerging needs.
Big Data is still very much a focus across global enterprises today, especially as interest in collecting internal, external, structured and unstructured data continues to grow. For many of these companies, however, the challenge will lie in how to effectively derive insights from this data and then take actions on these insights to achieve growth and competitive differentiation.
Rajani Baburajan
editor@infotechlead.com
