Cisco’s three developments to transform customer experience with contact centers

The world’s best brands earn customer loyalty over years, even decades – only to lose it in a few seconds if the customer experience is not stellar. While customer needs and expectations have changed, the ways in which companies respond have not kept pace. It’s time for a radical change.

Cisco announced three developments that will help bring about this radical change—an AI infusion, a new customer experience solution, and a new cloud contact center product. Together, they fundamentally transform the customer experience with contact centers, for the better.

First, Cisco announced new integrations with Voicea and Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI), that turn agents into “super agents”.

Cisco also announced Cisco Webex Experience Management (formerly CloudCherry), which empowers contact center staff with real-time visibility into how customers are feeling, in order to radically change the experience. Additionally, all of this innovation is now available on Cisco Webex Contact Center Enterprise.

“For decades, Cisco has partnered with the world’s largest contact centers to solve their most complex problems. Today, we are making possible an entirely new and improved customer and agent experience,” said Omar Tawakol, Vice President and General Manager, Contact Center at Cisco Collaboration.

“Through the application of AI, we will help contact centers of all sizes radically transform their customer’s experiences to meet the demands of today’s sophisticated consumer.”

Cisco (Voicea) and Google Cloud’s contact center AI integrations

Cisco is looking to massively transform the customer and agent experience by infusing AI into its contact center portfolio – empowering agents to provide high-touch customer support and improved overall customer experience.

To accomplish this, we’re taking a best-of-breed approach that combines our proprietary AI capabilities through recent acquisitions, along with best-in-class partner technology such as Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI.

The integration of Voicea turns contact center agents into super agents. As an agent talks to a customer on the phone, Voicea provides a call transcript and summary to automate the agent’s call wrap-up, ensuring no action item goes unaddressed.

Additionally, call highlights can be automatically synched with your CRM so that agents and supervisors can easily reference past support issues. We will continue to add new capabilities into Voicea (and customers will automatically have access to new features as they’re added).

Additionally, Cisco is excited to expand its partnership with Google Cloud to bring CCAI-enabled capabilities (such as conversational IVR, chatbots and agent assist) to its contact center portfolio.

With conversational IVR, businesses can move beyond rigid phone trees to provide the next generation of natural, conversational experiences to the contact center.

Customers can say or chat in a few words what they’re looking to do and using Google Cloud’s NLU the customer can either self-serve simple tasks (change password or check account balance), or be routed to the best available agent for more complex asks.

By incorporating Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI capabilities into the contact center, customers have 24/7 access to virtual agents to self-serve simple tasks. Additionally, for more complex issues, conversational routing accelerates the ability to connect customers to a live agent. 

“When it comes to the contact center, Cisco and Google Cloud share a common goal: improve the customer experience while increasing operational efficiency. That’s why we’re working together so closely to build an end-to-end solution for our customers,” said Antony Passemard, Conversational AI and CCAI Lead, Google Cloud.

“By combining Cisco’s rich contact center technology with Google Cloud’s CCAI NLU and Speech capabilities, businesses will be able to reduce average handle time, help agents provide the best possible customer service, and ultimately increase the brand’s NPS/CSAT scores.”

Webex Experience Management

Webex Experience Management drives the industry forward by blending contact center data and sentiment data. Contact centers have had the tools to engage with their customers via chat, email, and SMS. However, what’s been missing is the intelligence telling them when, who, and how to engage with a customer.

Webex Experience Management (based on the CloudCherry acquisition) empowers contact center staff with real-time visibility into how customers are feeling in order to radically change their experience, helping companies drive loyalty and improve CES, NPS, and CSAT scores.

It removes data siloes that make it impossible to do a meaningful analysis of what customers are experiencing as they navigate throughout the organization. It also identifies “at risk” customers so organizations can “close the loop” and be proactive in serving them better. For example:

• Before Webex Experience Management: You’re stranded in Sydney. Just last month the same airline stranded you in Seattle. And two years ago, it was an unplanned overnight in London. And, the call center agent you’re now on the phone with doesn’t know any of this – which makes you feel like finding a pair of scissors to shred your airline credit card.
• With Webex Experience Management: As soon as your call hits the contact center, you’re routed to a manager. The airline “remembers” that you gave them feedback that you always want to talk to a real person. “I am so sorry your flight is cancelled. And I know this is not the first time,” the manager says. “Let’s make this right—right now.”

Webex Contact Center Enterprise

All this great innovation is available on the new Webex Contact Center Enterprise, a new cloud solution that provides a trustworthy path to the cloud for large contact center enterprises. It’s a Cisco-backed solution combining security, reliability, and feature richness – the first of its kind.

It is based on Cisco’s mature, market-leading Contact Center Enterprise product, so you get proven stability, reliability, and the deep feature set that’s made Cisco a leader.

It’s also built on the Webex Platform for Contact Center, an open and flexible multi-tenant cloud architecture that enables fast access to new capabilities, agility, and speed of innovation.

Like the rest of our portfolio, it is supported across the globe with data centers in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. It is included in Cisco’s Collaboration Flex Plan, which provides current customers a financial path for on-premises to cloud migration at a pace that works for them.

It supports up to 24,000 agents and includes all the great features you’d expect from a market leader who has spent 20 years working to delight the world’s largest contact centers.