Verint Acquires Telligent and Extends Portfolio into Communities
Verint Systems recently announced the acquisition of Telligent, a leading provider of software for customer support and digital marketing communities. Communities represent yet another channel for companies to communicate with their customers and employees, extending the vision of the omnichannel customer experience and providing another avenue for companies to study in order to better understand their customer base.
Social customer communities are being embraced by enterprises in tandem with other social media channels as a means to increase outbound marketing efficiency, encourage employee-to-employee collaboration, and gain insights into customer attitudes and intentions.
Applying contact center analytics to customer community postings and conversations will enable deeper understanding of such critical insights as buying trends, marketing and campaign effectiveness, service effectiveness, and customer loyalty. Customer communities also serve as a self-service tool for those customers who choose to interact with other customers in order to solve a problem or obtain an answer.
This announcement from Verint is indicative of yet another ground-breaking strategic move that strengthens the status and influence of the contact center in the enterprise. Saddletree Research believes that customer communities, also known to many users as customer forums, have traditionally fallen within the responsibility of the marketing department. With Verint’s acquisition of Telligent, it is clear that traditional lines of responsibility within the enterprise continue to be redefined to the benefit of the contact center.
Linear delineations between enterprise functions that have historically existed, such as the boundary between marketing and customer service, become further blurred. This acquisition will allow Verint to extend its digital marketing strategies deeper into the enterprise as it integrates with other digital marketing channels in the enterprise.
Verint and Telligent already have several large customers in common, indicative of the fact that the customer community software application is not foreign to customer service professionals. These customer communities will become another link in the escalating omnichannel strategy that Verint is aggressively pursuing in support of the company’s customer intelligence, engagement and optimization initiatives. Communities offer customers social self-service through peer-to-peer support communities and empower the customer to find solutions and solve problems, all positive attributes already proven to be of value to community forum participants.
The value of these customer interactions is now increased exponentially as they become an integral component in the drive to gain deeper insight into customer sentiment and satisfaction.
With the addition of Telligent to the Verint portfolio of solutions, Verint continues to do what it has historically done so well—expanding the definition of actionable intelligence while breaking through traditional boundaries to gather that intelligence without regard to obstacles that may seem overwhelming to others.
As innovative strategic moves in support of this campaign such as Verint’s acquisition of Telligent and the creation of another contact center communications channel for employee and customer support intensify, the ultimate winners in this crusade will be both the consumer and the employee, as the voice of the customer joins the voice of the employee in commanding greater influence throughout the enterprise.
The post Verint Acquires Telligent and Extends Portfolio into Communities appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
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