Harnessing Verint Knowledge Management to Enable Seamless Self-Service

A Compelling Reason to Adopt Transformative Knowledge Management

Equiniti was established 10 years ago when Advent (a private equity firm) acquired a number of financial service providers and brought them together under the Equiniti Group brand. Floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2015, the group is comprised or more than 40 individual businesses and continues to grow rapidly, with the acquisition of an average of four businesses per year. 

The group employs 4,500 staff, primarily in the UK, and offers a unique combination of financial, data and technology-driven propositions. Primarily a business-to-business service provider, group activities see Equiniti engaging with over 25 million UK citizens every year. 

The average consumer uses multiple media to interact with an increasingly wide range of digital services. They move freely from one device to another and expect a consistent, intuitive experience across multiple platforms. 

With this in mind, Equiniti was looking to re-develop its Self-Share application; using a knowledge management solution to enable customers to self-serve on any platform, on any device.

Recognizing that technology had a vital role to play in delivering an improved customer experience, the Head of Digital Strategy for Equiniti, set about building the business case for change.

“The old FAQ was not as comprehensive as it could have been” explained the Head of Digital Strategy. “The aim of any customer service experience should be to handle the customer query at the first time of asking. It would not be a great experience if the customer needed to ask multiple questions to get the answer they were looking for”. 

The legacy system was not fully integrated with CRM, so answers were not tailored to individual customers. With the online system available 24/7 a significant proportion of online inquiries were logged outside of the core contact center hours of 8am to 6pm, so it was vital that the FAQ deliver contextually relevant content. 

Equiniti’s legacy system featured a static FAQ, with limited search functionality. For experienced customers, it relied on them knowing exactly what they were looking for within the FAQs. For new or inexperienced users, it was a maze of complex and unfamiliar terminology; leading to confusion and session abandonment.

Choosing the Best Knowledge Management Solution

Customer service for Equiniti had undergone its own evolution in recent years. The call center became the contact center, which in turn became the experience center. An integral part of omnichannel support is the effective management and automation of intelligence. So, when it came to choosing a technology partner, Equiniti insisted on a knowledge expert.

The Head of Digital Strategy explains how Equiniti chose to partner with Verint. “First of all, we were looking for a genuine partner. Someone who would be invested in our success. A core part of the dev project was to partner with a knowledge expert that would empower our omnichannel support to deliver an excellent customer experience”. 

“When it came to researching alternatives, we quickly discovered that there just weren’t that many companies offering what we wanted. FAQs and knowledge bases were offered but as a part of a bigger overall package. We even considered building something ourselves.” 

Integrating a third-party technology was a bit of a departure from business as usual for Equiniti. Not quite in the realms of a leap of faith, they were reassured to see Verint working with a number of brands they respected. 

“Pre-sales support from Verint has been great; both in terms of building the business case for the technology and keeping the various stakeholders engaged. With Verint, we feel we’ve not only found a company that can deliver on their promises, but also one that is clearly invested in our success.” 

Setting Objectives for the Knowledge Management System

When it comes to setting KPIs for any new technology, it can sometimes be difficult to avoid over-simplifying objectives. To simply provide a “better service” is laudable but makes ROI calculations difficult. With the new-look Self-Share, Equiniti established a clear set of objectives and metrics by which they could measure success.

• Offer a consistent, platform-agnostic experience
• Increase customer advocacy for Equiniti
• Realize a growth in customer investment volumes
• Make it easier for customers to access the right information 24/7
• Improve NPS
• Monitor systems usage over time
• Analyze adoption rates internally & externally
• Make it simple for the product team to manage “big data”
• Deliver management information to support improved decision making
• Have zero impact on the critical path

Designing and Deploying the Knowledge Management Solution

When it came to systems scoping, stakeholders from across the business were engaged. However, when it came to the design phase, the project team was deliberately kept small to ensure a smooth process. 

The partnership between the visual designers, UX team and Verint’s development team worked well and the system was quickly designed, built and delivered to plan. “The Verint project team were excellent throughout, we kept coming back to two key principles. Trust and momentum”. 

Internal testing was carried out with subject matter experts and contact center teams before launching the system as a part of the new website go-live. The mapping of legacy FAQs to the new system ensured SEO got a kick-start, as the system was seeded with 170 questions and answers.

The in-house team at Equiniti was relatively small, with little spare capacity to support the roll-out. They quickly realized that Verint could add value here as, under tight timescales, they wouldn’t need to divert scarce resources internally to support the early stages of deployment. 

Early Signs of Success

Assessing the impact of Verint on the Equiniti customer experience, “It often takes time to produce tangible evidence of returns with a new system, but we can clearly see an impact on user behaviour. We have established new benchmarks during early adoption and are setting some challenging targets going forward”. 

Changes in policies or fees usually generate an increase in call volumes to the experience centre. Since the introduction of Verint Knowledge Management, the system has handled an increasing number of these enquiries, providing support on a 24/7 basis and contributing toward call avoidance targets. 

“Adoption amongst employees has been fantastic. It’s not often you can say this about technology, but the team really enjoy using the system. User voting, quality scores and feedback are all visible. It gives genuine purpose to their work”.