Verint has unveiled a CCaaS platform, which the vendor suggests will “transform” the contact center landscape.
Launching the platform at its hallmark Engage event, Verint also introduced a new concept: Open CCaaS, which inspired the CCaaS solution.
To understand this concept, consider the challenges companies often face with CCaaS platforms.
Most aspire to offer a single application that contact centers can use to effectively manage all their customer conversations.
Yet, according to Verint, most lack the openness to succeed.
For instance, a global business may use different vendors for various voice, digital, and social applications across various locations – which are impossible to bring into a central environment.
That is where Verint aims to stand out from the crowd. As Dan Bodner, Chairman and CEO, states:
In today’s fast-paced technology environment, brands adopt platforms that are open in all dimensions to future-proof their contact centers.
However, Verint did not only design a platform to harmonize various CCaaS solutions. The open theme spreads across the many technologies that touch the contact center.
Conversational AI is one such technology, which Bodner was keen to underline. He stated:
They need a platform that is designed to augment their human workforce with an effective team of specialized AI bots to deliver tangible business outcomes.
The platform also allows businesses to plug in various other data sources, including third-party CRM and HCM technologies – for instance – to augment the user experience.
An Open Platform That Follows a “Bring Your Own Telephony” Approach
Alongside its open ecosystem, Verint aims to enable greater flexibility for enterprises by encouraging a “bring your own telephony” strategy.
That goes against the grain in the CCaaS space. After all, many contact centers built their platforms on a telephony infrastructure.
Indeed, many of the first-generation cloud solutions were telephony-first and closed.
Now, that is changing. Yet, the CCaaS conversation still often starts by discussing telephony and interaction routing.
However, “bring your own telephony” aligns with more advanced cloud offerings, according to Keith Dawson, VP & Research Director at Ventana Research.
Writing in a blog for the research firm, Dawson said:
When the core routing system is de-emphasized, an organization is freer to weigh the merits of different business application platforms as the first priority.
Verint aims to spread that message to enterprises, which typically suffer from complex contact center environments.
In doing so, it’ll serve up its solution, aim to simplify the contact center architecture, and unify various data streams.
The Verint Engagement Data Hub, which sits at the core of its Open CCaaS solution, will support this objective. Yet, it is only one of the platform’s several eye-catching components.
Core Components of the CCaaS Platform
Perhaps the most eye-catching features of Verint’s Open CCaaS platform are its Engagement Data Hub and embedded Da Vinci AI.
First, the data hub captures and stores data from all contact center systems, including conversational, WFO, and customer experience data.
Naturally, that provides an excellent central information resource for agents to leverage. Yet, it also makes it easier to export data into corporate data lakes for further analysis.
Next, Verint has embedded its Verint Da Vinci AI helps to augment the contact center workforce. According to a press release:
These specialized bots are designed to perform unique customer engagement tasks such as containment, forecasting, compliance, agent coaching, and interaction wrap-up.
In addition, the vendor has combined its proprietary AI with LLMs to enhance its Da Vinci AI with new generative AI features. These include automated post-call processing and bot transfers.
With these capabilities, Verint hopes to meet the increasing demand for CCaaS platforms that support a greater sophistication of digital channels, self-service, journey analytics, AI, machine learning, and automation.
Unfortunately, according to the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS: “CCaaS vendors’ support for these capabilities often lacks the functional maturity to meet customers’ demands.”
As Verint enters the CCaaS market, it aims to make these concerns problems of the past.
An Elephant In the Room?
Some may view Verint’s move into CCaaS as a little risky, concerned that the vendor could irritate some of its traditional partners.
After all, its longstanding collaborators – which include Avaya, Genesys, and Five9 – may perceive Verint to be stepping on their toes.
Verint relies on these partnerships for much of its business, augmenting their contact center platforms with WFO, conversational AI, analytics, and more.
Now, the vendor could represent a threat to their businesses – which seemed to be the elephant in the room during the announcement.
In this sense, Verint must proceed with caution in positioning its platform – otherwise, these partners could strengthen their ties with its conventional rivals, such as Calabrio.
Perhaps this is why it is doubling down on the word “open”, highlighting how customers can use its CCaaS solution alongside others, almost as a central operating system.
Nonetheless, there are many notable benefits for moving into the space, which include building on its existing enterprise business and – perhaps – squeezing out other CCaaS players.
New Opportunities Arise for Verint
With its CCaaS platform, Verint unlocks the opportunity to build upon its existing business inside many enterprise contact centers.
Indeed, lots of the world’s biggest companies already use Verint in their service operations, including 85 of the Fortune 100 companies.
As such, there seems to be a significant financial incentive for the vendor to make the move, with analysts expecting many more enterprises to migrate from legacy systems this year.
Yet, perhaps most pertinently, the move represents a somewhat logical next step in the business’s evolution.
As more businesses switch to SaaS models, Verint will have to fight new competitors to preserve its traditional business.
Moreover, many service operations are trying to converge their contact center stack with the guidance of a central CCaaS player.
By becoming a central CCaaS player, Verint can expand its business and ride the wave of these trends instead of getting trapped beneath them.
In doing so, the vendor may avoid the mistake of other best-of-breed vendors that failed to recognize this transition and fell behind.
Zendesk is one possible example of this, which never made its long-rumored shift into CCaaS and has endured a tricky 18 months – culminating in a second round of layoffs.
Verint has not endured such struggles, posting steady earnings. Yet, the move seems a thoughtful one to sustain its long-term enterprise business.
And, with many other prominent enterprise players recently making the CCaaS shift – including Google, Salesforce, and Zoom – it is somewhat a sign of the times.
Stay tuned for more of the latest and greatest news from Verint Engage 2023.
