Preface
This paper profiles customer service analytics, an essential part of an enterprise strategy for delivering customer service in today’s volatile global market. The paper describes how the customer service analytics offerings from Verint® Witness® Actionable Solutions foster customer-centric business processes by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of enterprise customer service, driving down costs, and building a cycle of continuous performance improvement across the entire customer service value chain.
About Verint Witness Actionable Solutions
Verint® Witness® Actionable Solutions was formed as a result of the company’s successful combination with workforce optimization provider, Witness Systems. Verint Witness Actionable Solutions enables organizations to capture and analyze customer interactions, improve workforce performance and optimize service processes in contact center, branch and back-office operations. With the industry’s broadest portfolio of innovative solutions for customer service analytics, workforce optimization, quality monitoring/full-time recording, workforce management, eLearning, performance management, and customer surveys, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions helps companies uncover business trends, discover the root cause of employee and customer behavior, and power the right decisions to help ensure service excellence and achieve continuous performance improvement across every aspect of customer operations.
Verint. Powering Actionable Intelligence.®
Verint Systems Inc. is a leading global provider of analytic software-based solutions for enterprise optimization and security. Verint solutions help organizations make sense of the vast voice, video, and data available to them, transforming this information into actionable intelligence™ for better decisions and highly effective performance.
Since 1994, Verint has been committed to developing innovative solutions that help global organizations achieve their most important objectives. Today, organizations in over 100 countries use Verint solutions to enhance security, boost operational efficiency, and fuel profitability.
The Quest for Affordable, Superior Customer Service
For years, organizations have struggled to balance customer satisfaction with the requirement to increase revenue and minimize the cost of customer service.
Managing these conflicting goals is difficult, but is complicated even further by the many different enterprise functions and supporting processes involved in serving customers. These include the traditional customer touch points — the contact center and branch offices — as well as back-office operations.
Not surprisingly, each of these areas within the organization has its own systems, processes, and procedures for managing workflow and assessing effectiveness. These pose a variety of challenges: - Although management applications and workforce management, IVR, ACD, and CRM systems provide a staggering amount of statistical data about what is happening in the organization, they do not explain why — and unit-level managers may lack the time, tools, and expertise necessary to perform meaningful data analysis.
- Applications often cannot share information readily, and data may remain hidden or inaccessible. Moreover, since the applications typically are purchased, implemented, and administered independently, they usually require duplicate effort and expense to install and maintain, thereby reducing their return on investment.
- Different functional areas within the organization often lack standardized processes for sharing and correlating data with other areas. This problem becomes magnified as data and reports are disseminated to successively higher levels in the organization. Reporting periods and units of measurement may vary from one business unit to another. Each unit, branch, or contact center may report on a different set of metrics altogether, making it difficult for data to be rolled up into meaningful reports. This prevents organizations from receiving a holistic view of performance, making data analysis for enterprise decision making nearly impossible.
- Many — if not most — organizations have developed their customer service processes to fit around their internal systems and procedures, such as accounting, order fulfillment, and delivery. These systems and processes are convenient for the organization, but not necessarily for the customer. Unless organizations have a means of collecting, analyzing, sharing, and acting on statistically valid customer feedback, they run the risk of alienating customers without even realizing that a problem exists somewhere within their service delivery chain.
Collectively, these challenges pose a formidable barrier to strategic decision making and superior customer service. In fact, they tend to foster fragmented customer service. In a survey of 176 North American firms with revenues of $500 million or more, Forrester Research presented respondents with a list of potential issues. Seventy-three percent of firms selected “getting alignment across organizations” as a significant obstacle for improving the customer experience they deliver.
