The Conversational Commerce Super Highway is littered with the evidence of good acquisitions gone bad. Often acquisitions made to accelerated product development or eliminate a pesky competitor has its longest lasting presence as “Goodwill” on a company’s balance sheet or “Impairment of Goodwill” on an income statement.

With the introduction of “Intelligent Customer Self-Service Capabilities,” Verint has onboarded and integrated assets, technology and personnel of recent acquisitions in record time. It will be able compete effectively in the fast-growing Conversational Commerce marketplace with a package of solutions that spans intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), interactive voice response (IVR) and Community (with a capital “c”). They have all the components for human-assisted self-service and collaboration offered through the full spectrum of communications channels.

A Continuum of Self-Service Oriented Acquisitions

It’s hard to believe that Verint acquired Next IT less than four months ago. But, as the company points out, it marks the culmination of a set of purchases that started with Telligent in August 2015, which introduced a platform for sharing “actionable intelligence” from a community of subject matter experts across chat, voice, text, e-mail and web services. Hosted IVR specialist Contact Solutions was acquired in February 2016, bringing expertise in speech-enabled voice self-service that was greatly enhanced roughly one year later when Verint purchase SmartCare from telecommunications platform provider Synchronoss.

SmartCare came into the world more than fifteen years prior under the name SpeechCycle. It pioneered the concept of “Rich Phone Apps” which are pre-configured conversational models, including Natural Language Understanding and Intent Prediction or Extraction, that simplified and shortened the time it took to deploy speech-enabled IVR services, especially for troubleshooting and technical support of subscribers of diversified cable, telco and entertainment companies.

Along this accelerating acquisition continuum, buying Next IT amounts to a lot more than merely putting the icing on the cake. Its Conversation Management Platform (formerly called Alme) is the core brains of the offering. Its data libraries contain 12 years worth of tagged and categorized conversations that have been packaged to support what Next IT had come to describe as “democratization of AI,” referring to the ability to put development tools into the hands of business unit personnel and make the data available in a way that is as frictionless and transparent as possible.

Next IT Brings Data and the Missing Master Mind

Speaking of transparency, at the time of acquisition Verint admitted that the purchase price started at $30 million in cash with “potential additional future cash payments” based on performance. Yet, the collective teams seemed poised to move fast almost by disposition. In a presentation to analysts, they acknowledge that the core business, surrounding contact center, back office (recording, analytics and the like) and assisted service accounts for 90% of its business. Self-Service, along with Voice of the Customer and Fraud and Compliance may be smaller, but they are destined to see accelerated growth.

The newly announced Intelligent Customer Self-Service Capabilities are, in the company’s words, “a new combination for Verint, but they are based on proven results.” Expect the solutions to map to three core market requirements shared by the large, customer-focused enterprises that Verint targets. These are to “simplify, modernize and automate” customer engagement, all in the name of measurably improved customer experience. To achieve those goals, Verint has integrated the Intelligent Assistance capabilities of Next IT to offer a coherent product offering in record speed.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles