Verint Engage, chatbots

At the recently held Verint Engage 2024 conference in Orlando, FL, Verint’s big focus was on a plethora of new chatbots and AI features that business leaders could incorporate quickly and use with ease.

Over the past year Verint has continued researching what companies have a need for, especially in contact centers, as customer expectations level up, and work requirements of employees expand.

Daniel Ziv, VP of AI and analytics, GTM strategy at Verint, shared, “We started talking about engagement capacity gap. Customer expectations are constantly going up, so what we did last year is not enough, because they are expecting more. The number of channels and interactions are growing. Budgets are flat or declining or growing at a pace that doesn’t match the needs of customers. That has created this gap. The solution is in AI outcomes and CX automation – improving customer experience, while reducing costs. This is an enterprise initiative. We start and stem our data and solutions from the contact center, but our solutions expand across the enterprise, and the insights and change we drive through these AI outcomes affect far beyond contact centers to back office, web and mobile, digital and branches. We have solutions for all those.”

To that note, Verint announced significant additions to its contact center business analytics suite, including the introduction of powerful AI-driven tools aimed at enhancing operational efficiency and delivering faster insights. One key development was the Verint Data Hub, which consolidates behavioral data from all customer touchpoints across an enterprise.

The centralized repository is designed to serve as a valuable resource for getting actionable insights that can help not only contact centers, but the broader organization. The addition of AI, especially through the new Verint Genie Bot, promises to accelerate the time it takes for business analysts to interpret data, a process that can often take weeks. The Verint Genie Bot has been incorporated into the company’s Speech Analytics solution. This tool is designed to help business analysts by automating time-consuming data analysis tasks, speeding up the delivery of insights.

Traditionally, brands have faced challenges in hiring and training sufficient analysts, which has led to delays in addressing critical business questions. With Genie Bot, Verint says contact centers can expect faster answers to key questions about customer behavior, complaints and escalations, allowing teams to act faster and more strategically.

The conference also showcased the Verint Data Insight Bot, which allows business leaders to interact with data directly and receive instant responses. This feature is supposed to help executives and contact center leaders make informed decisions in real time, particularly around issues like customer churn and service escalations.

Ziv said these innovations can significantly reduce the time it takes to turn data into actionable outcomes, potentially saving organizations millions of dollars by shortening the time-to-insight from days to seconds.

With the theme of the show being the “magic” of technology, several company leaders representing fields including health care and financial sectors took to the stage to share use cases for the tech. Two of the companies presented were New York Life and Cardinal Health.

Continuing through the conference, Verint also introduced Agent Copilot Bots, which are designed to automate various agent tasks, allowing agents to handle twice as many calls. These AI-powered bots support agents by automating tasks like call summaries, knowledge searches and real-time coaching for next-best actions. The bots can significantly help by quickly getting call center employees trained and up to speed faster.

Also mentioned was the TimeFlex bot. Contact centers struggle with employee retention, largely due to the rigid hourly requirements that can make it difficult to achieve a healthy work life balance. To solve the problem, TimeFlex bot allows employees to make last minute schedule changes, in as small as 15 minute increments.

All in all, Verint introduced many new AI tools and bots that are designed to help businesses customize their technology solutions to address specific problems, and implement solutions immediately.

Brian Yang, senior director of product management at Verint says what differentiates their chatbot solutions from others is how they provide very individualized, niche bots that allow companies to focus on solving one problem at a time and see the ROI quickly.

He says, “The key to our success has really been actually focusing on something more narrow, with self-service in mind. It’s about achieving results for people, not trying to address everything we think people might ask. It’s been about focusing on specific things that add immediate value and starting from there. And with the last couple years, GenAI has really helped solidify that.”