Verint announces new upgrades to its cloud workforce management solution

Effectively managing today’s workforce is crucial for improving customer experience, operational efficiency, and compliance. Yet currently, rising expectations of both customers and employees have made forecasting and scheduling contact center agents and customer engagement resources exponentially more challenging.

To give companies a simpler way to manage work across the enterprise, Verint Systems Inc., The Customer Engagement Company^™, recently announced the newest release of its market-leading Workforce Management^™ (WFM) solution, which leverages artificial intelligence-infused automation and new mobile tools to streamline forecasting and scheduling and improve employee engagement, all easily accessible via the Verint Cloud.

“The workforce represents up to 80 percent of overall contact center budgets so accurate and cost-effective scheduling is vital,” says Verint’s John Goodson, SVP and General Manager, Products. “At the same time, today’s employees demand easier flex scheduling options, so organizations must balance flexibility and cost to provide superior service. As a pioneer in WFM, we view this new release as one that can invigorate the market to meet the ever-changing demands of today’s contact centers and throughout the enterprise.”

The new release of Verint’s WFM solution offers a redesigned, incredibly intuitive, modern, user experience that streamlines scheduling with fewer clicks and screens, making common tasks more efficient for workforce managers and simplifying the path to proficiency for new users. It reduces time and effort, taking into account sick and overtime employees, user skills and multilingual capabilities, time zone variations, employment requirements and service level agreements (SLAs).

“Employee engagement and retaining talent are major concerns for today’s contact centers,” said Paul Stockford, Chief Analyst, Saddletree Research. Research with the NACC, chaired by Stockford, notes that employee engagement is important to 92 percent of the industry. “This sentiment, along with generational preferences, remote workers, gig workers, and multichannel customer service staffing complexities are driving the trending WFM technology refresh. Whether in the cloud or on premises, this Verint WFM release embodies the capabilities needed today to meet the evolving needs of the future.”

Ushering in the next generation of workforce management, these new capabilities empower organizations to support fast, agile scheduling, while balancing worker demands for flexibility with customer demands for exceptional service.

Flexible schedules, empowering technology and telework options are critical to retain highly talented employees in today’s competitive marketplace. Managers need an easy way to schedule the right agents on the right channel at the right time—whether that’s in traditional eight-hour shifts or in increments of mere minutes.

AI-infused automation streamlines decision-making and improves forecast accuracy, taking into account a variety of data points and changes. Enhanced mobile app functionality enables agents to easily swap shifts and make other schedule changes on the fly. Supervisors receive schedule change requests and approve or deny them through the app, providing a simpler way to manage work across the enterprise.

The power of the cloud means this new WFM is easy to scale up and down. And because it can also be deployed on premises, without sacrificing features or flexibility, organizations are able to standardize on a single WFM platform in cloud-ready and non-cloud-ready parts of the business, for both the front- and back-office, and across the globe. A vendor-neutral approach to the contact center ACD and data source integration makes for simplified configuration and deployment.

U-Haul: A Company on the Move Leveraging Verint WFM

U-Haul uses Verint Workforce Management to scale its customer service operations in a cost-effective manner, while enabling U-Haul to become the “employer of choice” via work schedules offering the flexibility to work from zero to 40 hours a week, while working from home.

Verint WFM has improved productivity for managers and agents by simplifying, modernizing and automating its operations—providing auto approvals for 16,000 requests for time off, and 36,000 shift swaps in the last year alone—processes that would have required 30 to 40 Full Time Employee managers to handle manually.

“Our agents work from home, they have obviously busy lives, and they want to be able to balance their work with their life. So the ability to get time off whenever they need it, or the ability to swap a shift with another agent is huge for us. And we use Verint to automate that effort.”

Joel White, Forecasting Manager, U-Haul International

SOURCE Verint