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May 29, 2019
During the week of May 20th, Social Edge attended and sponsored the Verint Engage19 Conference in Orlando, Florida. Verint owns the Telligent community software platform. Telligent is a community platform that Social Edge began to partner with in 2017 as a solution for our community customers. Gary Lungarini, Social Edge social business strategist, and I were joined by some of our long-time clients that have migrated to (or are considering migrating) to the Verint Community platform (Telligent). What I enjoyed most about the conference was the innovation Verint's other software platforms bring to the table to enhance the user experience for our community customers.
Verint (NASDAQ: VRNT) is a 1.1 billion annual revenue software company with a focus on the customer experience. They have dozens of software products across the categories workforce engagement, self-service, voice of the customer, and fraud and compliance. For our community customers, it is their Intelligent Self-Service (ISS) organization within the self-service category that offers complementary products and services to community owners. They acquired Telligent’s community software platform in 2015.
Communities have long created knowledge hubs for their users. However, community products are not purposely built for this. KM platforms have been around for some time and Verint has their own KM solution. Seeing how KM is traditionally implemented with a robust platform designed for that purpose is inspiring community products such as Telligent to bake into the core product some of those features. Essentially merging the offerings into one. Today, they are separate products that can be brought together with an out of the box Verint connector. As the industry continues to mature I can see how these will two platform types will continue to converge into the community solution. Our customers have been asking for that for a number of years.
Verint is making incredible progress with Intelligent Virtual Assistant created as a result of the NextIT acquisition in 2017. Beyond Bots, Chatbots, and Virtual Assistant, Intelligent Virtual Assistants create an interactive, conversational experience using natural language to understand your users’ intents and provide guided assistance to help navigate your organization's content. Looking at IVA through a community lens, it is easy to see how your company understands how it is organized, however users (customers and employees) often do not fully recognize how the information is stored and logged. With IVA, you have the opportunity to interject into the search process with critical questions to guide the user to the information they need. Check out the US Army Recruiting Sgt Star and Dell's ask Ava for two successful and long-running examples of this technology.
IVA is also moving beyond just keyed input/output and into voice recognition with popular devices such as Alexa, Google, Siri and Cortana. Consumer products are further along but the Verint team shared that they are starting to see interest emerge from their B2B customers. This trend is something our clients should look to consider in the future to stay in front of the customer’s expectations.
Verint has a full suite of contact center and voice of the customer technologies. What surprised me is how many service center professionals that we met at the conference were not familiar with the benefits of leveraging a community as a call deflection/self-service channel. Partnering with our community clients, we have implemented integrations with leading case management and knowledge systems such as Salesforce.com and Zendesk. This allows users to search/post in the community for an answer. If they cannot find what they need they can escalate that to a case properly managed by the contact center. With our integration, the contact center rep can work within their case management tool to respond and resolve the ticket.
In addition to the case management connectors, Social Edge has some additional product innovation on the Telligent platform. We have released eight new verint products to enhance the platforms this week.
There was a lot to absorb at the Verint Engage 2019 conference this year. I think for our community clients we can see a future where many of these technologies become part of the omnichannel service model for users with the community being a focal point. I also can see how this functionality can benefit employee-based communities as well. Regardless of your internal or external community focus, the future is bright with innovations and convergence to create better business outcomes for your customers. We are excited to partner with Verint and Telligent and look forward to what’s next in the evolution of Telligent as Verint’s Community platform.
