Posted by Vovici Blog on Wed, May 22, 2013
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/index
Verint continues to expand on analytics capabilities that allow customers to build stronger multichannel relationships, gain deeper insight into the customer experience and improve operational efficiencies. With our Voice of the Customer Analytics™ portfolio, organizations can capture VoC feedback 24/7 from anywhere in the world by easily deploying mobile surveys offline or online via the web, email, IVR—and now SMS. That means they can now gain feedback at the point of customer experiences and/or transactions—such as a store purchase or bank visit.
Looking to our latest Enterprise Feedback Management™ offering, organizations will find enhancements that continue to simplify survey design—helping reduce time and increase productivity—while maintaining a powerful and flexible feature set. These capabilities also are helping global companies centralize customer interaction data into a single view and break down information silos. Interactive dashboards take the advances a step further, providing a central view into customer data, allowing decision makers to instantly access and share real-time insight.
Interested in learning more? Click here.
Posted by Nancy Porte on Tue, May 14, 2013
By Nancy Porte, VP of Customer Experience, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) annual Member Insight Exchange kicks off today in San Diego, California at the Hotel del Coronado. Our keynote speaker this afternoon is Jeanne Bliss, president of the consulting firm CustomerBliss, a company that helps organizations create an actionable path for profitability and business growth through earning customer and employee raves. Her best-selling books are Chief Customer Officer and I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Loyalty in Good times and Bad. As co-founder of the CXPA, Jeanne was pleased to speak to her members.
Beloved companies enable people to decide and act from a corner of their brain that is congruent with doing the right thing. Five decisions set companies apart and reveal who they are and what they value. Beloved companies earn the right to their customers’ story. And beloved companies have prosperity—prosperity of spirit.
Companies that embrace the five decisions enjoy solid business performance advantages. Recruiting costs are less, because they are hiring—and keeping—the best employees. Advertising costs less, because their customers promote their products and services. And, their business grows as a result of a clear, customer-focused message.
Decision 1: Beloved Companies Decide to Believe
“We trust our customers. We trust those who serve them.”
Do you believe that customers are an asset or a cost center?
Zane’s Cycles made the decision to not ask for collateral for test drives. As a result they show their trust in customers. (And, they lose very few bicycles as a result.)
1. Revamp how you hire–start with core values.
2. Create a “kill a stupid rule” movement.
3. Let customers key their feedback directly on your home page.
Believing is about embedding the notion in your company about building an asset–the customer–and talking about them as human beings.
Decision 2: Beloved Companies Decide with Clarity of Purpose
“Our iron-clad integrity and clarity guide the direction of our decisions.”
This is about moving your employees past doing tasks and toward creating a customer experience. Know the emotions your customers want to feel. Improve their lives and create a memory to that desired emotion.
IKEA decides to design the price tag first. They learn how the customer will use the furniture first and design the chair or sofa from there. People remember the first and last experience. Are you designing your experience around how customers are greeted, and what do you offer them as they leave?
Decision 3: Beloved Companies Decide to Be Real
“We have a spirited soul, humanity in our touch, and personality that’s all ours.”
Beloved companies take customers seriously—but they don’t take themselves too seriously. Being transparent with customers takes courage. USAA decided that new hires should eat like soldiers so they understand their customers better—as a result, they are more real when solving their issues. The resulting empathy created amazing growth for USAA.
Being real means thinking about people, not accounts. Show your values as you make decisions.
- Start all new hire orientation with walking in customers’ shoes.
- Get rid of jargon in how you talk to and about customers.
- Be a customer. Require everyone to do this once per quarter.
Decision 4: Beloved Companies Decide to Be There
“We must earn the right to our continued relationship with customers.”
Do you know your customers? Zara decided to invest in product speed, not advertising. They knew their customers were fashionistas on a limited budget. So, they turn over inventory quickly and their customers purchase when they see it. In fact, customers go into the stores 17 times a year!
- Start with customer priorities to drive operational investment.
- Connect team structure and rewards to customer prosperity.
- Fix how you hand off customers when service providers change.
Beloved companies do the hard work in getting to know their customers and earning the right to repeat business. That starts with being there when customers need them, on the customers’ terms.
Decision 5: Beloved Companies Decide to Say Sorry
“We act with humility when things go wrong. We will make it right.”
