With a tricky macro-economy and a converging tech stack the talk of the CX town in late 2022, “best-of-breed” vendors faced an uncertain start to 2023.
As perhaps the most prominent best-of-breed CX vendor - offering workforce engagement management (WEM), conversational AI, and voice of the customer (VoC) solutions – the top team at Verint may have felt hot under the collar.
However, revenues at Verint haven’t stuttered. Instead - following the launch of its Open CCaaS platform and specialized bot strategy – they have accelerated.
Indeed, Verint overachieved its financial year 2024 revenue forecast of $910MN and raised its fiscal year 2025 revenue outlook to $930MN.
Moreover, Verint’s stock is up 42 percent from six months ago, and it has already – in 2024 - announced several high-profile megadeals – including a $49MN healthcare win.
Now, with market tailwinds behind the vendor, Dan Bodner, CEO of Verint, believes that the business “is uniquely positioned to lead the emerging CX automation category.”
In doing so, he outlined three core accelerators during an earnings call:
- Verint has a large customer base across many industries and geographies, which consists of four million agents currently using the Verint platform and looking to add AI-powered bots.
- The customer data Verint has on the platform is critical for training the bots.
- The Verint Open CCaaS platform is designed to deliver AI business outcomes “better than any other vendor in our market”.
That first point is particularly noteworthy. After all, 12 months ago, many likely predicted that holding on to its large customer base would be Verint's chief objective. Now, it wants to build upon it.
Selling Outcomes, Not Tech: How Verint Flipped the Script
As 2023 beckoned, many enterprise tech vendors converged on the customer experience space, bringing their own WEM, conversational AI, and VoC solutions.
These promised to converge the CX stack, and Verint came under more pressure to demonstrate that its applications drive significantly higher value than those available within all-in-one CX platforms.
That seemed an almost existential battle. Yet, in its attempts to showcase superior value, Verint recognized an opportunity to stand out from the CX crowd: to lead with the impact on outcomes, not the tech. As Bodner says:
You're not buying Verint AI technologies. You are buying Verint AI business outcomes, and you should be able to measure the ROI.
That thought inspired the November 2023 launch of Verint's specialized bot strategy.
With this strategy, Verint has released 40 specialized bots, each augmenting a specific role, automating one function, and "automating without disruption".
In addition, each bot strives aims to drive targeted value. For instance, there is a "Wrap-up Bot" that summarizes customer interactions, a "Transfer Bot" that adds context to contact transfers and a "TimeFlex Bot" that increases agent schedule autonomy.
"Customers can choose the one that is most compelling for them at any given time, and they can expand," added Bodner.
Moreover, customers can buy those bots “at any given time” and enable them on the Verint Open CCaaS Platform – another solution that has also helped Verint flip the script.
Indeed, the CCaaS Platform rethinks contact center infrastructure beyond the SaaS revolution.
