Cisco invests in customer experience with new connected, cognitive, and cloud contact center capabilities

In an age where customer experience is a strategic differentiator, it made sense for this year’s Contact Center Summit to be focused on Creating Magical Customer Experiences. A few weeks ago, we gathered with over 1000 Cisco sellers, partners and customers to share our vision of how we plan to transform contact centers from cost centers to rich customer journeys powered by intelligence, creating super agents augmented by AI, ML, Bots, and NLP, and transforming static routing schemes to dynamic, real-time, personalized experiences.

At the event, we also announced enhancements to our cloud-based Webex Contact Center solution, making it highly scalable, more globally available, more connected with the rest of the Webex portfolio, and more cognitive by bringing new ways of improving agent and customer experiences.

Before I share the highlights of the event, I’d like to give a huge thank you to all our customers, partners, and colleagues who helped make this a magical event, with record attendance up over 40% from last year.

Highlights

Our Customers

This year, we invited a select group of customers who enjoyed the transparency as we shared our vision and roadmaps with them, and demonstrated the delivery of promises we made last year. One of the highlights was having Tamara Jensen, Senior Technical Product Manager at T-Mobile, share with the audience how Cisco Contact Center solutions have helped T-Mobile reduce agent attrition and customer churn by half, almost triple their customer base, and increase their stock price, by delivering proactive and personalized service to their customers.

Next generation cognitive contact center

We kicked off the event sharing our vision of a cognitive contact center, highlighting two of Cisco’s recent acquisitions – Voicea and CloudCherry. Amy Chang, EVP and General Manager, Cisco Collaboration, was joined by Voicea co-founder and CEO Omar Tawakaol and CloudCherry co-founder and CEO Vinod Vinod Muthukrishnan to demonstrate the next generation cognitive contact center.

• Voicea’s Enterprise Voice Assistant (EVA) is bringing advanced speech recognition and transcription directly into the entire Webex portfolio. Applying Voicea technology into the contact center, will help customers route calls more naturally to the right agent, create more intelligent moments between agents and their customers, wrap up the call more efficiently, and enable better agent training and coaching, among many other benefits.
• CloudCherry’s customer engagement management (CEM) solution brings voice of the customer (VOC) and journey mapping capabilities directly into the customer experience. By embedding CloudCherry CEM into the contact center, customers can track, measure, and analyze the customer journey across the entire value lifecycle, well before and after the contact center interaction. This will enable them to deliver predictive and proactive customer experiences that will impact business outcomes like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT).

On-premise innovation is strong

We’re not just investing in cognitive capabilities. We demonstrated our commitment to invest in our on-premises portfolio – we increased scale and provided a single-pane-of-glass for administration, among many other enhancements, while continuing to provide innovative and flexible paths for our customers to move to the cloud when they’re ready. We do this with the Flex Plan commercial offer which makes buying and deploying easy using a subscription based consumption model, and with advanced cloud services powered by data analytics and AI capabilities that all our customers can use – whether they’re using Webex Contact Center in the cloud, or our on-premises solutions.

Unified Webex platform

The contact center is the most inter-connected organization and application within the enterprise. This is why we believe having an integrated collaboration suite is critical to any business. Cisco’s “full stack” collaboration portfolio helps our customers deliver seamless experiences in, out, and across their value chain, to improve workplace efficiencies and serve their customers better. By integrating Webex Contact Center with Webex Calling and Webex Teams natively in the cloud, our customers have a one-stop-shop for enterprise-grade voice, higher quality calling, and the added value of managing everything, including their devices, from a single intuitive portal – Webex Control Hub.

So what’s next?

To deliver on our cognitive contact center vision, Omar Tawakol will be taking over as Vice President & General Manager of the Cisco Contact Center business unit, reporting directly to Amy Chang. Omar is an MIT and Stanford engineering graduate, entrepreneur, and large company veteran. With his strong technology leadership and experience in AI and cloud-based service models, Omar is the ideal executive to take the Cisco Contact Center portfolio into the future.

We’re really excited to be bringing both Voicea and CloudCherry teams into the Cisco Collaboration family, and about all the advancements we’re bringing to the Cisco Contact Center portfolio to help our customers deliver world-class customer experiences.

To learn more about Webex Contact Center, read our eBook

Learn more:

• To learn more about Cisco Contact Center, visit our website
• Announcing the New Global, Scalable, and Cognitive Cloud-Based Webex Contact Center
• Don’t Let Your Contact Center Fall Into the Complexity Trap