How you apologize to a customer and how you handle an adverse situation is the true litmus test of your organization. Southwest Airlines decided to proactively apologize to customers. They review issues with flights each day and proactively send letters and compensation to inconvenienced customers. As a result, net positive revenue increased. Takeaways for the rest of us:
- Establish your own version of the daily overview meeting.
- Establish five very human responses to mistakes.
- Re-entrench core values—act from them in service failures.
Decide to believe. Have clarity of purpose. Be real. Be there. Say you are sorry. The decision is yours!
Posted by Dave Capuano on Mon, May 13, 2013
By Dave Capuano, Vice President, Marketing, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
These days the Big Data buzz is growing louder, rapidly becoming a topic that organizations need to address. The volume of customer data has become so large—and is growing at such a fast rate—that “business as usual” can’t keep up anymore.
It’s easier than ever for customers to express their feelings about service experiences, products and more to the social stratosphere. As a result, organizations are no longer covered if they only record transactional information. Now, customer sentiment also needs to be tracked, analyzed and understood through all channels or modes of communication. Moreover, while trying to manage all that, companies also have to adhere to customer information-related data protection and privacy laws. In a word, compliance—and it’s here to stay.
Today’s highly competitive marketplace—combined with customers who have multiple ways to communicate 24/7—has created the need to tame the data beast. Collecting and analyzing vast amounts of customer data quickly can be challenging. Word to the wise: much of this data can be unclear, ambiguous or just plain irrelevant. As if that’s not enough, the intelligence gleaned from this data then needs to be applied wisely across the enterprise so that everyone accesses and leverages the same information effectively.
That’s a lot to absorb, so are you ready for some good news? When accessed and leveraged correctly, the intelligence from all this data can be timely, valuable and solve complex problems quickly. Companies that successfully navigate this maze have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
Targeted VoC Analytics solutions can enter databases and information warehouses to find answers to questions or challenges without requiring any significant system overhauls. In fact, industry analyst firm Frost & Sullivan points out that Verint’s Voice of the Customer Analytics™ is designed to obtain customer sentiment and VoC from unstructured and structured data. It also performs predictive analytics in real time during customer interactions, as well as to customer files prior to customer contact.
Want to know more? Read Frost & Sullivan’s white paper Obtaining “Big Results” from Big Data.
Posted by Vovici Blog on Thu, May 09, 2013
By Oren Stern, Vice President, Voice of the Customer Analytics, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
These days everyone wants your opinion—or at least they all seem to be asking for it in some way, shape or form.
Nearly all companies have come to realize the importance of measuring customer experience and satisfaction. Various means of collecting customer feedback, especially in the business-to-consumer and retail industries, seem to be overflowing. With all of these requests for feedback, one question keeps bothering me—how do these feedback requests influence the customer experience itself?
A great deal has been said about feedback fatigue. You know how it works: you get too many requests for feedback. You don't really see the value in providing it. You start (or continue) ignoring the requests. Much research has been done on how to optimize the amount of feedback requests one gets, as well as how to maximize the perceived value in providing feedback. (Hint: You actually do something about the feedback and close the loop!)
However, let me hypothesize and suggest that the ubiquity of feedback and the emergence of social media have made feedback not only a desired mechanism for understanding customer satisfaction, but also an integral part of the experience itself.
Case in point—I took my car in for service the other day. The service experience was stellar as it has always been. The waiting room was great, Wi-Fi worked perfectly, my car came back sparkling after being hand washed, and I drove off into the sunset (well, actually, back to the office).
As I expected, what followed shortly thereafter was a courteous email requesting my feedback. As I do Voice of the Customer Analytics for a living, I try and read these emails, and sometimes I actually respond! I expected the first part of the email, which was all about how a great customer experience is important to the dealership and the car company. However, the second part of the email took me by surprise.
I thought it would be about how the dealership values my opinion and wants to improve. Instead, it was all about how the service person’s professional standing with the company depended on my feedback, as well as the dealership’s professional standing with the car company. It was suggested that if I intended to answer anything but "it was a stellar experience,” that I should call them first to clarify.
This actually got me a bit mad! Here was the service department "warning" me I shouldn't say anything wrong or negative about them, suggesting they didn’t care about my feedback or want it in order to improve.
Feedback is no longer an isolated event that happens with a select few companies you interact with. It is everywhere. Moreover, social media has taught us we all have an opinion, and we can choose to scream it from the rooftops. We go online and discuss our last meal in a restaurant, rank the hotel we recently stayed in, review the concert we just went to, and so on.
