Last December, Verint put a marketing stake in the ground by introducing its Open CCaaS™ Platform. At their Verint Analyst Days in Dallas last week, the Verint team presented their corresponding go-to-market strategy to a group of industry analysts. CEO Dan Bodner announced that the company had rebranded itself as “The CX Automation” company. This new positioning responds to market conversations, which, according to Bodner, indicate a clear demand for enhancing customer experience while simultaneously lowering costs. Leaders from various business areas, including IT, Operations, and Contact Center, may have differing opinions on the company’s needs, but they all share a common goal: to do more for the customer while reducing costs. Consequently, the concept of automation resonates universally.

Bodner repeatedly emphasized Verint’s commitment to delivering “AI business outcomes” quickly and effortlessly for customers. This is where their strategy of “openness” comes in. For Verint, openness means setting themselves apart from the competition by offering companies flexible options to purchase and deploy Verint-based AI capabilities without the need to “rip and replace” existing contact center systems.

I previously discussed this practical and flexible aspect of Verint’s strategy in an earlier post. Their approach appears to be successful, as Verint has recently secured substantial new deployments involving their GenAI offerings and has expanded their presence in existing engagements.

Verint’s Flexible Bot Integration: Pick, Plug, and Play for Immediate Value

Companies with on-premises contact centers are not required to move to the cloud to utilize Verint GenAI services. Instead, customers can select from an a la carte menu of specialized “bots” and integrate these services into their existing systems using APIs. For example, if a company with an on-premises solution wants to utilize the Verint Wrap-Up Bot, they can easily integrate it into their telephony system and decide where to store the call summaries. Some companies may prefer the summaries to appear in the agent’s call center dashboard, while others might opt to store them in the CRM system. The Verint Wrap-Up Bot operates in the cloud but integrates seamlessly with on-premises systems.

Bodner explained that when they present this “keep what you have, add what you need” approach to companies, it is often met with surprise. Many business leaders are unaware that such flexibility is possible, as other vendors (according to Bodner) typically insist that a move to the cloud is necessary to benefit from GenAI.

Whether a company uses on-premises or cloud platforms, Verint says it has designed their bots to integrate into a customer’s existing systems with minimal effort, providing immediate business value. In addition to the Wrap-Up Bot, other popular bots include the Call Containment Bot, Coaching Bot, and FlexTime Bot, which empowers agents to independently adjust their work schedules.

Continuing the theme of openness, Verint enables customers to use any telephony vendor they prefer, as long as the vendor supports integrations with Verint’s APIs. They also encourage companies to use their preferred LLMs (large language models), including proprietary ones if available. This “choose your own LLM” approach aligns with what many other CCaaS vendors are doing and seems appropriate in a rapidly evolving LLM landscape. Locking into a specific LLM doesn’t make sense for most companies.

The Open Engagement Data Hub: Source of Insights

Another key component of Verint’s open approach is their Engagement Data Hub. Customers can configure the hub to collect and store any data they choose, whether from customer calls, digital interactions, internal emails, surveys, or external systems such as WFM and CRM platforms. Bodner and the Verint team consistently highlighted that the Data Hub is genuinely open. Customers own and control their data in the hub and can export it to external systems via straightforward APIs, providing maximum flexibility.

The Engagement Data Hub powers Verint’s analytics, which customers can access by purchasing the Verint “Data Insights Bot.” With access to all the information in the Data Hub, the Data Insights Bot acts like a super analyst, capable of immediately answering any questions a contact center or operational employee may have, while often uncovering important insights that the employee hasn’t even thought to ask about.

Verint’s Bold Bet on Openness: A New Path to Differentiation in CCaaS

GenAI, including LLMs, has irreversibly impacted functions once exclusively offered by CCaaS or a handful of “Conversational AI” specialists. Their offerings include tools for self-service virtual assistants, reliable NLP (Natural Language Processing) for intent detection and entity extraction, and ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) systems for voice interactions and accurate call transcripts. Before LLMs, CCaaS vendors differentiated themselves with proprietary NLP and ASR systems. Now, advanced features like quick, reliable, fully automated call summaries are standard across all vendors.

Clearly, in a world of commoditized NLP, ASR, and advanced natural language services, CCaaS vendors must find new ways to distinguish themselves. Verint is positioning itself as the vendor most capable of delivering broad AI business outcomes as quickly as possible. Key to delivering on this promise is their radical embrace of an open, modular, and flexible architecture. Ultimately, the market will decide the success of Verint’s open CCaaS strategy, which offers large organizations with legacy systems a way to quickly gain the benefits of GenAI.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles