Accelerating the Pace of Change: Building on a Successful 2018 and Looking Ahead to Customer Engagement in 2019

Looking back on 2018, it was another hard-charging year for the customer engagement industry! Here at Verint, we continued to innovate with our amazing customers to help them thrive and give their best to their customers.

We held Engage customer events all over the world, including our largest ever Global Customer Conference in Dallas as well as our event in London. Interacting with thousands of customers enabled us to spotlight the success stories and best practices of our customers, as well as new innovations. Drawing customers, partners, industry analysts, media representatives and employees from around the world, these Engage events are inspiring. We expect even greater things with more innovation and learning in 2019.

I'm proud to be associated with so many sharp, forward-thinking, innovative leaders from a wide range of industries from around the world. We also take pride in the exciting customer wins from 2018 from our global customer conferences that showcase how we're helping to set the tone in the industry and anticipate customer needs. A few that stood out to me from Dallas:

AARP: Overall Winner
Alight Solutions
Worldwide Health Services Organization
Banco Votorantim
Holland America Line
Navy Federal Credit Union
Zions Bank and VyStar Credit Union (Security Excellence)

Check out the details in the press releases below:

In London, we recognized the following customers and practitioners:

Wheatley Group
eir
esure
Legal & General Retail Retirement
David Ede, James Hay
Capita
NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA)
Mercedes-Benz Customer Assistance Center
Royal Mail
Barclaycard

I had the pleasure of visiting many of our customers and learning more about why they value their relationships with Verint and how they're putting our solutions to work. There is nothing more meaningful than sitting down with our customers and watching them interact with their customers using Verint solutions. In fact, I already have several such visits planned this month and throughout 2019.

Speaking of 2019, we can expect another year of change and excitement. According to several industry analysts, we can expect more AI and automation, richer analytics, and a heightened focus on employee and customer engagement.

For example, according to Strategic Contact¹, three key trends for the year are AI, cloud and analytics. "Artificial Intelligence tops the list for consideration -- because even if you aren't thinking about it, your boss may be!" And this: "While cloud has been around a long time and is well accepted at this point, it is not a "one size fits all" world. Choices extend beyond private cloud and public cloud, or single tenant versus multi-tenant." Also, this point: "Analytics (e.g., speech and text) is something every enterprise and center needs, and most have some level of focus here." Finally, Strategic Contact notes "fraud prevention/authentication tools are one of my favorite topics, because so many centers face challenges here."

More new research comes from Dimension Data² with their top trend being "Conversational AI is giving speech a voice again. The overall trend of automation is growing in pace, and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is an area that companies are prioritising." I'm also seeing the emergence of a "hybrid workforce" in my travels, and that's consistent with DiData as well: "Companies are harmonising human and virtual agents. Generally, organisations mitigate risk by initially using bots alongside live agents. The bots learn from the agents and gradually enhance their productivity." DiData's second trend for the year is "Robotic process automation is reshaping customer experience. We expect to see exponential growth in robotic process automation as capabilities advance."

New market predictions from Saddletree Research³ show "the relative importance of several trends and solutions that are on the collective minds of contact center professionals. The top four of these trends, mentioned by more research participants than any others, are as follows: Bots, Web Chat, Omnichannel and 'Gig economy' agents."

Bottom line: We are fast out of the gates in 2019. That's exciting news for a thriving customer engagement industry filled with trendsetters like these. At Verint, we're excited about yet another year of innovation and continuing our lead -- along with our global customers -- in shaping this incredible market.

¹Strategic Contact, Seven Key Technologies for 2019, December 2018

²Dimension Data, Customer experience trends in 2019, Rob Allman, Senior Vice President - Customer Experience, Dimension Data

³Saddletree Research, Paul Stockford, Chief Analyst, Saddletree Research, 2019