All-Star Acceleration – Experts Look at What’s Next for Contact Center Technology

Hope and Hype for Customer Service and Support Solutions — Insights from Cisco and Gartner Research

Recently, Cisco partnered with Gartner Research to create a set of deep insights on five subject areas that contact center practitioners and customer experience experts can leverage to guide their planning for the year ahead.

The resulting publication, Accelerating the Next Generation Contact Center, features five thought-provoking articles on matters critical to contact center decision makers. Each section has been carefully authored by Cisco leaders who are subject matter experts, to help guide those looking to understand what the key subjects are for consideration as the contact center has joined digital channels as the primary place of commerce and service in 2020 and beyond.

The articles are followed by a complimentary copy of the 2020 Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies report, which per our understanding tracks key technologies along their adoption cycle.

Let’s take a look at the all-star Cisco lineup of contact center experts:

Leaning In: The Future of Contact Center

Omar Tawakol leads off our article team. He’s the VP and General Manager of Cisco’s Contact Center Business Unit. Omar has built several cloud-based businesses and joined us from the Voicea acquisition in 2019.

In his article, Leaning In: The Future of Contact Center, Omar provides a broad landscape vision for our contact center business, highlighting four key areas of investment. He also describes how our solutions will “flatten the resource curve” in the contact center. The ultimate goal? Better customer experiences.

The Future of AI in Contact Centers

Mohamed El-Geish is the Director of Cisco Contact Center AI. He’s an accomplished inventor with ten patents in AI-related innovations. His article,The Future of AI, has an interesting twist – see if you can locate it!

Geish helps the reader navigate some of the important trends in AI and where they stand in the hype cycle. The reader will come away with insights on what to expect in the years ahead with this mega trend.

Hype vs. Hope: Customer Experience

Vinod Muthukrishnan is Chief Growth Officer for Cisco Contact Center. Vinod surely has one of the most interesting backgrounds on our team – he was once the chief navigation officer on a super-tanker and spent nine years on the high seas! How that journey motivated him to start CloudCherry, acquired by Cisco in 2019, is a thing of legend.

Vinod steps the reader through the reality of Hype vs. Hope: Customer Experience. His deep background in Voice of Customer solutions has manifested itself at Cisco in our Webex Experience Management capability. The reader will learn about predictive and pre-emptive customer experiences.

Why the Contact Center is More Critical Than Ever

As Director of Strategic Communications for the Cisco Contact Center business unit, I have the opportunity on a daily basis to talk with leading companies globally who are re-inventing their customer experiences based on the dual pronged strategy of digital and contact center innovation. Thinking though the problems I see being addressed has led to nine patents in contact center innovation over the years.

My basic thesis in Why the Contact Center is More Critical Than Ever is playing out in real-time as the contact center is undergoing a massive renaissance, and is emerged in a leading role in enterprise customer experience. The contact center will break free of a “cost to be managed” reputation, to one that is “asset to be leveraged”. Contact centers have truly become the “digital goalkeepers” of the organization, handling make or break customer experience exceptions that cannot be addressed in self-service.

The Six Essentials of the Customer Experience Platform of the Future

Batting cleanup for us is our Cisco Contact Center CTO Ryan Plant. Ryan is a veteran of cloud software development, bringing extensive experience to our Contact Center business unit. Ryan has been deeply involved in architecting our next generation CCaaS platform. In his article, entitled The Six Essentials of the Customer Experience Platform of the Future you’ll put on the hat of a CTO chartered to build a leading, modern software platform.

Ryan clearly explains why each of these six areas are so critical to modern customer service platform. And the good news? You don’t need to be a coder to understand the journey Ryan takes the reader through!

I recall for years always marveling at the All-Star Band that Ringo Starr assembled to tour every year – all the best players from different groups. In working on this project, I had a glimpse of how must have felt! Thanks to my colleagues Omar, Geish, Vinod, and Ryan for coming along on the ride to the next generation contact center!