Verint Acquires Telligent - Adds Communities

Verint announced that it is acquiring Telligent, part of Zimbra, which provides "social applications and social services that enable organizations to create communities of interest for their customers." Verint will be bringing these capabilities into the company's customer engagement optimization portfolio.

A combined solution would bring together Telligent's Community Solution with Verint's Customer Engagement Optimization offerings. With this acquisition, Verint can now offer communities as part of its platform. Verint realized that communities are playing an increasing role in organizations both internally and externally for customer support. By adding Telligent's community solution to its customer engagement optimization offerings, Verint can help organizations "gain a holistic view of customer service effectiveness, and integrate social experiences on the web and support digital transformation initiatives." As customers turn to communities to enable more self service, this creates more social conversations that can become an important part of Voice of the Customer.

According to Verint, the combination will help companies improve their customer support with "digital first" self service, while improving the Voice of the Customer capabilities through collaborative feedback, allowing businesses to collect and analyze intelligence across more service channels.

In terms of customer support, Verint notes that, in addition to benefiting marketing and Voice of the Customer programs, the combination will help companies:

• Save money and customers' time with social self service through peer-to-peer support forums and online FAQs; 

  
  
• Deflect support calls by empowering customers to find solutions and solve problems with online resources, such as discussion forums, crowd-sourced knowledgebase articles, and how-to videos;
  
  
• Provide 24x7 social support anywhere in the world, with mobile communities; and 

  
  
• Increase revenue with social CRM to empower sales and marketing teams.

With its focus on providing actionable intelligence across customers' omnichannel experiences, Verint can now add employee and customer communities as a channel. As social media and communities become an increasingly important part of the customer experience, this is an important new area where Verint can add value to its customers. While Verint focuses on customer engagement rather than internal employee engagement, it will be interesting to see how and if the company leverages Telligent's internal employee communities and digital marketing capabilities, as this hasn't been an area of focus for the company.