We are conditioned to provide feedback these days. When we take our car in for service, we expect we’ll be asked about it. However, if the feedback request is done the wrong way—as in too frequently, with poor wording, insincerely or without closing the loop—this becomes part of the experience itself.
In my case, it even turned a positive experience into a less satisfying one, with a lasting impression.
This is where we need to get smarter about asking for feedback. We need to recognize and understand that eliciting feedback has become an integral part of the overall customer experience. Sometimes, it’s the last impression we give. Designing a positive and stellar customer experience is critical to separating your organization from the pack; yet, in its research, Forrester suggests that customer experience design is still a foreign concept.
According to recent studies, only 35 percent of companies follow a formal process for designing customer experiences. So while we expand our listening posts and start capturing multichannel feedback, we should keep in mind that feedback is part of the experience and thus should be taken into consideration.
A lot of new up-and-coming social, mobile and online providers have started to take this into consideration. There are more and more applications and websites where "your feedback" is not just a hidden button behind three layers of navigation, but an integral part of obtaining the service. This is still infrequent, but requesting feedback as part of the experience is where we’re headed.
Recognize this today and get smarter about asking for feedback. Your organization will be rewarded with customer loyalty and more repeat business.
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, Apr 22, 2013
By Siobhan Miller, Solutions Marketing Director, Speech Analytics, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
A U.S. television program called “The Voice” challenges musicians to perform onstage while judges listen with their backs turned, forced to identify the next great singer purely on the quality of the voice they hear. Based on the judges’ reactions, the appearance of many of the contestants isn’t much of a surprise. But every once in a while, there is genuine shock—one contestant was greeted with a “whoa, you’re a guy?!”
The conceit of the show is—of course—that we have preconceived notions of what a successful singer looks like. At times that can overtake what a great singer sounds like—indeed, the actual voice can get overlooked.
I was thinking about this recently in terms of customer experience initiatives, especially when they involve speech analytics. When we think about speech analytics, we often think in terms of how we can use the solution to solve problems we know about—long handle times, high call volume, customer satisfaction issues, product or process issues, etc. We build categories to bucket calls that pertain to these issues, so we can easily track and access them and continue to make progress against our KPIs. Categories such as “complaint,” “repeat calls,” “self-service failures,” “compliments” or “product quality” track what’s important to us and identify root cause.
However, whether we know it or not, we’re filtering what our customers are telling us. We’re taking this amazing, unsolicited feedback and focusing it according to what we want to hear, or what we already know. However, in the process, we can lose sight of an invaluable benefit of speech analytics: using unsolicited customer feedback to tell us the things about our business that we don’t already know. What are we overlooking in our quest to maximize our ROI and make progress against KPIs?
Speech analytics solutions maximize their value when you take the time to just listen—without filters and without bias. Use speech analytics to surface words and phrases that have seen the biggest increase or decrease in use across time and find out what’s spiking. Find out what customers are saying without predetermined or fixed labels.
Can you still track issues that are important to you? Sure. I mean, even on “The Voice,” the contestants eventually have to perform in front of people who can see them. But having that initial pass of just listening—without bias? That’s invaluable!
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, Apr 15, 2013
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/index
In the last year, much has been written about Big Data Analytics. More recently, and rightly so, many have pointed out the contact center and other customer experience-delivering departments as the entry point of big data analytics into the enterprise. Big Data manifests itself as Voice of the Customer Analytics (VoCA) in these departments—these solutions analyze treasure troves of big unstructured data collected in the form of recorded phone calls, emails, web chats, free-form survey remarks and social media posts.
VoCA enables enterprises to “listen” to solicited and unsolicited customer feedback across different channels and modes of communication. This feedback is analyzed to identify trends, root causes and, most importantly, deliver actionable intelligence that the rest of the enterprise can use to improve performance.
VoCA (a la Big Data) is new, and understandably so, has a lot of excitement surrounding it. However, there is a tendency to view it as the end-all for enterprises to deliver a superior customer experience. While VoCA is excellent at delivering actionable intelligence, it alone cannot help operationalize the intelligence across the enterprise. In addition to listening and analyzing, intelligent enterprises have to strive for and achieve operational excellence. This is where traditional Workforce Optimization (WFO) solutions and processes still have an active and important role.
