There's been a lot of big news in the Customer Experience (CX) market over the last few months with Survey Monkey's IPO and SAP's announcement to purchase Qualtrics for $8B. Market research continues to show that CX is a board level priority now, and these events validate it. In fact, CX has become the battleground where companies are going to compete to win market share.

Every technology market is evolving continuously. As disruption occurs, new players emerge, leaders adapt, and laggards disappear. The CX market is no different. The early years of this market were driven by telephone and paper-based surveys, as well as focus groups. With the explosion of the internet in the late 1990s, technology delivered a new way for organizations to understand their customers more quickly than ever before. 

I was part of that disruption when I was at Vovici (the combination of Perseus & WebSurveyor), one of the first technology companies to build software for online surveys. Our tagline was "Feedback Drives Vision," and we grew into one of the major players in the online survey software space. In 2011 Vovici was acquired by a forward-looking company named Verint, because Verint believed that the voice of the customer was a critical component to help organizations successfully understand and engage with their customers. 

Fast forward seven years, and we are now in the midst of the next disruption of the CX market. One that will move us from technology point solutions to unified cross-channel platforms. One that will tap into artificial intelligence to evolve from reporting to prediction. One that will expand VoC from surveys into conversations to gain a deeper understanding of customer interactions through automation. One that will connect experiential and operational data to automatically deliver the right insight to the right person at the right time to take the right actions across engagement channels. 

The idea of combining operational and experiential data to enable customers to differentiate and win with their CX has informed Verint's customer engagement strategy for many years. As a complement to our core capability of leveraging automation to turn contact center customer feedback and operational data into actionable insights and operational improvement, Verint has assembled a strategy that brings together experiential and operational data from across all customer interaction channels. Starting with our organic innovation in speech and text analytics, followed by our acquisition of Vovici, and more recently with the acquisitions of digital feedback pioneer OpinionLab, social community innovator Telligent and leading intelligent virtual assistant solution NextIT, Verint is well positioned for this next CX market evolution. 

Recent news about SAP acquiring Qualtrics highlights the market opportunity for which we have been preparing at Verint. The market convergence of customer relationship management (CRM) and voice of the customer (VoC) is well underway, and this acquisition is another validation of the evolution and prioritization of customer experience (CX), which we have long anticipated. Bringing together different types of structured and unstructured CX and operational data to help customers make smarter and faster business decisions will separate the winners from the losers. Verint is exceptionally well-positioned to win and lead in this market.

The result for Verint customers will be delivering on the promise of their CX programs while also uncovering new ways to bring the voice of the customer to the boardroom. I am very satisfied to see how well our strategy has anticipated this latest, customer-driven market shift. I'm excited to see what the future holds for the CX market, Verint and our customers.