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Summary
When Verint Systems completed its acquisition of Witness Systems in May 2007, customers waited to see what the impact would be on their investments and how the company would market the combined products. Verint’s announcement in December of Impact 360 sets the course. It brings together the existing core products – for workforce management, quality monitoring and contact center analytics – of the two companies as well as those from other acquisitions and some functional upgrades. Ventana Research sees the combined product as an important step to reassure customers that their existing investments are being protected and to provide an upgrade path to new features that support efforts to focus more fully on the customers’ own customers.

Assessment
Ventana Research’s benchmark research on the use of technology to help companies interact with customers finds that multiple business units now handle the interactions and use multiple communication channels to do it. This makes interaction-handling an enterprise process rather than an activity confined to the call center. More aptly called the contact center, it retains an important role, but issues such as scheduling the availability of customer-service agents, monitoring the overall quality of how interactions are handled and producing reports and analysis about overall interaction-handling performance are now bigger, broader challenges.

Impact 360 is the first product to combine the strengths of these two organizations’ key products. It also adds components from acquisitions of Opus Solutions and AMAE Software and makes changes to core functionality; all these features are integrated in one environment with a common user interface. The core components of Impact 360 are multichannel quality monitoring, workforce management, e-learning, customer feedback management and enhanced analytics for data, speech and text. Each still can be purchased as a stand-alone product, but by buying them as a single integrated offering or adding components to an existing environment, companies can take advantage of the common user interface, smooth integration between the components and a single point of administration.

Each of these is important in the new “virtual” environment where interactions are handled by various business units throughout the enterprise. When more employees spend part of their time handling interactions, it is critical that technology tools are easy to use. Also, having a common user interface for different capabilities should make working and training easier. Integration of the modules conveys a similar benefit. Users working in one application can navigate easily to others or create transactions in one application that colleagues can take action on in another; for example, a supervisor can create an e-learning requirement that automatically will be placed in the designated individual’s work schedule. The single point of administration for all applications will mean less effort is required to set up and configure the product for various users, and also will simplify ongoing administrative tasks.

The major new component is feedback management, available through the software acquired from AMAE. It supports rapidly configuring surveys that solicit feedback from customers on their experiences at different points of interaction with the company. The resulting information can be used in place of more subjective assessments of customer satisfaction and thus can help companies understand the customer’s experience better. If a customer rates an interaction below a target score, the response can be flagged so a supervisor can drill down to identify the handling agent and if necessary schedule specific training to deal with the problem behavior – all from within the integrated applications.

Market Impact
Verint’s acquisition of Witness Systems is part of a trend in which a few key vendors have increased their presence in the contact center market by a combination of acquisitions and internal product development. Impact 360 joins a small group of products from vendors such as Envision, Interactive Intelligence and Nice Systems that integrate core applications to manage customer interaction-handling and improve the customer’s experience. Two features make Impact 360 stand out. First, using technology acquired from Opus, the product takes a data-driven approach to planning and decision-making. Its analysis of data, text and voice recordings provides a fuller picture of the customer and his or her interactions with the company, so that decisions are based more on facts and are more consistent across the different interaction points. Second, greater integration enables the product to support the full performance management cycle in which reports and analysis identify areas requiring change, which then can be tracked to ensure the desired new outcomes are achieved.

Not all companies feel comfortable depending on a suite of products from one vendor. Verint has addressed this issue by developing Impact 360 on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform, which allows companies to choose between buying components and integrating them into their existing architecture or going with the fully integrated suite. This flexibility, plus the added functionality and greater integration, should help Verint and its Witness Actionable Solution unit remain one of the leading vendors in the contact center market.

Recommendation
Verint is promoting Impact 360 as providing “analytics-driven workforce optimization.” It does provide this, but in fact does more. Ventana Research believes that handling customer interactions well requires more than workforce optimization; it requires changing an organization’s culture, processes, people and technology to make it more customer-focused, changing the goal from efficiency to effectiveness and basing all activities on factual information. Only by making these changes will a company improve the experience of its customers, raise its levels of customer satisfaction and ultimately compete better in ever more challenging markets. We advise companies setting out on this journey to evaluate whether Impact 360 can support them in these efforts.

Related Research Notes
True Measures of Customer Satisfaction
CustomerSat’s technology helps assess and monitor customer satisfaction (November 19, 2007)

Contact Centers Struggle for Customers’ Trust
U.K. Customer Contact Association forum reveals pressure to change (November 19, 2007)

Improving the Self-Service Customer Experience
Tealeaf delivers insight into customers’ use of the Web (September 17, 2007)