VoCA and traditional WFO are different yet must work together. VoCA excels in analyzing humongous amounts of unstructured data and proactively delivering valuable insight and actionable intelligence. The recipients of this intelligence are usually a relatively small group of ‘analyst’ type users. If the insights and intelligence are not acted upon in a timely and systematic way at all levels across the enterprise, then the customer experience will not improve.
Delivering a superior customer experience requires enterprises to percolate that intelligence across the entire population of agents, employees, supervisors and managers. It requires the buy-in, involvement and collaboration of many people and instilling a culture of continuous improvement.
A few examples: The intelligence unearthed by VoCA should be used to change quality evaluations from random samples to more relevant interactions to the business. The intelligence gained has to be applied to train and coach employees at all levels to change behaviors and elevate their performance to desired levels.
Acting on the intelligence in a timely manner requires having the right number of people with the right skills at the right time. The people who do the work are usually geographically dispersed across various departments or groups (contact center, back office, branch), have different skill sets and availabilities and must be scheduled and holistically managed. Their work arrives in different forms and types with other varying characteristics. This work must be tracked and meet specific service level goals.
The processes that people follow when working also tend to vary—managers need visibility into them to understand how work is being done and to address variances. Delivering a superior customer experience requires effectively managing the work, people and processes. Leveraging the intelligence and proactively applying it to improve performance—quality, productivity, behavior and lower costs—is where the value lies. Traditional WFO solutions enable this.
Therefore, delivering a superior and consistent customer experience requires a unified combination of Voice of the Customer Analytics (a la Big Data) and WFO solutions, working in tandem. A common framework that delivers interoperability between the two enables enterprises to practice and achieve the nirvana of Customer Inspired Excellence.
Learn more about Verint’s customer-centric Workforce Optimization and Voice of the Customer Analytics software.
Posted by Nancy Porte on Mon, Apr 01, 2013
By Nancy Porte, VP of Customer Experience, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
This week I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar presented by Harley Manning, Vice President and Research Director, Forrester Research. Harley leads Forrester’s team of analysts who cover topics ranging from strategy and design to metrics. He is also the co-author of Forrester’s latest book, Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.
The presentation provided guidance for organizations interested in building a great customer experience. At Verint, we believe that a great customer experience can be a differentiator in the marketplace and propel amazing business success. However, we also know that it can be difficult to know where to start!
Harley began by asking the obvious question – Why Customer Experience? Why now? The answer is actually quite clear. We live in a new reality where customers have almost limitless choices. They can choose from many vendors for almost any product and can easily access them through mobile devices. So, when multiple companies sell the same product, the consumer understandably often chooses the company that is easiest to do business with.
Customer experience is defined as how customers perceive their interactions with your company. Forrester has determined that in order to provide great customer experience and, ultimately, inspire customer loyalty, the interactions must have three dimensions. First, they must meet the needs of the customer. If the customer contacts customer support for a technical problem, the first requirement is that the technical issue needs to be resolved. Secondly, the interaction should be easy. For example, customers do not want to explain their needs every time they are transferred to a new company contact. Finally, the interaction should be enjoyable. At the end of any interaction there is an emotional component. Successful interactions typically end with a positive feeling that translates into the customer wanting to do business again.
Why does this matter so much? Customer experience correlates to loyalty! Watermark Consulting performed a study of companies that were declared leaders and laggards in customer experience. They followed these companies for a five-year period (2008-2012) and found that customer experience leaders averaged over 22 percent increase in stock price, where the laggards lost over 46 percent in the same time period. So, not only do customers reward companies who offer great experiences, but so does the stock market!
Harley offered some great advice to companies wondering how to get on the path to customer experience improvement. He talked about how the customer experience ecosystem—the complex set of interdependent relationships among your company’s employees, partners and customers—needs to be understood. One way to understand the complexities is to map your current customer ecosystem.
Mapping a customer system can look simple. However, many levels need to be considered. At the top of the map can be the customer-facing process and who is involved in each step of the interaction. Then a “line of visibility” is drawn to indicate the back office or behind-the-scenes activities that impact the people and processes that interact with the customers. These include items such as CRM systems, scheduling systems and corporate policies. By examining the factors that influence the interactions between the customer and employees and partners, the root cause can be found—helping to ensure the team designs the true solution to the issue causing customer dissatisfaction.
