We Finally Got Social! At Verint Engage22

Allison Rouleau

Last week Social Edge was delighted to attend and sponsor Verint Engage22 in Orlando, Florida. Verint Engage is a four-day customer engagement conference for customers to come together, discover knowledge, innovative ways to collaborate, tips, and solutions for crafting customer and employee engagement. From thought leadership and demos to networking; Engage22 had all things customer engagement.

Social Edge’s focus at the conference was to support the nine-session Community Track for the Verint Community platform. The Verint Community platform is a full featured and robust collaboration platform built with the flexibility enterprise clients require to meet their customer experience, marketing, and client engagement needs.

Our team members were joined at Verint Engage22 by long-term clients who have migrated to the Verint Community from other platforms, along with new faces, additional partners, and members of the Verint team.

The conference started with a bang as chef José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen kicked off as keynote speaker. José had a truly humbling and inspirational message expressing the importance of community in all aspects. He is one to lead by example, and inspires those around him to do the same.

Day 1: Verint Community Track Sessions

The Community Track began with Verint’s VP and Subject Matter Expert Jon Allen sharing What’s Next for the Future of Verint Community. Jon covered his view on how communities will adapt to a more digital and diverse consumer base. He shared new features being pre-released by Verint, including Bulk Content Management, Content Assignment and Reporting, Subscriptions. Along with what we can expect in the next 6 months and 6 years for the Verint Community platform. 

Throughout the day, we heard from several Verint Community customers. Analog Devices’ Lisa Allison, Farnell’s Dianne Kibbey, and Social Edge’s Andrew Kratz held a session discussing Industry Best Practices for Growing an Engaging Community. A wide variety of topics were covered by our panelists, including: collaboration between customers, gamification, super user programs, and leveraging video within communities. The Q&A that followed showcased the power of veteran community owners engaging with new owners and sharing their invaluable experience.

Lenovo’s Jessica Mara wowed us with how Lenovo validates investing in their customer community and how you can too. Hint: it includes an in-depth community integration roadmap. Jessica and her team continued on to win Verint’s Driving Digital-First Engagement - Highly Commendable award. Congratulations!

Finally, to round out Day One, Kim Blanck of The Conference Board and Liz Massa of Analog Devices took the stage for an exciting Client Theme and UX: Show and Tell Panel. We had a behind the scenes peek of how two of our creative customers have built engaging user experiences with both out-of-the-box and custom solutions. 

Day 2: Community Track Sessions

The second day of the Verint Engage22 Community Track was buzzing with exceptional sessions. The day started with a deep dive in The Institution of Engineering and Technology’s EngX Community led by IET’s Evanna Gale and 4 Roads Rob Nash and Adam Dew. We discovered the power of community in the engineering world. 

Newsela’s JJ Janikis & Evan Wolf walked us through their session on Visualizing Your Goals where we learned how Newsela builds reports to analyze and share their community success. They demonstrated their process to build the Newsela Community Engagement Data Model. This model shows how the community helps drive value and increased usage of our product while providing proprietary data for our Go-To-Market Org to have more informed conversations with Newsela’s prospects and customer base.

One of the most popular sessions was Community Client Roundtable Speed Topics. Clients had the opportunity to discuss a variety of topics together, the most popular being user experience, in particular, moderation. Additional topics included Engagement, Reporting, User Experience (survey/member feedback), Content Management, Global Community Challenges, and Technical Talk.

Community Integration with the Pro’s, hosted by Social Edge’s John Reynolds and 4 Roads Rob Nash and Adam Dew, presented the latest and greatest products and integrations being developed by their respective teams.

The final Community Track session, Voice of the Verint Community Customer was a working session. Clients were encouraged to make their views and opinions known on items and ideas important to them. This immersive session included the opportunity to vote in-person to let Verint know which ideas to move forward with to ensure continuous improvements to the Verint Community platform.

Verint’s Engage22 conference was complete with compelling sessions and opportunities to be together again. For some of us, it was our first in-person professional event after two long years of working virtually. The power of being back in-person, coupled with the significance of human-to-human interaction was palpable. It reminded us of the boundless possibilities and connections we make through the power of community - in every sense of the word. The future is bright for Verint Communities and we are looking forward to the next year of innovations and collaboration together!