As you might recall, Telligent®, acquired Zimbra, whose purpose was to help organizations enhance support, drive digital transformation and to ensure brand consistency. Today, Verint acquired Telligent®.
The reason for the acquisition? Verint wants to extended its customer engagement optimization portfolio with the addition of a market-leading, enterprise-class community solution. As a result, organizations can uniquely provide actionable intelligence across customers’ omnichannel experiences to include voice, chat, email, web self-service, and now customer and employee communities.
Was This Acquisition a Good Move For Verint? MY POV: This seems like a very good move for Verint, as having a community offering is key to customer care. Communities are a critical part of customer service as well as customer engagement. With the combination of Verint and Telligent, customers will be uniquely positioned to use the actionable intelligence that flows through their communities to help achieve important strategic objectives, including the ability to gain a holistic view of customer service effectiveness, integrate social experiences on the web and support digital transformation initiatives.
How Is Having An Option for Online Communities Useful To Brands? By integrating communities into their customer support and marketing strategies, organizations can lower their service costs, redirecting routine customer queries to their communities for quick answers to frequently asked questions. Through powerful analytics, they also can gain critical insights into buying trends and patterns; evaluate marketing content and campaign effectiveness; enhance social selling; take action on voice of the customer feedback about products, services and overall experiences; and heighten loyalty.
How Do Communities Play a Role In OmniChannel Customer Engagement? As consumers continue to self-serve and seek insights and perspectives from peers, the importance of social communities has grown. With increasing demand for more real-time engagement and personalized service, communities are becoming sought-after and valued sources for customer support. Likewise, marketers are turning to social communities to infuse new digital content, advance social experiences in their online properties, and take action by tracking and analyzing buyer behavior and site activity. There’s not one department that can’t benefit from an online community. And, while that is true, not all departments know the business case. There are huge business reasons for every single department – customer facing or employee facing – that can benefit from an online community.
Does Your Brand Have a Community? If not why? What are you waiting for? Want the ROI of online communities beyond customer service? I’m your ROI gal!
@drNatalie VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
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