This excerpt is pulled from the article in the NACC In Queue Newsletter.  Click here for the full text.

On September 29th, Verint® Systems introduced the Impact 360® Text Analytics™ solution for their Customer Interaction Analytics™ portfolio (Whew. Writing all those trademark symbols wears me out). This new offering is the result of a partnership between Verint and Clarabridge, Inc., a text analytics company well-known in marketing circles.

This excerpt comes from an article on ITBusinessEdge.com.  Click here for the full article.
Originally posted on ITbusinessedge.com by Michael Vizard Sep 30, 2010 10:22:53 AM

One of the bigger challenges facing business managers today is the number of customer touch points they have to manage and monitor. Besides worry about what might be happening in, for example, a store or on the phone, there are now thousands of conversations taking place on social networks that can affect the business.

To address this issue, Verint Systems is adding speech and text analytics based on its own technology and technology from Clarabridge to its suite of tools for managing customer interactions across multiple channels.

According to Daniel Ziv, vice president of customer interaction analytics for Verint Systems, businesses scramble to get in front of a customer issue before it becomes a major problem. By including analytics in its offerings, IT organizations that use the Verint software can mine data collected from social networks, call centers and sales reports to identify potential issues.

Presented by: Verint^® Witness Actionable Solutions^® and CRMXchange

Presenter: Diego Lomanto, Principal, Solutions Marketing - Analytics, Verint

Date: Thursday, September 23 – 1 p.m. ET

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Getting ahead of your customers’ expectations, and even reactions to doing business with your organization, can present great challenges. Coupled with the breadth of multichannel service and communications media, it begs the question: “How well are you equipped to anticipate, analyze, and act on customers’ requirements and their experiences with your organization?”

Join this session to discover the power of Customer Interaction Analytics—solutions that include speech, data and text analytics, along with customer survey feedback—and how arming your business with an “early internal warning system” can advance your organization through a proactive, customer-centric approach to sales, service, and deeper customer relationships.

Learn how Customer Interaction Analytics can help your business:

·         Gain a better understanding of customers’ wants, needs, expectations, and your ability to deliver.

·         Develop an early warning system that mines customer interactions and feedback to surface emerging trends, and areas of opportunity and improvement.

·         Anticipate sources of customer frustration in order to take proactive, corrective action.

·         Improve business insight and decision making by combining intelligence from multiple sales/service channels—including phone, email, chat, web self-service, and social media—for a more complete view of your customers.

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The social media phenomenon is proving to be one of the most powerful forms of communication impacting brands. Customers are sharing thoughts on products and services, good and bad service experiences, and much more. This new social “word of mouth” is the number one decision factor of 20-50 percent of all customer decisions. Furthermore, social networking is most influential for first time buyers or when products are relatively expensive-the most important transactions for most organizations.

Facebook has more than 500 million global users, and Twitter has seen over 20 billion “tweets” of which 20 percent are estimated to be related to product and services requests. There is a shear mass of consumer-generated information that transpires and increasingly influences buying decisions. Marketing departments no longer own their corporate brands… the customers do!

This can pose a threat especially for organizations that have spent years building their brand. For a customer-centric enterprise, capturing and mining this new social voice of the customer is critical, yet separating the insights from the ‘noise” may be a daunting task. Once something goes social, it’s very hard to control.  See the full article here.

Most companies have the ability to estimate expenses associated with customer interactions. The formula is fairly straightforward. Take the cost of a live customer interaction — which is often measured by average handle time — and then multiply it by the “per minute” cost associated with having a live agent on the phone, including any additional relevant overhead. These same organizations, however, don’t always have an effective parallel process to measure the value created by the same customer interaction. 

This unbalanced management style focuses more on cost and less on value, causing contact center and enterprise strategies to look more heavily at cost reduction and less on increasing the actual value created. This alone can be an expensive mistake. A recent Forrester study looked at interactions across 12 industries, and in doing so discovered that quality customer experiences can generate as much as $311 million per year.   See the full article on MediaPost.