Reflecting on Verint Engage 2023
Verint Engage is a customer experience event like no other… The presentations you see and the stories you hear are primarily delivered by customers.
If you’re interested in Customer Service, Customer Experience, AI, Digital-First Engagement, or Self-Service, this is one event you always want to have marked on the calendar.
It’s not about pushing products on you, it’s about real users taking apart their journeys and sharing their experiences.
Of course, it pays testament to the solutions that customers are happy to fly from all corners of the world to talk about their projects, but the emphasis is firmly on providing value to attendees.
It’s why over 1000 customers, partners, industry experts and curious businesses flock to Engage, this year in vibrant Las Vegas. From June 12-15th, 4 Roads were among them, and we had the honour of sponsoring this year’s event.
Here’s the 4 Roads’ Verint Engage 2023 experience.
Setting the Stage
In previous years, we’ve focused on the Community sessions. However, this year we expanded our reach to support and explore the wider Digital-First portfolio, including Knowledge Management, Chatbots, IVA (Intelligent Virtual Assistants) and AI.
The cost of human customer service topped $2 trillion annually, and these tools will play a crucial role in bringing that number down considerably.
Verint introduced some amazing innovations to combat this at the CcaaS level, but the Digital-First innovations are the first line of defence and will have the biggest impact on closing the Engagement Capacity Gap.
Customers Leading the Way
Verint Engage stands out from other customer experience-focused events by offering a unique approach: a significant portion of its sessions and presentations are delivered by customers themselves.
This customer-centric format brings a plethora of benefits to the attendees. Firstly, hearing directly from customers using the products provides a genuine and authentic perspective on the challenges, successes, and lessons learned in implementing customer experience strategies. This creates a stronger sense of relatability and practicality for the audience, as they can directly connect with the experiences and insights shared.
We also found the customer-led sessions delved into the nitty-gritty details of real-world scenarios, offering practical knowledge and innovative ideas that are directly applicable to their own organisations.
Moreover, this format fosters a sense of community and collaboration, as attendees have the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussions and connect with peers who have faced similar challenges. We saw this best in the Community sessions, with the community managers representing their solutions throughout the conference with team shirts.
Not a single session ended without the audience having interesting follow-up questions.
The Future Of Community Is Bright
Of course, Community remains a key focus for 4 Roads, and it was exciting to see eight sessions dedicated to Verint Community.
These sessions are a deep dive into the exciting possibilities of Verint Community, and it’s exciting to see the future of Verint Community is bright.
We were in each session sharing our insights and connecting with new and existing community managers. It was great to see some new faces and share some lessons with those just starting their journey.
John Allen initially took us through the upcoming updates and features we can look forward to, but it was again the customers who took centre stage—6 of the 8 sessions involved community managers sharing their knowledge and experience.
This is the exciting thing; the community around Verint Community, and how community managers work together to get the most out of the platform.
The Big Themes That Shaped the Event
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is on everyone’s lips right now and rightly dominated many of the discussions and keynote presentations.
Kelly Koelliker and her “geek translator” Jaime Meritt explained the best way to use bots is by not asking them to do too much. Instead, deploy specialised bots that excel at ONE specific task, such as providing interaction summaries to help agents quickly understand customer interactions. You can still implement several bots, each tackling its specific task.
“Pick one use case that makes sense to you and deploy it and see.” – Jamie Meritt
However, we’re not yet at a point where we can automate ‘end-to-end’. Verint never deploys anything that doesn’t have a human have the final say – e.g. summarise calls, but it still requires an agent to validate and sign off.
This follows a similar path we took for our chatbot project for DS automobiles. However, an interesting concept that is gaining traction is the idea of training bots on your own data.
Tying It All Together
Verint’s experts are also excited about the value of these Digital-First tools working together harmoniously to deliver an enhanced CX experience—the sum is greater than the parts.
We’re also excited about the opportunities we can create from integrating these tools, and we have work to do to help educate customers about this.
You likely already have several Digital-First tools in your customer service toolkit. But we need to move away from an approach where individual solutions or teams are isolated, solve only singular needs and lack the connected intelligence of the entire customer journey.
Connect the dots, and get people, processes and technology all working together.
During the keynote, Verint’s Engagement Data Hub was highlighted as the perfect backbone for this central repository where various customer touchpoints can be tracked, tagged and leveraged.
This is exactly what made Agilent’s session ‘Digital-First Strategy Starts and Evolves with Verint’ so interesting — they have both a Verint Community and a Knowledge Base (which 4 Roads built the connector for). Despite the complexity of the subject matter, including 50 products, the cohesion across channels allows for efficient content filtering, making it easy for users to find the right information.
The Expert Speakers and Their Insights
“AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, but without data, it’s Actually Ignorance.” – Juanita Coley
“We won’t have another AI winter. It is here to stay.” – Brian Yang
“Knowledge is an asset, and every business has it.” – John Chmaj
“The fact that we’re having a session about the marketplace means we need to do more to tell people about the marketplace!” – Matt Pyke
“Siloed data is limiting your insights.” – Dan Bodner
The Cocktail Hour(s)
One part Verint always excels at is helping us unwind at the end of each day.
The first day rounded off with a cocktail reception by the pool, complete with dinner, drinks and a live band. Thankfully everyone got the memo about switching out from business wear!
On the final night, Verint Engage took over Brooklyn Bowl, where we bowled and listened to (surprisingly good) rock band karaoke. We couldn’t ask for a better send-off to a world-class event.
See you all at Engage 2024!
