2019 KM Promise Award Winner: Verint
The winners of the KM Promise and KM Reality awards were announced on Thursday, Nov. 7, at the KMWorld 2019 Conference in Washington, D.C. The awards are designed to celebrate the success stories of knowledge management.
The search for a knowledge management solution is not an easy one. Many companies vow they offer the best technology to meet a client’s needs, but finding the vendor that actually fulfills that promise can be challenging. The KM Promise Award is given to a company that implements and integrates knowledge management practices into business processes and works with clients to ensure they reach their goals. The award recipient provides innovative technology that breaks through the hype to help customers gain insights, collaborate, and compete in a mobile and global business environment.
At KMWorld 2019, Thomas H. Hogan, Sr., CEO and president of Information Today, Inc. (ITI), presented the 2019 KM Promise Award to John Chmaj, chief KM strategist of Verint, who accepted the award on behalf of the company.
Videos of KMWorld 2019 awards presentations, keynotes, and sessions can be found here.
KM Promise Award Winner: Verint
Verint is a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions with a focus on customer engagement optimization and cyberintelligence. Today, 10,000-plus organizations in more than 180 countries—including more than 85% of the Fortune 100—count on Verint solutions to make more informed, effective, and timely decisions.
Cognitive technologies have helped Verint to redefine knowledge solutions. Verint brings together traditional knowledge-sharing tools with advanced AI.
Cognitive knowledge mimics human thought processes and models expertise to answer questions accurately and consistently, without cumbersome manual tagging and linking. This cognitive approach enables a new generation of "digital advisers" that provide fast, accurate and effective advice to ensure customer success, fuel agent performance and maximize employee productivity.
Verint Knowledge Management uses patented AI technology to create a more natural and effective way to connect people to knowledge. The application works the same way that humans process knowledge, intuitively and automatically understanding concepts without manual intervention. This solution works out of the box, providing immediate benefits with a rapid cloud deployment.
"Since KM products of the past work more like a searchable warehouse of answers rather than the human brain, we knew there had to be a better way," said Chmaj. "AI powers our solution to understand nuances in how people ask questions—what people mean, not what they type. It also anticipates what people want and predicts what they are about to ask even before they do while constantly learning based on what it hears and sees. It’s what our market needs, and we’re thrilled to offer a solution that dramatically reduces the effort for agents and self-service applications to better serve their customers."
Verint Knowledge Management customers are able to balance the two primary goals of many organizations: providing an exceptional customer experience while also helping to decrease costs.
Verint’s customers have benefited from its unique cognitive approach to knowledge. Powered by advanced computing technologies, Verint enables people and machines to interact more naturally to extend human expertise and cognition, and provides the flexibility and enterprise-grade infrastructure businesses need to rapidly deploy smarter solutions.
Verint customer Capgemini Business Services is a finance and accounting outsourcing partner that works with clients to optimize financial processes to provide efficient finance and accounting solutions that deliver revenue growth, improve margins, and expand cash flow. The company is challenged with accelerating speed to market, reducing ownership costs, and promoting business innovation. Capgemini serves 100-plus clients that are mainly very large global organizations that reach across industry sectors. Capgemini uses Verint Knowledge Management to support its contact center agents and back-office functions that provide business process outsourcing services to global clients. The solution makes it possible to design a central repository of generic reusable knowledge, which can be the automatically populated into individual client instances, while enabling individual client managers to add unique client knowledge at the same time. Since implementing Verint’s Knowledge Management solution, Capgemini has experienced a 60% reduction in query volume—chiefly because of improvements in first call resolution and call transfers within the company; a 70% reduction in query handling time—because information is accurately retrieved from one place and avoids repeat searches in multiple systems; an 80% improvement in time to operate and reducing the amount of classroom training needed for new agents before they can become fully functional; and a 50% improvement in customer experience scores.
Another Verint customer Wolseley is part of Ferguson plc—a leading specialist distributor of plumbing and heating products. Wolseley leveraged Verint Knowledge Management to drive contact center support for 3,000 employees across 740 stores, as well as three websites. Verint Knowledge Management helps Wolseley handle more than 330,000 inquiries a year, across three customer support sites, handling thousands of pieces of information applying to more than 200,000 SKUs. Its knowledgebase adoption has risen by 400%, and content submissions have increased by more than 200% in the last 6 months. Overall results have included a more than 32% increase in first call resolution, a more than 20% increase in customer satisfaction, a more than 6% NPS (net promoter score) improvement, and a more than 23% decrease in inbound call volumes from self-help. Wolseley has also leveraged the knowledgebase to reduce its average training time by 33%—from 12 weeks to 8 weeks.