Today, business leaders are adopting the next-gen technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud and Data to align with their organizational vision and goals. The deployment of these technologies helps organizations to enhance the customer experience to a greater extent. In addition, the organizations in India plans to further upgrade their IT infrastructure to support customer engagement in 2022. The adoption of tech-enabled solutions for elevating the customer experience has increased in various sectors such as BFSI, ecommerce and retail. Verint is one of the market players helping such organizations to leverage these technologies. In line with getting more insights on this scenario Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal spoke to Anil Chawla, Managing Director, Customer Engagement Solutions, Verint. Read below the excerpts:
Rajeev: How do you see the growth of Verint in Indian Market, especially in last few years during existing pandemic?
Anil: Our journey in India started over two decades back with a mixture of traditional ‘on-premise’ customers augmented with a rapidly growing cohort of clients that are investing in Verint’s cloud platform. With the sudden digital shift during the pandemic, our engagement was based on availing the right solutions for remote collaboration and empowering remote employees while ensuring business continuity and efficiency. Verint supported all its existing customers and their agents to work remotely without the requirement of any additional investment. This is a testimony of the agility, innovation, and flexibility of Verint’s strong solution portfolio in the India market.
As part of the COVID-19 rapid response effort, we utilised speech analytics and reached out to our customers who needed immediate and ongoing insights into COVID-19’s impact on their customers and employees. We created a Phonetic Boosting Pack “COVID-19 category” to support our customers, which was offered free to all the speech analytics customers. Additionally, existing language models were calibrated and customized to include new terminology related to this crisis, further supporting agents to talk to their customers empathetically.
Rajeev: How reliance on (A)rtificial intelligence, (B)lockchain, (C)loud and (D)ata can enhance customer engagement/customer experience?
Anil: With smartphones, internet penetration, social media changing the way people are engaged and influenced, it has become inevitable to enhance the digital platforms to upgrade customer engagement and increase brand loyalty. Strategic investment in solutions like (A)rtificial intelligence, (C)loud and (D)ata will be critical to elevate customer and employee engagement to a new level and help organizations with reduction in overtime spend, improved average call handling time and scheduling, and reduction in complaints.
Business Leaders in this space have always been early adopters of such technologies with clear understanding of how they align with their own organizational vision and goals. They are also the ones driving such initiatives aggressively with their organization to realize the value data analytics brings forward.
Rajeev: What are the major challenges for companies who are willing to enhance customer engagement experience?
Anil: When we look at customer engagement today, innumerable channels are getting evolved, the expectations from the consumers have increased manifold. As consumers shift to digital channels, brands are facing an increasing number of interactions and skyrocketing expectations and most businesses have a limited set of resources to engage with customers. This makes it difficult to build enduring customer relationships. Customer behaviours keep changing ever so often that organisations find it difficult to keep up. Another challenge is to use customer feedback in the best way to improve efficiency and break the silos within the organization. The biggest challenge for organizations is to engage with their customers and employees to capture, analyze, and act on their feedback in a closed-loop process across the entire organization.
Rajeev: Which industries/sectors in India are likely to invest the most on improving tech-enabled customer engagement?
Anil: Apart from the BPO industry which are leaders of advanced applications adoption, sectors like BFSI, ecommerce and retail sectors are expected to invest strategically on tech-enabled solutions to elevate the customer experience. We also see significant uptake from emerging industries like Edtech, Fintech and online food ordering and delivering platforms.
Rajeev: How is India growing in terms of customer engagement solutions market?
Anil: The India market has shown solid improvement over Wave 1, fueled by the right solution implementations and expansions in 2021, and strong anticipated investment in 2022 to address new challenges associated with the customer engagement. Indian CXOs have been continuously focusing on quality/performance solutions, knowledge management, and Experience Management to elevate the customers’ experience. Infact, Indian organizations also plan to increase staffing levels to support customer engagement in 2022, and are highly prepared to deal with remote workforce challenges in 2022.
Rajeev: How do you sell your solution in India? Please brief about your channel or partner network?
Anil: Verint engages through partners as well as directly with the customers. Verint has a wide array of partners comprising of Global Sis like TCS, Accenture, Tech M, HCL and Infosys to name a few, along with specialized domestic partners like BlackBox, Wipro and SimmCom.
Rajeev: What are your future plans in the India market? What is target by year 2022?
Anil: As part of our growth initiatives, Verint is committed to helping organizations transition their operations to cloud-based platforms that deliver cost efficiencies and differentiated experiences to customers and employees.
We continue to grow our revenue base and employee base in India as India continues to be the strategic growth region for Verint globally. To this effect, we have recently announced the availability of our best-in-class customer engagement cloud platform in India.