The contact center as a service (CCaaS) industry is going through a profound change. Brands are now racing to keep pace with their customers’ demands for quick resolution to issues and easier ways to engage. Automation and AI are supposed to help, but in this new world of AI, it’s important not to lose sight that experience matters. A bad experience can cost a company lost revenue, customer loyalty and even brand reputation.
Webex powers customer experiences for many of the world’s leading brands. Webex is also renowned for its cloud-based collaboration suite and extensive experience in cloud calling with 14 million Webex Calling users. We have a decade of experience in AI with language intelligence, audio intelligence, and video Intelligence. At Webex, we realize the bar for customer experience is getting higher, so we are bringing our best innovations forward to help customers navigate this new age of CX and AI. We have infused our contact center solutions with the same level of quality, innovation, and reliability you’ve come to expect from Webex.
Our latest Webex Contact Center solution is self-learning and delivers an integrated experience across digital and voice channels. It provides proactive communications for customer alerts and self-service options, and when a customer needs to engage with a human agent, Webex ensures a seamless connection. It’s a single solution that supports all users as part of the customer experience journey, from the customer to the agent, supervisor, back-office, and IT. Our commitment is to help you deliver the best customer experience.
Throughout the customer engagement ecosystem – whether that is enhancing customer experiences, making agents more effective, or making the business more efficient, we leverage the power of purpose-built AI. The Cisco Webex AI Assistant works to help anticipate customer needs, resolve issues quickly, and deliver a rich experience.
One advantage of working with Webex is that we use both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Real-Time Media Models (RMMs) as part of our AI strategy. Most of the industry has leaned exclusively into LLMs, focusing on text: emails, messages, transcripts, and documents. We are also focusing on RMMs, which leverage data from media like voice and voice tone (audio) and reactions and gestures (video). The advantage of combining LMMs and RMMs is that the intelligence available to your contact center becomes that much richer. For example, if you can capture clean audio over a phone conversation, then the text transcription and call summarization are going to be more accurate. If your call quality is bad and you lose parts of the conversation, your summarization is incomplete, and the customer now must repeat themselves. Higher quality experiences can lead to higher customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and happier customers across the board.
“Deploying the right technology to enable employees to deliver top-notch customer service in the financial services industry is critical. At First Horizon Bank, we have a longstanding partnership with Cisco and have piloted Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center to empower our contact center agents – or as we call them, Virtual Bankers, to deliver memorable customer experiences.
Over the course of just weeks, we observed 4x improvement in time spent handling customer inquiries and have reported improved customer satisfaction scores from 4.8 to 4.9 on a 1-5 scale thanks to our Agent Wellness features alone.”
Jason O’Dell, VP, Voice Services Manager, First Horizon Bank
Speaking of CSAT scores, we realize that there’s real value in having visibility into your best scores as well as your lowest scores so you can make ongoing improvements. This is why we have developed automatic customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. This feature uses our native AI capabilities to predict post-interaction CSAT for customers, enabling contact centers to leverage every interaction for decision-making instead of the mere 3-10% of usual respondents to post-interaction surveys.
We have also been working on several innovations aimed at enhancing the daily operations within contact centers. Take, for instance, our new Topic Analytics feature, now available in beta, which leverages AI to identify the top reasons customers are calling into the contact center. With this insight, supervisors can craft automated workflows and digital engagement strategies that proactively address top call drivers, potentially eliminating the need for a call altogether. Imagine if you could significantly reduce call volume, freeing your agents to devote their attention to more complex, high-value customer interactions.
While automating more workflows sounds like a north star for organizations, the reality is there are still times when a human connection provides the best experience. In these situations, a handoff from virtual agent to human agent is a necessity. Handoffs like these can be a real point of frustration for a customer. Nobody likes having to repeat their issue.
But what if this cold handoff became a warm introduction to the human agent? This is where Conversation Summaries can help improve the experience. Utilizing AI, these summaries capture the essence of the initial exchange between the customer and the virtual agent. This ensures that when the conversation is transferred to a live agent over the phone, all the relevant context is preserved. As a result, customers are spared the frustration of having to repeat themselves, creating a more streamlined and satisfying support experience – and a faster time to resolution.
Conversation summaries also create continuity when a call is accidentally dropped – we’ve all had that situation when we’ve entered the infamous cell phone dead zone. With Dropped Call Summaries, the next agent will be able to pick up right where the customer left off. All the exciting features we just shared including Conversation Summaries, Dropped Call Summaries, Automatic Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Scores, and Topic Analytics, are currently available in beta.
We are taking it a step further by providing agents Suggested Responses, powered by generative AI. This new feature, expected to be available in beta in H2 CY 2024, analyzes digital interactions and automatically suggests the best response for the contact center agent based on the context of the conversation. Again, AI works to enhance the customer experience by increasing efficiency and effectiveness.
To optimize agent performance, I am excited to share that core quality management features from Webex Workforce Optimization will be part of the new Webex Contact Center license. Additionally, as part of Webex’s focus on delivering a steady stream of innovation to customers, new, deeper integrations with leading CRM providers will be arriving in Summer 2024. These integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and ServiceNow will seamlessly enable agents to process customer information without delay and manage advanced call-related tasks directly from an integrated desktop. This ultimately simplifies workflows and improves overall efficiency.
While I am primarily focused on our Webex Contact Center and AI in this blog, I do want to share one other piece of advice. With the tremendous amounts of data required to enable intelligent AI experiences – comes a tremendous amount of responsibility to secure those experiences while maintaining trust with your customers.
Cisco has extensive experience in providing enterprise-grade security, and this positions us as a trusted partner for companies seeking robust protection alongside their pursuit of CX strategies with AI. Cisco’s Responsible AI framework outlines our commitment to AI governance, with security, privacy, and human rights at the forefront of our product development. This strong security foundation, coupled with Cisco’s reputation, builds a level of trust that is critical when competing in a market where security and privacy are top concerns.
As companies pursue their CX strategies with AI, we realize there is a lot to consider. We also realize that companies have different needs and might be in different phases of transformation. To answer this diversity of needs, Webex offers a portfolio of customer experience solutions, which all leverage the best of our UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS capabilities. We designed different options that meet the needs of contact center agents, employees, and teams because we believe that great customer experience is everyone’s responsibility. Below are Webex Customer Experience solution offerings:
If you’re thinking about taking your customer experience to the next level … I highly recommend that you consider Webex Contact Center. We are ready to help you on your CX transformation journey. To learn more, visit our Webex Contact Center page and you can even get started today.
If you are an existing Webex Contact Center customer, we encourage you to sign up for our AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center beta program to gain access to new AI-powered features.
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