In February, when Verint shed its security/analytics resources into a start-up called Cognyte, management started to flesh out a vision of “Boundless Customer Engagement.” Today (Aug 10) its acquisition of Conversocial signals its understanding that no definition of “boundless” is complete if it doesn’t accommodate the hundreds of millions of people using messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Apple Business Chat.

The $50 million price tag is a relatively small price to pay to accelerate integration of social messaging into the Verint Cloud Platform. Conversocial was founded in 2009 and did much of the early heavy lifting required to define how brands could best integrate asynchronous, digital conversations into their customer-facing channels. Over the years they provided a compelling narrative to lure hundreds of enterprise clients to engage their customers through private conversations carried out over their messaging network of choice. In response to organic demand from their installed base, they augmented their service offerings with a CX Platform of their own, embracing Conversational AI, bots, live agent workspaces and analytical insights.

Verint had been moving along a parallel path, starting with a strong foundation in speech analytics, natural language understanding and Intelligent Self Service (bots). They may have to sort out any overlap in their product offerings, but the match promises to make for a more formidable set of services for their respective customer bases. Conversocial’s customers will benefit from Verint’s long-standing investment in the features and functions its customers have come to expect. On the flip side, Verint will benefit from adding a customer base of sophisticated enterprises that are successfully reaching message-oriented, digital natives.

Like its acquisition of NextIT in 2017, this is destined to be a win/win/win/win — referring to Verint, Conversocial, their customers and their customers’ customers.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants