Customer experience is viewed as the great differentiator among loyalty marketers.
Consequently, Verint Systems Inc. and research and advisory firm Forrester recently partnered to provide a holistic approach to customer experience measurement and management. The partnership combines Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) methodology, benchmark data, and engagement program with Verint Enterprise Feedback Management™ (EFM) to create a single source for organizations to collect, analyze, and act on benchmark data.
Loyalty360 caught up with Brian Koma, vice president, customer experience, Verint and Roxana Strohmenger, vice president, customer experience index, Forrester, to learn more about this new and exciting partnership.
How did this partnership come together and what are your goals for it from a customer experience/customer engagement perspective?
Koma: Verint has seen significant demand across its global customer base for CX benchmark data to understand how well its organization’s CX program is performing.
While Verint’s Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) platform has many capabilities, it didn’t incorporate an industry-standard CX benchmark. As a result, Verint was faced with the decision: Does it establish its own benchmark or tap into an existing metric? After evaluating a wide variety of metrics and benchmarks, it quickly became clear that Forrester, a leader in CX research, had done the best work in this arena and had made a substantial investment in creating a rigorous and actionable methodology coupled with gathering substantial benchmark data.
Strohmenger: Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) is based on academic and thought-driven research that measures the key drivers of CX quality (effectiveness, ease, and emotion) that Forrester has identified in independent research as the best drivers of loyalty, advocacy and increased spend. Forrester’s proven methodology benchmarks approximately 800 worldwide brands across 17 industries in eight countries. Because Forrester’s CX Index methodology also measures and incorporates NPS and CSAT data, it builds on the great work that many of our customers have already done.
Verint has several goals from a customer experience/customer engagement perspective. First, the company is always looking to add value to its customer relationships by taking its requests for additional capabilities seriously. Second, it wants to provide customers with access to best practices and industry thought leaders so they can add value to their organizations.
What makes this partnership unique in the CX world?
Strohmenger: The partnership combines Forrester’s CX Index methodology, benchmark data, and engagement program with the Verint EFM platform to create a single source for organizations to collect, analyze, and act on benchmark data. This exclusive partnership between Verint and Forrester is an industry first because it embeds the CX Index within an EFM solution, providing customers with best-of-breed technology and one of the most comprehensive CX benchmarks. The combination will not only help organizations measure themselves against industry peers and CX leaders from outside their industry, but also allow them to dig into improvement areas and measure the revenue impact of CX improvements—all through a single solution.
The combined offering goes beyond this, however. When coupled with the continuous listening Verint provides through its speech and text analytics solutions, we further differentiate ourselves. Both speech and text analytics software uniquely identify emotion and sentiment by analyzing millions of recorded telephone calls from contact centers, as well as written interactions from email, web, and social interactions. When speech and text analytics data are combined with survey and benchmark data, this provides an absolutely differentiated offering.
How can this partnership help brands elevate their respective customer experiences?
Koma: Verint will embed Forrester’s CX Index platform into its Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) deployments. With this new capability, customers can deploy Forrester-developed CX Index scoring surveys to gauge how successful they are in delivering quality experiences that create and sustain loyalty.
Data from the customer-specific surveys will be analyzed by Forrester, and scoring survey results will be displayed within the Verint EFM solution. This is part of an overall Engagement Program that will provide a customized evaluation to the customer that illustrates how its scores compare to the industry norm and key competitors—using a custom integration that Verint is building to the Forrester CX Index Platform, which will also include actionable recommendations for CX improvements by Forrester’s CX thought leaders.
This combination of market leading technology, benchmark data and scoring data, coupled with the Forrester Engagement Program allows organizations to understand industry norms, how their brand compares against these norms and enables them to obtain customized insight into how to move the needle for their CX program and what potential revenue uplift is associated with those improvements.
How do you define CX today and how has that definition evolved in recent years?
Koma: Verint defines CX as being able to capture, analyze, and act on the voice of the customer across all channels – digital, mobile, email, SMS, IVR, recorded calls and social media, and then to effect positive change to ease the customer journey and create real differentiation. CX has evolved significantly in the last several years. It started in many organizations as a way to consolidate and bring order to the many disparate customer listening initiatives organizations accreted over the years.
It has now evolved into a true global discipline that not only listens to customer feedback but provides analysis and interpretation of the data for non-CX professionals. Most importantly, CX has evolved into an action function that drives positive change and ongoing measurement so that brands can act on customer input. It has evolved – and will continue to evolve – as organizations around the globe embrace it as a driver of growth.