The 2015 Speech Industry Star Performers: Verint
Verint's Tech Listens for Sentiment and Security
Verint Systems continued to be a force in the speech technology industry and broadened its expansion into voice biometrics last year, following acquisitions of the fraud and identity authentications outfit Victrio in late 2013 and Kana Software in January 2014.
Verint made headway in arming organizations with more portable tools. In August of last year, it launched its mobile Workforce Optimization (WFO) app for handheld devices that run on Google Android and Apple iOS engines. With the app, employees can access Verint's Actionable Intelligence platform, which gives them on-demand access to WFO functions in the workplace and off site. The app also allows teams to keep an eye on trends and track important key performance indicators and scores.
In May, Verint gave its WFO solution a makeover to fortify organizations with sharper insights into customer engagement. "We've created a whole new speech analytics engine underneath the hood," says Daniel Ziv, vice president of Voice of the Customer Analytics at Verint. The updated app uses this engine, which the company spent the past three years retooling, said Kristyn Emenecker, global vice president of enterprise workforce optimization at Verint, to Speech Technology in May. Benefits of the redesign include improved transcription accuracy, higher processing speeds, and a reduction in hardware investment and maintenance.
A standout feature enabled by the new engine is speaker separation, which allows contact centers to better distinguish between the speech of customer and agent. Emenecker told Speech Technology that the function allows companies to get trends and patterns from 100 percent of calls, a vast improvement from the past, where contact centers "probably listened to just one percent of customer conversations, [and were] mainly listening for employee compliance." Verint's speaker separation is unique, she added, because with it calls don't have to be read by a mono or stereo audio feed.
Verint also introduced automated theme discovery, in which the solution listens for words as they're spoken in conjunction with other words and learns without human aid to uncover trends. It's more effective than manual search, Emenecker said in May, because it isn't biased in what it searches for. Ziv adds that it can reveal common sentiments around new products.
The improved WFO suite also incorporates Victrio's voice biometrics technology, enabling the solution to compare the voices of customers against voice prints Verint holds in its vaults. This allows agents to converse with callers while the system authenticates their identity and notifies agents when further security questions are no longer necessary.
A top priority for Verint has been to offer up its functions on one uniform interface to prevent agents from having fragmented experiences and logging in and out of separate programs. It's this holistic approach to enterprise software that gives the company its competitive edge. "We have competitors in each subset of our solution, but we don't have a competitor that has this broad end-to-end reach," Ziv says. In the coming year, the goal is to continue on the path to tying it all together.