Verint leads CX transformation of India’s Contact Centers, BPOs and Shared Service Centers
Verint is seeing significant growth in demand for its products. There are two important aspects of its enterprise solutions- Customer Experience (CX) and compliance. As larger enterprises are focusing on CX and defining it to grow and compete, Verint’s product portfolio, which is very much focused on CX, is also seeing a lot of demand for compliance and privacy of the customer.
With a team of 200 employees in the country, India remains one of the key markets for Verint in the APAC region. Aiming to double the team strength to 400 employees and clocking 4 times growth from last year, the company unveiled its new Bangalore facility earlier this year. Not just the hiring roadmap but from a larger perspective as well, India is integral to enhance Verint’s R&D and service capabilities globally.
Sarabjeet Kaur from BW CIOWORLD spoke with Ady Meretz, President Asia Pacific, Verint, who shared that the company is investing heavily in its R&D and also through mergers and acquisitions to extend its CX portfolio. Excerpts:
How is Verint modernizing CX for their customers?
We really bank upon our consultative capabilities and go beyond of being just a vendor. Investing in our team’s skills is a top priority for us, so that they seamlessly fit into our customers’ work environment. We combine our technical expertise with mentoring thought leaders within India’s and Asia’s contact centre industry. Equipped with powerful analytics and automation tools we can help drive CX agenda of the enterprises. We also ensure complete team support to drive change within our customers’ organisations. India is also an important hub for our managed services capabilities. We also support our customers by simplifying this process of change.
How is Verint digitally transforming India’s contact centers?
We work with the top 8/10 BPOs in India. While traditionally, the Indian landscape was focused on growth of the BPO market which is largely voice-led, the trend which we have come across in the last two years is the growth in domestic market as well. Like their global counterparts, the domestic players are also focused on driving CX. In past two-three years we have been able to extend our CX portfolio to the local banks, insurance players and telecom companies. We are getting demands from all the above key verticals to support them for voice to digital to an omni-channel solution under one customer platform. Verint offers many solutions on the digital side such as Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) which allows enterprises to interact with automated Chabot. Once the customer interacts with the bot they are also using Knowledge Management (KM) base which IVA is bundled with and can respond to customer queries.
Data is the key here. How the customer interaction is migrating from chatbots to voice is where Verint’s technology is clearly differentiating in the APAC region and in India as well.
How are you keeping a check on customer privacy and European General Data Protection (GDPR) compliance?
Amongst the many industries that the European GDPR mandate has impacted is India’s contact center industry catering to the European markets. The primary objective of the GDPR is to give citizens back the control of their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business. GDPR views the contact centers as data controllers and/or data processors of customer and employee personal data; and are obliged to implement technical and organizational measures that demonstrate how data protection is integrated into the business activities.
Taking this into consideration, just as our platform analyzes customer data, we also keep ensuring privacy of the customer. We strictly make sure that there is no compliance violation by agents or the organization. By leveraging our speech analytics, we transcribe every voice from speech to text. This feature is available in multiple languages and is enabled for 100 per cent of the calls. On the same piece of data, we extend our two-fold solution—we offer a compliance solution which gives real-time feedback for any compliance violation. Our automation tools can analyze millions of calls without any human intervention. Organizations can use the same data to drive CX.
What challenges have you faced and what measures have you taken to comply with GDPR?
The regulations are broad in scope—covering customers and employees, regulations around data breaches, data requests from individuals, when a firm can legally process data, and more. For contact centers, GDPR can be particularly challenging since the collection and processing of structured and unstructured data is critical to operations.
GDPR marks a radical change in how it approaches obtaining consent to collect and process consumers’ personal data. Instead of assuming that all customers are “opting in” by default, where the onus is on an individual to explicitly request that data isn’t collected or processed, GDPR switches to an “opting out” default, where the onus is on the firms to collect explicit permission from customers and employees to collect and process their data.
But consent is only one basis for processing data and you only need one. If you have another acceptable basis for processing data and Article 6 of the GDPR legislation outlines all six of them — then consent isn’t required. You must disclose what you’re doing with the data, even if consent isn’t required.
Contact centers have plenty of reasons for recording and processing data — from regulatory compliance, to improving the customer experience, to optimising operations. Those reasons don’t disappear with the enforcement of GDPR.
We have helped organisations adopt the GDPR Compliance Program:
Make data security a high priority
Have a data breach policy and procedure
Understand how the new rights of individuals affect internal and external stakeholders
Achieve a state of preparedness that allows the organization to produce a Data Protection Impact Assessment for each processing activities.
How is Verint using analytics to empower contact center agents?
Analytics is also the best tool to understand the customer behavior and feedback. The traditional way to collate customer feedback is through surveys. But surveys really depend on the customer’s choice to give the feedback. In the digital age, customer loyalty is really fickle. Speech analytics is a powerful feedback tool as it can drive near real time insights through a call, text conversation or e-mail. The Voice of Customer Analytics (VoCA) platform can combine feedback from speech analytics, text analytics, surveys and digital. Hence the agent is getting empowered with the right answers for the customers’ concerns. Verint technology can deliver all the data driven intelligence on the agent’s desktop. The dashboard includes key customer matrix like the customer Net Prompter Score (NPS), his history of interaction with the organization, the analytics and the next best action as recommended by Knowledge Management (KM). We can also integrate KM to our data analytics tool. So KM is not a stand-alone product it can be integrated to speech analytics, data analytics and to a chatbot. KM is a key differentiator for our CX solution.
Please elaborate about your RPA technology?
RPA, is part of our automation portfolio; which is a key offering for our back-office side. RPA helps in automating the back-office processes. While RPA as a standalone solution is also good, but it delivers better if integrated on a platform. Coupled with our data analytics tool which can analyze the changes and trends on the agent desktop. The Workforce Management tool can help manage human and non-human activities. The back-office tool is a combination of RPA and Desktop Process Analytics (DPA). We also offer automation on the voice channel through Automated Quality Monitoring (AQM). AQM can automate the entire quality management process by scoring up to 100 per cent of the recorded calls. AQM facilitates both-scoring, evaluation and agent coaching. Through AQM we can score and evaluate every agent in an automated way saving the efforts to hear and evaluate a few random calls. We can use the same tool to fulfill compliance mandates.
How do you forsee the future trends and what is the current scenario in the India market?
We see two major drivers in the India market-
The BPO market
The domestic market
Each one of them is slightly different from the CX strategy perspective. We see more and more BPOs building a new practice around implementing speech, text and social media analytics. However the domestic market is now getting more CX oriented. Traditionally domestic market was all about customer acquisition but now it’s becoming more and more competitive in terms of retaining and servicing their clients well. Some customers are focusing on voice and digital and some are integrating all channels. Both the markets have major potential for growth.