Harley closed the webinar by encouraging viewers to put in a very visible place in their office, “I need my customers more than they need me!” This will help create the right frame of mind when building a customer experience program.
Enjoy the journey!
Posted by Sean Mahoney on Thu, Mar 21, 2013
By Sean Mahoney, Manager, EFM Solutions Consulting, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
We all hate taking long and tedious surveys. But when creating them for our own organizations we sometimes struggle to keep them short and to the point. Everybody has questions they want included! The secret to making surveys shorter is looking at them from the respondent's perspective. Hiding questions, showing random subsets of questions, and asking questions in a later survey are all ways to shorten a survey from an individual's perspective.
Here are six top tips to shorten your survey:
- Answer the Questions Yourself
For customer and prospect surveys, take a hard look at the questionnaire to see which questions can be answered by looking up the data from an appropriate system at your organization. If this is a questionnaire following up on a customer service call for instance, since your call-center software tracks how long the call was and stores a code indicating the type of inquiry, you don't need to ask the respondent for that information.
For the demographic section of your survey, your CRM system should have many basic facts about the respondent, such as their age, gender and address. Taking the time to integrate your community feedback system with your other systems can easily cut 10% of the questions you ask. From a respondent’s perspective, those are often the most tedious and annoying questions to answer as well!
- Don't Ask All the Questions
Use skip patterns and randomization to show respondents different subsets of the questionnaire. One example of this is a hotel handing out a short paper survey to luncheon attendees at a conference. While some key questions were the same, the list of attributes to be rated varied from survey to survey. This way the hotel was able to gather detailed information across many aspects of its services without overwhelming any one individual respondent.
- Ask Only the Most Important Questions
A common research tactic is to address a key issue with three or more questions, all with very similar wording. This is important only for benchmarks. For instance, here’s one organization’s three questions related to corporate image – asking the respondent to rate a corporation's image, asking them to think of how their friends' would rate the corporate image, and then asking them to rerate the corporate image when thinking of how well the company does compared to the competition. If you're not benchmarking a particular measure – reduce it to ONE question.
- Don't Ask Questions the Respondent Wouldn't Understand
Sometimes surveys go into excruciating detail about very minor aspects of a product or service. This is understandable from the perspective of the corporation, which is responsible for every tiny detail. However, many of these distinctions are too subtle for the respondents. The questionnaire might use industry and technical terms that respondents don't know or misunderstand.
For cases like this, conduct some qualitative interviews by phone, focus group – or most efficiently – by using your online community. This research can make sure that you are using language the respondent understands and making distinctions that are important to the respondent. Where you are not – get rid of those questions.
- Don't Ask for the Sake of Asking
Look hard at the questionnaire to see if the answer to a question will help you with your current decision making. Sometimes, when writing a questionnaire, you begin to think "It would be nice to know...". How would knowing this particular answer help you? If it wouldn't, then get rid of the question. Or, if you really can't stomach that, show it only to a random subset of respondents. For instance, often pricing questions are inserted into surveys that aren't about pricing. These are good candidates to postpone to some later study.
- Survey More Frequently
Finally, if you have many questions on a different topic then considering running a separate survey on that topic later. The less frequently your organization conducts surveys, the greater the desire to squeeze everything into one survey. By doing surveys more often, you alleviate this, and by using random sampling and enterprise feedback management, you can make sure that you are not over-surveying.
Posted by Sean Mahoney on Fri, Mar 08, 2013
By Sean Mahoney, Manager, EFM Solutions Consulting, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
Want to get new insights from your survey data? Or maybe you want a little help prioritizing areas you’ve uncovered for improvements? Give correlation a try.
Correlation is a simple yet powerful technique for teasing new insights out of your survey data. It measures the strength of the relationship between two variables – revealing whether they are independent of one another or strongly “co-related.”
Correlation is an important analytical building block, supporting key driver analysis, factor analysis, estimation of predictive validity and other techniques. And, it’s a powerful tool for helping prioritize areas you’ve identified for improvement.
Example Correlation Coefficients
A correlation coefficient is a number ranging from -1 to 1 that measures the strength of the relationship between two variables. For instance, customer loyalty studies often seek out correlations with likelihood to repurchase. The following chart shows some scatterplots of two variables with some examples of possible correlations.
