Ryan Hollenbeck on Verint's Industry-First "5th-Generation" Enterprise Workforce Optimization Solution

12 May 2011
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New Voice of the Customer Analytics Platform

Ryan Hollenbeck, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, Verint Systems, joins UCStrategies' Jim Burton in this Executive Insights podcast to discuss Verint's recent unveiling of the latest version of its Impact 360® Workforce Optimization™ (WFO) software, the market's first "5th-Generation" enterprise WFO suite, and its new Voice of the Customer Analytics platform.

Verint's fifth-generation Impact 360 Workforce Optimization solution represents a strategic architectural release that sets new standards in the market for unified, enterprise WFO-including real-time enterprise collaboration, navigation and ease of use, total cost of ownership, simplified system administration, and depth of functionality. It also tightly integrates with the company's new Voice of the Customer Analytics platform, which combines all sources of customer interaction data into a single holistic platform for cross-channel analysis and individual customer tracking capabilities, to deliver a wider framework for customer experience management that enables organizations to use critical intelligence Real Time at the Right Time™ for faster, more informed decision making.

For additional information on these product announcements, please visit the links below.

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Also on UCStrategies.com about this announcement, read "Verint Launches "5th-Generation" WFO Solution and New "Voice of the Customer" Analytics Platform," News Analysis by Blair Pleasant.

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Executive Insights. This is Jim Burton and I am joined today by Ryan Hollenbeck, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Verint Systems. Ryan you've recently announced Verint's Fifth-Generation Enterprise Workforce Optimization Solution. Can you tell us a little more about it?

Ryan Hollenbeck: Sure, thanks Jim. The Fifth-Generation Workforce Optimization Solution, what we call Impact 360, really represents a strategic architectural release that really sets new standards for the market in terms of the unification of workforce optimization. We have talked about it for many years now in the market, as you know, and what this release really does is delivers on the promise of several things.

First, supporting the idea of more of a real time enterprise collaboration. Delivering on a more consistent navigation and ease-of-use, reducing the total cost of ownership-that's a really significant benefit I think, for customers to deploy the solution. Simplified system administration, whether that's the recorders across multiple locations worldwide, or a simple deployment with a single server, up to 250 seats for the first time ever in the marketplace you will be able to deploy all of workforce optimization, including speech analytics on a single server up to 250 seats. And then finally, it maintains the deep application functionality by extending with new enhancements across individual solutions like back office operations with workforce management and scheduling capabilities.

Jim Burton: Ryan, you've also announced that you've got a customer analytics platform coming out and this is what I find of particular interest - here in the last year I've been suggesting that there are three stages to unified communications, the first being user experience, the second being integrating into business processes, and the third one is the analytics. So it looks like you've jumped ahead of a lot of the competition and are leading the market in this area. So can you talk to us a little bit about that solution?

Ryan Hollenbeck: Yeah, thanks Jim. We think you're right, we like to think you're right, and if you relate this Voice of the Customer Analytics Platform to what we've already talked about with this industry-first Fifth-Generation Enterprise Workforce Optimization Solution, I think what's interesting is as organizations are looking for new ways of acquiring "voice of the customer" and related business insights and putting that intelligence, if you will that they get, into action, what they'll have with the Fifth-Generation Solution is the most mature WFO platform on the market and now a way to relate it to this challenge that they have of combining all sources of their customer interaction data into a single holistic platform that allows that cross-channel analysis that is so important in the market today. And what the platform includes is speech analytics, text analytics, customer feedback surveys, as well as the ability to integrate data from a whole host of other capabilities, like web analytics, social media channels, and other customer interaction points, all again into the single platform so that you will have the ability to correlate all of these different analytical components and understand better what is happening with the voice of the customer. And then again, I think importantly, relate that analytical data back to what you are doing within the workforce operationally.

Jim Burton: It sounds fascinating and certainly in line with my thinking of the market direction and what the leaders in this market will be doing in the future.

One of the things that I like to hear from vendors is, what got you to develop this product? What led you down this path? Because these are very innovative solutions, clearly one of them being Fifth Generation is a little bit different, but something that is going after the analytics portion of it. What drove you and gave you guidance to develop these two products?

Ryan Hollenbeck: That's a good question, Jim, and I think the short answer is customer feedback or customer input. We've I think, attempted over the years to develop solutions that meet specific market requirements and specific feedback from our customers. What we originally brought to the market back in the 2005 time frame is an initial core set of integration points between workforce management and quality monitoring, to form a workforce optimization capability. And you might think of that as sort of generation one. And then since then we have everything from retail branch banking capabilities, back office operations, desktop and process analytics, leading us all the way up to today in this Fifth-Generation Workforce Optimization capability, more of a collaborative workforce optimization, if you will, and what brought us to this point is the maturity of the workforce optimization market.

What we did is we went out and spoke to our customers about what they'd like to see in terms of more simplified navigation and ease-of-use, a much more simplified footprint for workforce optimization, which as we said earlier gets the WFO capability onto a single server or reduces the number of servers required for a large multi-national WFO deployment. In some of our controlled release sites, for example, we saw what maybe would have taken from one of the other solutions in the industry or even an earlier version of ours, as many as 120 plus servers all the way down to about forty. And you could see that reduced footprint and how that can really affect total cost of ownership for a workforce optimization solution.

