The evolution of analytics and call recording.

The Boardroom Report provides the CRM, customer interaction and call center industry's view from the top, featuring the sector's first indepth, exclusive CEO-to-CEO interviews with leading executives regarding industry news, analysis, trends and the latest developments at their companies. As the industry's leading publication since 1982, it is our responsibility to recognize leaders with the best minds in the industry and share their vision and wisdom with our valued readers. Technology Marketing Corp. founder/chairman/CEO Nadji Tehrani interviewed Verint Systems' President, CEO and Director Dan Bodner for this installment of The Boardroom Report. More information about Verint Systems may be found at www.verint.com.

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NT: Please tell us about your company and type of business.

DB: Verint Systems is the leading provider of analytic software-based solutions for the security and enterprise markets. Verint solutions help enterprises capture massive amounts of structured and unstructured information, such as voice, video and text, and distill this information into actionable intelligence--timely, mission-critical insights for more effective decisions and optimal outcomes.

What does actionable intelligence mean to Verint? Actionable intelligence is mission-critical information that you can readily understand and use to improve business performance--timely information that you can act upon for better business outcomes.

In the security market, intelligence and law enforcement organizations use Verint to analyze and distill the huge amounts of information available to them and generate actionable intelligence to better protect lives and assets.

Enterprises use Verint's ULTRA solution to analyze and distill the huge amounts of information generated within their contact centers. This capability improves agent performance, enhances contact center efficiency and filters back into the enterprise in the form of improved customer service, higher profit margins and the agility required to react to changing market conditions.

Actionable intelligence is an enterprise window to the customer experience. It impacts every process and person that touches your customers. For a contact center supervisor, actionable intelligence means the right contacts for evaluation delivered automatically to his desktop. For a customer retention specialist, actionable intelligence is an alert about a valued customer threatening to close his or her account received within minutes of the call. For a marketing executive, actionable intelligence is calls that indicate why a new product campaign is generating more questions than sales.

NT: What are the greatest challenges that you and your company are facing?

DB: The contact center solutions market is a key component in a very important transformation driving enterprises to become more customer-centric. Today, companies need to focus on the whole customer process, not just the contact center processes. It's about overall enterprise performance, not just agent optimization.

Verint's number one challenge is to educate the market about the great benefits of adopting a more holistic approach to enterprise quality. As leaders of this industry, our challenge is to communicate the message to as many people as possible, as fast as we possibly can.

Actionable intelligence is a great asset to forward-looking organizations. It's one of these disrupting technologies that helps improve the entire organization to perform at higher levels.

NT: What do you feel are practical solutions to those challenges?

DB: While actionable intelligence can benefit many functional units within an organization, not every customer is ready for a full implementation. Therefore, we are taking a practical approach to deployment and have designed our ULTRA solution around modules that can provide incremental benefits to our customers.

For example, ULTRA can be implemented in the contact center to assist customers who are focused on agent performance only. Those customers may choose, at a later time, to look beyond the agent into contact center quality and enterprise quality issues. They can use ULTRA to optimize back-office business processes by understanding how and why they affect service delivery and customer satisfaction. In addition, the insights gained from ULTRA can ensure the consistent high quality of process-intensive customer-facing businesses.

NT: In your opinion, what is the greatest need of our industry?

DB: As mentioned before, the contact center solutions market is key to a very important transformation in the enterprise. It's about the whole customer process, not just the contact center; it's about enterprise performance, not just agent optimization. The industry needs products and services with much higher ROI than today's increasingly commoditized recording/QM solutions.

You can't achieve your customer service, operational performance and quality objectives without a holistic view that connects the contact center with all the back-office functions feeding into it.

NT: Tell us about new developments in your company.

DB: Our recent acquisition of The Opus Group extends the capabilities of Verint's Enterprise Actionable Intelligence portfolio to further support enterprise goals to enhance the effectiveness of their customer-facing and back-office operations. Opus helps processintensive enterprises improve performance and reduce the cost of their operations by analyzing data collected from across the enterprise and identifying areas for improvement.

