Verint's next generation Contact-Center-as-a-Service - three major changes

Verint is betting on a vision of next-generation Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) that focuses on bots to lower the cost of interactions, increase agent efficiency, and deliver better customer experiences.

At Verint’s Fall Analyst event, Verint CEO Dan Bodner pointed to customer experience (CX) automation as the means to resolve the resource constraints faced by customer service operations. Verint’s solution is a cloud-based bot strategy that can surround either an on-premise or cloud-based voice channel. Verint is calling its solution a next-generation CCaaS that is open for customers and partners, with a unified data hub at the core, and a team of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered specialized bots running across the contact center. 

Verint’s vision of the future of CX (Customer Experience)  breaks some of the traditional rules of the contact center, and the company will need to make the case for how its approach makes sense – and how Verint, its partners, and its customers need to change their thinking about CX and contact centers.

Change 1 - from telephony at the core to CX automation at the core

Just a few years ago, contact center meant call center, and almost always meant teams of agents sitting in rooms with hardwired telephony – but that definition shifted dramatically during the pandemic. The rush to move contact centers to the cloud during the pandemic was largely a telephony play. CCaaS-enabled service agents to work from anywhere and taking the burden of managing telephony off IT’s plate. However, as much as many CCaaS vendors advocated business transformation – not just a lift and shift – many contact center leaders didn’t take advantage of the cloud to drive greater levels of automation. They got the benefits of reduced cost and burden of managing telephony, but (Bodner argues) missed out on other cloud benefits.

In Verint’s view, the next-generation of CCaaS involves providing a contact center as a service, not telephony as a service, and telephony is just one application. Customers can keep their existing telephony, buy cloud telephony from Verint (delivered through partners), or use any new telephony from any vendor (including their choice of call routing). This makes sense from a contact center perspective: as more and more customer interactions move to digital channels (including self-service) and AI-supported automation, telephony is a simply an infrastructure component that should be treated as a commodity. 

Change 2 - from per-agent to consumption-based pricing 

Contact center and customer service solutions have been traditionally priced on a per agent basis. However, Verint is taking a bots-first approach, having developed more than 30 specialized bots that augment a specific role or task:

• Agent Bots increase agent capacity in areas such as voice and digital case wrap up, performance and sentiment coaching, virtual assistant, knowledge suggestion, and agent and self-service transfer.
• Enterprise Bots increase the capacity of other CX roles such as workload forecasting, knowledge creation, and compliance and CX scoring.

As the burden shifts from agents to bots, a per-agent pricing model doesn’t make sense for customers or for vendors, so both will have to shift the way they think about budgeting and paying for their CCaaS. Verint believes that per-interaction pricing will be predictable and justifiable for customers, but that will require customers to have a clear handle on not just the volume of interaction they handle per channel but also the cost per interaction – and not everyone’s there yet, particularly those that are still managing different channels separately. 

Change 3 - from agent management to bot management

Once again, as the volume of interactions shifts from agents to bots, and bots become able to complete more complex queries, a more sophisticated level of managing and understanding bot interactions and their quality will be required. With AI in the mix, real-time quality monitoring of bot responses will be necessary on an ongoing basis to quickly interrupt and remedy any bot missteps. In Verint’s world of specialized bots – with an team of bots deployed for very specific purposes – one customer interaction could require the orchestration and management of several different bots. This means that what used to be a simple question – can this customer or case be handled by the bot or not? – becomes far more complicated.

My take

For Verint, this approach reflects its core strengths in workforce management and optimization, except that it looks a little different when it’s bots – not primarily humans – as the workforce. The advantage is they don’t call in sick or need to be motivated. The disadvantage is they won’t necessarily be smart enough to flag an issue that shouldn’t be handled by a bot, meaning a lot more active monitoring and management will be needed.

The final big change – and the real sign that Verint and other CCaaS vendors and customers have moved to a truly cloud model – will be delivering ongoing innovation. Paying an ongoing subscription for CCaaS without taking advantage of new capabilities that deliver more value over time is like paying for multiple streaming subscriptions and watching only network television. Cloud CCaaS vendors’ big challenge is to get both partners and customers on board with a different pace of innovation and technology change to maximize ROI from CCaaS, whichever generation they call it.