What we asked our customers was, what types of titles are you starting to see? How is the workforce optimization role starting to take off within your organization? Because what was really just an idea or a concept back in 2005 is now very much a real deployment, much the way we saw the CRM industry mature and what we're seeing early days now with unified communications, as you said. So what we found with our customers was that there were some very administrative-type functions-they now have people within their organizations, like a WFO solutions architect, or a practice manager for their WFO team, or a workforce optimization analyst or technical specialist for workforce optimization.

But then we are starting to see more strategic roles come into to play as well, like Vice President of Workforce Optimization or Director of Workforce Optimization, and these more strategic roles were a sign to us that there's a career path and an ecosystem that is kind of forming around workforce optimization that hasn't existed before and then as a result, these administrators and these more strategic roles are looking for the greater functionality that we have tried to bring to market here with this Fifth-Generation WFO technology.

Jim Burton: Well I think that's fascinating. The idea that these organizations are changing and organizing to really take advantage of these new technologies is something that I am hearing on a fairly regular basis around unified communications, and it's interesting to see that it certainly works in your area, as well.

Ryan Hollenbeck: Thanks Jim. I think related to that, you mentioned earlier unified communications and your focus on analytics and again back to this idea of the customer experience or the voice of the customer, which oftentimes is gathered and analyzed through these analytical tools, we saw a similar phenomenon. There's this evolution of the customer experience title within our organization - our customers are beginning to have titles like Chief Customer Officer, as you would expect; Chief Experience Officer; Vice President of the Customer Experience; Senior Director of Customer Insights and Strategy; -we don't yet have a lot of the operational responsibilities, but this group of people is looking for a tool set that can help them perform their jobs and interestingly, they came to us and said, "Well we might have the customer solution deployed for IVR surveys from Verint, or we might have your recording and speech analytics solutions today, but how can we use these tools together and form more of a platform, (as we discussed earlier) and make that the tool set of the Customer Experience Officer?" And as we began to see more of these titles on the rise within our customer base, we've attempted to respond to that demand by creating a tool set that can make them more effective in their jobs and as a result, for their companies provide a better customer experience for their customers.

Jim Burton: Well you have hit on something that I find is common among all successful companies, you are listening to your customers and you are delivering them the solutions that they are looking for.

Ryan Hollenbeck: Well, I appreciate you saying that, Jim, and I think that that is one of the things that we have learned over the years, we sometimes get credit for being an innovator in the market and frankly a lot of that innovation is actually derived from our customers and I think that is clearly the case here with this new voice of the customer analytics platform that we have developed. We talked earlier about some of the different channels that will be able to come into this platform, but realistically, being able to get at the critical information that you need - we like to call it realtime at the right time. You don't want to overwhelm an agent in a call center, for example, with too many things all at once, but you do want to make the tools available to that agent and to the management team, not just within customer service, but into other functions like marketing and operations, where they've got the dashboard and the tool set that can correlate what consumers are saying about their organizations on the web, through email, and importantly, through those customer interactions that happen over the phone in the call center. And be able to study them and understand what they can do to drive business change as a result of that. And of course, in a very competitive environment that means being able to drive that change quickly and effectively.

Jim Burton: Ryan, what kind of things do people discover when they use your analytical tools?

Ryan Hollenbeck: Well that is a good question, Jim. It's interesting...if you think about the key performance indicators that we have in our performance management dashboards and adding in voice of the customer-like information, it really starts to point at some interesting processes that probably could use some attention. The solution itself has sophisticated text analytics capabilities that can mine customer interactions and the intelligence that is derived through feedback across multi-channel customer interactions, including email messages, web chats, blogs, review sites, social media, text-based channels. But you've also got these customer feedback surveys that apply short really context-sensitive surveys to capture the customer insights and perspectives on products and processes and other things in a very specific and targeted way in more of a realtime fashion that if you think about the speech analytics, the text analytics, and the customer feedback surveys combined, what you find is that there are all sorts of things that the end customer is looking for, for these organizations to change. The trouble is on average, really only about 35% of what is discovered through the voice of the customer analytics, if you will, speech, text, and feedback, can be fixed in the contact center. And so as a result, what we've also been asked to do, if you will, to build solutions to build from our customers, are things that can affect non-customer facing parts of an organization-backoffice operations, if you will. How can the solutions from Verint be deployed to support processes and produce what really are the tools that can provide, not just a better customer experience on the front line with the customer, but also these backend processes that really need some time spent optimizing. So things like in financial transactions: payments, billing, and accounting; in order processing, receipt preparation, data input, and fulfillment - things like customer accounts, like account creation and maintenance and even in case management in research, where typically you want to be able to find the resolution of issues related to transactions, orders, and billing. If you think about new ways that you can enhance the WFO and analytical tools that they deploy, in order to optimize these types of backend processes, you can find much better productivity improvement. You can reduce the variance between best and worst staff processes, for example, around accuracy and reduced rework. You can find that you can target training that just those who are needing it, when they need it. And I guess the bottom line is you can make more timely decisions in these backoffice processes, which end up affecting the customer experience overall.

Jim Burton: Well there is a lot of great information here and I know there is a lot more depth to the information than what we are able to cover today. So we will put some links into this article so that people can click on them and go find more information, as appropriate.

Ryan, thank you so much for your time today-very interesting, very exciting stuff, and I look forward to working with you in the future. I know that UCStrategies is planning on doing a few more articles around these particular subjects and we will, of course link them altogether so people can find them on our sites. So thank you again for your time today.

Ryan Hollenbeck: Thank you, Jim.

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