In short, Opus provides Verint with an expanded solution offering and a performance management analytics suite that complements ours, deep domain expertise, more than 500 man-years of experience in operational performance management, and a proven, high-ROI performance optimization methodology. These capabilities extend our reach in the enterprise to optimize the complete customer experience from front office to back office.

Verint also recently announced a new addition to the ULTRA solutions suite, called ULTRA Analytics. ULTRA Analytics goes beyond traditional performance management and workforce optimization tools to help businesses understand not only what is happening in their operations, but to also identify the underlying causes. ULTRA Analytics also helps resolve issues that impact the effectiveness of their customer-focused operations.

NT: What would be the impact of those developments on the bottom line?

DB: The acquisition extends the capabilities of Verint's Enterprise Actionable Intelligence portfolio to further support enterprise goals to enhance the effectiveness of their customer-facing and back-office operations.

NT: How would you describe the current status of the customer interaction/CRM/teleservices industry?

DB: This industry is at an interesting inflection point. As mentioned before, the enterprise quality trend is causing our customers to view their processes and programs differently and is requiring vendor partners to provide solutions that deliver significant business impact. The transformation of the contact center and its meaningful connection to the rest of the enterprise requires new strategies, approaches and technologies. Verint is well positioned to help our enterprise customers navigate this transition.

NT: What is your vision for the trends and the future of our industry?

DB: Our vision is that contact centers will be called upon in the near future to have a greater impact on the overall business plan of enterprises and therefore will be more closely aligned with the business objectives. In order for success to be achieved in the contact center, I think the organization needs to realign performance with strategic business goals.

This can be facilitated by sharing the intelligence gleaned in the call center with other parts of the organization for a more complete view of the customer's interaction with a company. Solutions like our ULTRA root cause analytics will help our customers understand the drivers behind incoming calls to their call center and to better understand how they can improve products, programs and services both inside and outside the contact center.

NT: What is the significance of the following in the customer interaction industry: VoIP, speech, data security, home agents and offshoring?

DB: VoIP is about virtualizing the contact center and expanding its boundaries. Remote agents and home agents become feasible and possible with the advent of IP.

Speech technology is a transformative technology that can deliver real business impact. Turning customer interactions into actionable business intelligence delivers many important insights that enable real performance improvement.

As virtualization technologies like VoIP proliferate, data security will become more critical in the call center. You will see a growth of call center data security initiatives similar to what organizations are currently deploying for back-office systems.

The concept of home agents enables organizations to cost-effectively expand their workforce to accommodate peak seasonal workloads and to have flexibility to attract new work populations beyond their geographic area. However, processes and best practices will need to be solidified to make this a viable option.

Finally, offshoring is a trend that we've seen slow down somewhat in the past year, but it still remains a growth factor for our business in India and other Asia locations.

NT: Is your company involved in any of the above?

DB: All of the above, except for data security.

NT: What is your company's greatest core competency?

DB: Our core competency is our focus on the actionable intelligence technology combined with vast experience in optimizing contact center and enterprise performance. Our core competency is our ability to provide customers with total solutions to their business problems. Technology alone will not do it. It's our people's expertise in applying this technology and replicating success from one customer to the next that differentiates us from the rest.

NT: How do you differentiate your company?

DB: Verint's solution for the contact center market, the ULTRA suite, provides actionable intelligence that helps customers enhance the overall effectiveness of customer-focused operations, with tangible business benefits for departments throughout the organization. Verint is the only one in the market to provide:

* Actionable intelligence for a smarter workforce -- for managing the entire agent evaluation, coaching and development process;

* Actionable intelligence for a smarter contact center -- to enable the organization to effectively measure and enhance contact center operations; and

* Actionable intelligence for a smarter enterprise -- for sharing customer intelligence across the organization.

WITH NADJI TEHRANI