Verint Acquires OpinionLab For VoC Solutions

Customer engagement optimization solutions provider Verint recently announced its acquisition of OpinionLab, a provider of continuous voice of the customer (VoC) listening solutions that drive smarter, real-time customer engagement in the digital space.

“At the highest level, Verint’s mission is to help our customers optimize customer engagement using actionable intelligence,” said Ben Smith, senior vice president and general manager of customer experience solutions at Verint.

“We provide companies with technology to optimize the customer care components of their businesses. We help them listen to the customer through surveys, feedback mechanisms, recorded calls and speech analytics,” said Smith.

Verint also supplies a full suite of capabilities to help companies engage back with those customers either through self- or assisted-service channels like chat or social communities.

Verint is a publicly traded company that generates over $1 billion in revenue. It has been in business for over 20 years and has a long history of providing customer experience intelligence technology to Fortune 1000 companies.

Its recent acquisition of OpinionLab came as the company saw consumers moving into the digital space to interact with businesses.

“What we saw in the market — and what we think everyone is seeing in the market — was the rise of the digital channel in terms of how consumers are trying to interact with brands,” said Smith. “We’ve been actively building out our capabilities to focus on that digital channel — websites and mobile apps.”

With this recent acquisition, Verint has merged with OpinionLabs’ capabilities, expanding its already broad suite of VoC solutions to now include the ability to measure and act on digital customer experiences in real time.

In addition to recorded calls, comment cards and other traditional customer engagement optimization solutions, the company is now able to leverage customer metadata to provide additional context behind each problem as it’s raised. And this additional context can make all the difference in solving problems.

“When you’re dealing with the world of transactional businesses, if something goes wrong, there can be hundreds or thousands or millions of dollars lost while companies try to react,” said Tim Whiting, vice president of marketing at OpinionLab. “Without our solution, companies might understand that something isn’t working, but they don’t have the context to take action in real time.”

Whiting gave some real life examples of the combined VoC technology in action.

“We’re just coming out of Black Friday and Cyber Monday — we have retailers that find out through our solution that a mobile coupon code isn’t working. What we provide them is not just that a code isn’t working, but that the iPhone 7 running a particular iOS is having the issue.”

In this case, the VoC solution provided the businesses with context so they could fix the issue while ensuring other transactions continued to flow and that they weren’t losing revenue or customers.

“We had another major retailer that rolled out a website redesign and found that certain customers weren’t able to transact,” said Whiting. “Using the context we provided as to where on the page customers were having an issue, they found they hadn’t accommodated the 4-digit American Express security code.”

Financial services, telco, insurance and retail are all core verticals for Verint, said Smith.

“This most recent acquisition of OpinionLabs is going to provide our customers with the industry’s broadest VoC solution for listening, analyzing and acting on consumer data,” he said. “We’re excited to get to work and help our customers with this offering.”