Here are some correlation coefficient examples:
- 1 – The two variables increase in lockstep. I’ve seen customer satisfaction have a .95 correlation to likelihood to repurchase.
- 0.8 – The two variables almost increase in lockstep and are practically equivalent at measuring the same underlying construct, as with likelihood to recommend and repurchase likelihood.
- 0.4 – As the scatterplot shows, the two variables are less in sync, but in many studies the highest correlations are in this range. Since many attributes make up product or service loyalty, it is not surprising that no single attribute will have a much higher correlation than 0.4. In one study, price satisfaction had a 0.4 correlation coefficient to repurchase – many respondents were less satisfied with price than their overall satisfaction. However, this dissatisfaction was mitigated by the service’s unique attributes. In other words, it was moderately expensive but with no direct competition.
- 0 – Few attributes are completely independent of loyalty. However, for example, I know of one company that wanted to know how much of a long survey was answered to see if more loyal customers completed more of the survey. There was no correlation between likelihood to repurchase and the percent of the survey that was completed.
- -0.4 – Negative correlation coefficients indicate that as one variable increases, the other variable decreases. This is less common—often, if there’s an example, it’s counterintuitive and related to unique situations for different businesses. One more general finding is that likelihood to switch to a different provider decreases as loyalty increases. The two variables don’t have a higher correlation, because some disloyal customers weren’t going to purchase similar services from any vendor.
You can calculate correlation coefficient using spreadsheets, free online tools and survey software applications. Because correlations above 0.199 indicate a significant relationship (19 times out of 20 at a sample size as small as 100), a common analytical mistake is to ignore the effect of subsample sizes when calculating correlations for filtered results. The above table can be used for a quick reference as to whether or not a correlation is statistically significant.
Correlation Does Not Equal Causation
Sometimes, a correlation may be statistically significant but meaningless. For example, when analyzing a transactional survey against actual subsequent loyalty behavior, the variable with the highest correlation can turn out to be whether or not respondents entered their phone number!
In other words, respondents who requested a call back for an open service request were more likely to be loyal than those who didn’t. What seems to be happening here is that customers who were more loyal anyway are more likely to seek out a personal response rather than an email response.
A Powerful Technique
Correlation is a simple yet powerful technique. Give it a try next time you want to glean some new insights from your hard-won survey data.
Posted by Vovici Blog on Thu, Feb 28, 2013
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/index
An overcast winter day became distinctly brighter just south of downtown Atlanta this week. On February 25, the day before the annual Verint Sales Kick-off event, about 125 Verint employees from offices around the world gathered at Ivy Preparatory Academy in Kirkwood to build a playground for the K through 7th grade scholars there who drew pictures of their ideal playground in December.
Partnering with the school and KaBOOM!, the national non-profit organization dedicated to saving play, Verint built a new playground that will provide more than 500 children in the community with a safe place to play. While Ivy Prep students have been thriving academically, they have been playing on a parking lot.
Ivy Preparatory Academy operates tuition-free, public charter schools in the metropolitan Atlanta area. In 2011, Ivy Preparatory Academy (IPA) opened two schools in DeKalb County – a boys and girls school now serving these young scholars in Kirkwood. These two single gender academies are modeled after the original “big sister” school, Ivy Preparatory Academy in nearby Gwinnett County.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony included Elan Moriah, president of Verint Enterprise Intelligence Solutions and Security Intelligence Solutions, who worked alongside other Verint employees hauling mulch, mixing and pouring concrete, constructing swing set and other equipment, picking up trash, painting signs, and completing many other tasks to bring the students’ playground vision to life.
Verint and its employees also donated PTO time to fund the playground, contributing over $100,000 USD to the effort. The playground was built under the auspices of the Verint Next Generation program, which addresses the educational, physical, social, and healthcare needs of children in our communities, and in cooperation with the non-profit organization KaBOOM, which collaborates with local community volunteers to create safe and accessible playspaces for children.
This is the second playground built by Verint and KaBOOM!, and marks one of more than 150 playground builds KaBOOM! will lead across the country in 2013. In addition to the community-built playground, the new play area will include Imagination Playground in a Cart – a breakthrough playspace concept designed by architect David Rockwell to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play. With reconfigurable loose parts, this type of play area allows children to constantly change their environment and design their own course of play.
Thank you to the Verint, KaBOOM!, Ivy Prep and other community volunteers and partners that donated their time and money to make this initiative a rousing success!