The News: Verint’s November Analyst Days event was filled with updates on products, customer stories, and demos. Yes, we heard a lot about Open CCaaS and the benefits it provides as well as data unification and the insights and analytics leveraging the Verint Engagement Data Hub. Some of the most interesting time spent was on the company’s evolving bot story, including numbers on the potential cost and time savings the company’s bots can provide. You can read more on the Verint website.
Verint’s Bots Provide Time and Cost Savings
Analyst Take: Verint currently has 35 specialized bots with new bots being introduced every few weeks. According to CEO Dan Bodner, this team of bots was created with the customer journey in mind and to help support a hybrid workforce.
Each Verint bot is designed to do one thing and do it well. For a human, this might be a rough, boring mandate for a job, but it is where bots can shine. This theme was much repeated during the event and that messaging is important because many bots currently on the market, unlike Verint bots, are designed to do many things and not all of them well. The result can be poor customer experience (CX). For the company, it can result in more agent time spent on an interaction, and for the agent, it could be more time spent on mundane tasks. Verint says its bots are designed to help automate without disruption and augment the human workforce, coexisting with human agents to help increase capacity.
Humans and Bots Working Together = Time + Money Savings
One of the most interesting focus areas during the event were presentations on cost and time savings. On the cost front, Verint gets paid based on interactions handled by agent or on interactions handled by bot. In an example provided of a voice containment bot and its deployment cost versus an agent, the cost benefit was pretty clear. With the assumption of an agent costing $40k and handling 7,200 interactions per year, Verint pegged costs at:
- $5.50 cost of agent labor (per interaction)
- $0.06 cost of Verint software to empower agents (per interaction)
- $0.20 cost of Verint bot (per contained interaction)
Capacity gains were also estimated with an example of a 2,000-seat call center planning for a 20% increase in the number of interactions. If the center deployed a team of bots, Verint estimates a 20% increase in agent capacity.
Other potential times savings and benefits were also outlined, as the following table shows.
Clearing up time for agents to focus on higher level tasks has always been a compelling use case due to the potential savings in operational costs, but bots such as the Interaction Wrap-Up Bot can also support the agent experience by lessening the number of menial tasks they are expected to complete. There have certainly been a lot of other generative AI-related announcements in the contact center space focused on this type of use case.
However, in the team of bots Verint is building, there are many interesting ones that are more manager supporting. I found the ones that can tie into the Engagement Data Hub of particular interest as they can be the “deliverers” of that gold mine of information, taking in information from all the channels. The Data Insights Bot helps managers find anomalies and trends and includes 100% of the engagement data so that managers do not miss information that previously might not have been apparent. Information can be queried in natural language such as:
- What is the AHT actual versus forecasted this month?
- What is the service level versus forecasted service level by organization?
- How many email interactions happened last week?
- List the top five employees with interactions
The data can be displayed quickly via graphs or video response.
Verint has laid out an aggressive plan for bot development in terms of number and type offered, and the statistics shared are certainly encouraging. According to the company, interest has been high and in the third quarter (Q3) of the fiscal year, nine of Verint’s ten largest cloud orders included their bots. I am looking forward to seeing how the bot story evolves in 2024 and getting more customer-generated data points as adoption progresses.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Verint’s Team of Bots Gets Bigger
Verint: Consumer Expectations and Usage of Digital Channels Are Rising
CX Research from Cloudera, Verint, Talkdesk, Stanford, and Kore.ai
Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
