Categories: Collaboration Customer Experience

Cisco Receives 2020 Contact Center Technology Award from CUSTOMER Magazine

Cisco Webex Contact Center CCaaS honored for improving customer service technology and customer experience.

Award Winner Second Year in a Row

I’m excited to announce that Webex Contact Center was among the 2020 Contact Center Technology Award winners, presented by CUSTOMER Magazine this month. This award honors vendors that have embraced technology as a key tool for customer service excellence and distinguish their success as innovators, thought leaders, and market movers in the contact center and customer care industries.

Let me share some of the reasons Webex Contact Center received this recognition.

Cloud Agility

Webex Contact Center is our omnichannel contact center Software as a Service for small, mid-sized, and distributed contact centers.  It’s powered by the public cloud, making it highly scalable, flexible, secure, and agile. It uses artificial intelligence and data insights to power contact center performance, and empower agents with greater knowledge and context, enabling them to deliver enriched and more meaningful engagements with their customers.

Webex Contact Center is built on the unique Webex Platform for Contact Center. This open platform architecture enables our customers to easily add and integrate with advanced cloud applications such as AI-based virtual agents, advanced data analytics, workforce optimization, and other Webex applications, including Webex Experience Management, Webex Calling, and Webex Control Hub.

This multi-tenant approach benefits Cisco Contact Center customers in two ways. First, it enables all customers – whether cloud or on-premises, to take advantage of advanced applications, continuous feature delivery, and a low-disruption path to the cloud. Second, by having integrations between Webex applications, collaboration within the organization is more seamless, reduces costs, and makes solution acquisition and management easier for our customers.

Business Continuity

With the increase in customer inquiry and call volumes, and millions of agents now working from home, many businesses have experienced a massive disruption in operating their business.  Some have needed a contact center for the very first time to set up an emergency “hot line,” and others have needed to augment and scale their existing one to offload call volumes. In the first 60 days of the pandemic, we were able to quickly deploy and expand contact center solutions and remote agents in less than five days for more than 150 businesses who had an urgent need.

Here’s what some of these customers have to say:

“Webex Contact Center enabled us to provide and respond to the immediate needs of the business, while maintaining social distancing and work from home. We were able to provide scale above and beyond what we could have established with an on-premises solution.”

“Webex Contact Center has been an enabler for remote working during COVID. Without it, we would have had to close our contact center for longer.”

“Webex Contact Center has allowed us to adapt “agile working” during the current pandemic.”

“Webex Contact Center provided a quick and easy way to handle the call volume coming in, and keep track of trends so we could forecast and plan accordingly. It provided all the right metrics to report to the management team.”

Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence

Over the past two years, Cisco acquired AI companies Voicea and CloudCherry to accelerate our Webex Contact Center AI practice. To deliver AI solutions quickly to customers, we use a “best of breed” approach, using our own in-house AI, and AI from partners like Google Cloud.  For example, Virtual Agents for voice and chat are powered by Google Cloud CCAI and provide our customers with new ways of responding to their customers using AI-powered self-service technologies.  With the rise of digital interactions, automated self-service has become the preferred method for consumers to interact with a business. Self-service enables a contact center to offload incoming inquires, while providing customers with faster, 24/7 service. According to research advisory firm Nemertes, companies experience a 37% increase in CSAT scores when using AI for customer contact.

Coming up this fall, we’ll be introducing Agent Answers, an intelligent agent assistant that displays context-driven suggestions and guidance in real-time to contact center agents as they are talking to or chatting with a customer, minimizing agent research time, while improving first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.​

In addition, using Cisco’s own AI we’ve delivered Agent Call Transcription. Powered by the same groundbreaking speech engine that delivers transcripts and captions on the Webex Meetings platform, this unique feature provides real-time transcription of the agent/customer conversation, giving agents a full transcript and summary of each call. This allows agents to focus on what the customer is saying while minimizing post-call wrap-up time and ensuring transaction accuracy and follow-up with the customer.  Agent Call Transcription is currently in field trials on Cisco Contact Center platforms and in development for Webex Contact Center.

Bringing CX to the Contact Center Forefront

In January, we introduced Webex Experience Management (formerly CloudCherry), our next-generation AI-powered customer experience management SaaS.  This solution provides a true 360-degree view of the customer journey bringing tremendous insight to all customer touchpoints across the organization.

Cisco will be uniquely embedding these capabilities directly into Webex Contact Center, beginning with post-call surveys via SMS and email. With this information, organizations are empowered with customer sentiment data in real-time, providing them with a better understanding of what customers are experiencing, and enabling them to make informed decisions and take action on how to improve those experiences to drive higher NPS, CSAT, and CES scores. More integrations with the agent desktop will be coming out in the near future.

This is Just the Beginning

This is just the beginning of how we’re enhancing Webex Contact Center to help organizations create greater efficiencies, improve productivity, and achieve more meaningful relationships with their customers that improve loyalty and financial outcomes. Keep an eye out for more continuous innovation from Cisco Contact Center!

Read the Webex Contact Center ebook to learn more.

Learn more about Cisco Contact Center solutions.

Aragon Research names Cisco as a leader in intelligent contact centers.
Read their latest report:  Aragon Research Globe for Intelligent Contact Centers, 2020

 

Learn More

Cisco is Identified as a Leader in Aragon’s Globe for Intelligent Contact Center

Cisco Wins UC Today’s Best Collaboration Platform for 2020

Cisco Announces Work From Home Webex Contact Center Quick Deployment

A Message to Our Customers: Your Agents Can Work From Home with Your Cisco Contact Center Solution

Award Info

This 15th-annual Contact Center Technology Award, presented by CUSTOMER Magazine, honors vendors and technologies that have embraced technology as a key tool for customer service excellence. This award distinguishes their success as innovators, thought leaders, and market movers in the contact center and customer care industries.

 

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Published by
David Wiener

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