Verint Community gives you all of the tools you need to manage a robust community for your customers
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
My company uses Verint Community to host and manage our online user community, connecting our customers, partners, employees, and anyone else interested in our products. Members share experiences, help solve technical challenges, stay up-to-date on company updates and product releases, access our training resources, and much more. The platform is extremely flexible and customizable, so the digital customer experience fits extremely well within our existing branding, making the site feel like "ours" instead of other platforms which are more obviously "an X community with the customer's branding and color scheme." This also gives the ability to configure the community actions and user experience to fit our needs on a whole-site and per-group basis, so the community can be the right thing, in the right place, at the right time, for all users. We also have moments where it feels like we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible and look to continue to leverage the flexibility extensively over the next year and beyond.
Pros
- Customization/flexibility - The platform can be truly made "yours." How far to take this can depend on what skillsets or budget you have available for customizations, but customers have an opportunity to provide an unparalleled experience for members. Almost every aspect of the site experience can be configured which seems to be a unique offering.
- Customer service - They have a very active community filled with fellow community managers and developers who are eager to support one another. The Verint staff is extremely engaged, always offering to help, accessible and transparent when sharing insights, and generally pleasant and supportive! The ideas for improvements that I've received from the Verint team or fellow customers have been invaluable.
- Affordable - In our vendor selection process, Verint came in among the lowest in price AND highest in value.
- Flexible hosting environment - Choose if you want them to host and manage the back end, or if you want to host yourself. Not having to worry about server maintenance is a huge weight off the customer's shoulders, and you don't have to decide whether to sacrifice hosting for flexibility.
- Integrations - The platform API is robust and well-documented, so you can integrate the site in any way you want into your existing systems if you have the proper knowledge.
- Edit - After doing some roadmap planning with my team for the next year, I'm extra excited about this flexibility. We've planned out some really interesting and impactful updates for our community members that would likely not be possible (or as easy) on other platforms.
- Transparent roadmap and ideation process - The Verint team really listens to their customers and implements improvements to the platform based on customer input. They readily share what's coming soon and keep realistic expectations on what will (or won't) be done and when.
- Edit - The most recent roadmap updates seem to have a well-planned schedule over the next year or so and are looking to benefit new and existing customers. Not all of the new functionality is relevant to me specifically, but I'm excited about the updates and how they'll impact me as an administrator and my community members.
Cons
- More flexible reporting - There are a lot of reporting options, but the inability to create your own custom reports is a challenge. I know this is a pain point for other customers and the Verint team is working on better ways to improve this. This can also be worked around by pulling data from the APIs or exporting to Excel and manipulating it in other ways which are not ideal, but worthwhile if the needs arise.
- Upgrade process - This can be cumbersome and daunting, even on a site hosted by Vertint. There is still a lot of responsibilty placed on the customer/site admins, but upgrades aren't forced either as the customer gets to choose when to perform the upgrade.
- Exporting - individiuaul content details are difficult to export from the system (e.g. a list of forum posts or ideas)
Most Important Features
- Customization/Flexibility of the UI and UX
- Easy to use UI/UX for members/customers
- Add-on marketplace to extend the platform, which is full of both free and paid configuration packages
Return on Investment
- We have not tracked specific numbers, but our salespeople and renewals team reference and share our community regularly when working with prospects and customers to help show the additional offerings our company provides in additional to the actual product.
- Our views have increased over 40% from 2021 to 2022, showing a huge impact for our customers.
Alternatives Considered
Higher Logic Vanilla and Khoros Communities
Other Software Used
Sugar Sell (SugarCRM), Slack, Canva