Verint Gets Conversocial for More Digital Customer Engagement Channels

The paradigms of omnichannel customer engagement and omnichannel customer experience (CX) are no longer news, as the shifts had already been underway well before the ongoing pandemic. More recently, customer conversations have shifted from public social channels to one-to-one personalized messaging. Thus, brands are increasingly looking for ways to turn messaging into a strategic commerce and customer service channel to benefit CX. Commonly used messaging channels include Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more.
 
The future of digital business relies on digital conversations that offer continuity and enable brands to stay connected with consumers. Every digital experience must be intelligent, and that requires a different approach that embraces the unique nature of messaging and enhances it with conversational artificial intelligence (AI), to intelligently integrate humans and chat bots in a single platform.
 

Messaging CX

A digital customer engagement platform that breaks down communication barriers to deliver exceptional experiences through the orchestration of data, AI, and human interactions is an imperative today. Companies need to enable a conversational CX that is hyper-personalized from initial inquiry and commerce (an order) through customer care.
 
For example, many brands use Google Search and Google Maps as customer acquisition pathways to meet prospective customers at the earliest point of their buyer journey, when they literally “Google something.” They can begin conversations pre-purchase and keep the relationship going throughout the customer lifecycle and mitigate the sunsetting of third-party cookie tracking in Chrome. Many also strive to provide efficient self-service issue resolution with no need for agent intervention. This can be done, for example, by deploying FAQ bots to answer the most common queries.
 
When it comes to in-store pickups, messaging channels offer another customer engagement pathway, integrating the virtual experience with the physical one to boost customer retention (brands with strong virtual CX keep customers longer). On the other hand, customers tend to spend more when shopping in-store vs. online, signaling that impulse shopping is still prevalent when browsing in-store.
 
These messaging channels also offer the opportunity to book virtual or in-person appointments using Apple Business Chat’s Time Pickers tool. A vast majority of website visitors leave without converting and there is no way to reconnect with them. Using private messaging channels makes re-engagement across the customer journey possible. On the other hand, straightforward booking processes and convenient appointments contributes to exceptional CX.    

Verint and Conversocial

To that end, Verint Systems, a provider of Boundless Customer Engagement software solutions to more 85 of the Fortune 100 companies, recently announced the expansion of the digital-first capabilities of its cloud platform through its acquisition of Conversocial, a provider of social messaging solutions, for $50 million in cash.  Founded in London in 2009, Conversocial has approximately 80 employees with offices in New York (the location of its current HQ) and London.
 
Conversocial helps leading brands such as Google, British Airways, Vodafone, Whirlpool, and Hertz build and scale relationships via a more personal touch and the convenience of social messaging. As an example, Whirlpool achieved 27% bot containment rate after a 106% year-over-year increase in inbound queries after the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020.
 
With the addition of Conversocial, Verint’s AI-based engagement platform will enable brands to orchestrate customer journeys with a connected experience across their channels of choice. The two merging companies seem to have a strong alignment of their technology stacks. Conversocial CEO Ido Bornstein-Hacohen will report to Verint CEO Dan Bodner and continue to run Sales and Service for Conversocial, while the other positions will report functionally.
 

Figure 1.  The combined capabilities of Verint and Conversocial    

Largely Complementary Capabilities

As a much larger company, Verint will add to Conversocial the interaction handling, capture, and experience management across all channels as well as its advanced Da Vinci AI and analytics across the voice, text, and experience channels (see Figure 1). It will also connect AI-powered Knowledge Management (KM) across all those channels. Verint also has workforce engagement capabilities such as a unified agent desktop. This simplifies the agent experience and enables seamless orchestration of humans and bots across channels.
 
As a matter of course, Conversocial brings to Verint deep expertise in social messaging with support for a broad set of social channels. This should bring agility in conversational digital engagement use cases including proactive engagement. For instance, Volaris Airlines replaced web chat with Messenger Customer Chat. Within six months, this resulted in 81% of all inbound service volume being received over messaging channels—with a 43% reduction in agent response time and a 29% reduction in average handling time. The strategy proved to be 83% more cost effective than traditional web chat.
 
In the foreseeable future, the combined capabilities of Verint and Conversocial will allow customers to use conversational AI to automate proactive, personalized communications on their channel of choice. They will be able to integrate deeper intelligence for better customer interactions, such as a human and bot orchestration for superior CX.
 
With these new capabilities, Verint is setting a new bar for its main competitors (NICE, Genesys, Calabrio, Salesforce, and others). We will keep an eye out for any moves they might make in that regard.    

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