In an ever-expanding enterprise ecosystem, customer experience is increasingly important because, after all, commerce doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As such, gauging customer engagement is a priority for all businesses in today’s digital era.

Verint Systems Inc. is working to help organizations turn structured and unstructured customer data into insights by leveraging machine learning technology and advanced analytics. The company works with businesses to simplify and modernize the way they engage customers through their contact centers, branches, back offices, and marketing departments.

“The thing that makes us different is we’re completely agnostic to the infrastructure that we sit on top of,” said John Bourne (pictured), senior vice president of global channels and alliances at Verint.

Bourne spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) and Stu Miniman (@stu), hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Enterprise Connect event in Kissimmee, Florida. They discussed the impact of recent developments in enterprise communications, and how customers are now being presented data to measure their own engagement experiences (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Martin: Tell us about communication and customer experience as table stakes for a business.

Bourne: There are more vendors, more players, more solutions, more good stories that are talking about real customer outcomes today than there ever were before. You have to remember our industry is quite conservative. We build bulletproof systems that work. And the phone always worked; the dial tone was there, but it’s a whole new world, as you know.

Martin: Where are businesses on that maturation of actually delivering an integrated, omnichannel experience?

Bourne: It’s still fairly early for most businesses. Because it’s hard to do. If you look around the show, there are all sorts of vendors here who do a one-point solution, one piece. To make this work in a true integrated journey, the bots and the [integrated voice responses] need to be communicating with the digital channels and email and chat and the self-service channels on the web, as well as the voice.

Ultimately, what really matters to us is when we do actually end up talking to an agent, we want them to know everything we’ve already done, so repeating that is the biggest frustration out there.

Miniman: What are some of the key metrics that customers use?

Bourne: It’s customer experience; it’s however they decide to measure customer experience. It’s like you said, some of them like a net promoter score, some of them have far more complex scenarios. It’s all this stuff about average handle time, first-time resolution; it’s not important. It’s all about what was the experience the customer had. Was it seamless? Are they going to be loyal? But everybody measures it differently.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Enterprise Connect event. (* Disclosure: Verint Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Verint nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE