Transforming enterprise contact centers: The Architecture for Cloud Experiences

With over three million agents using Cisco contact center solutions, it would be fair to say that if you called a contact center, there is a high chance that you probably spoke to an agent on a Cisco contact center platform. With its powerful voice features, customization capabilities, and enterprise-level scalability and stability, Cisco Contact Center Enterprise has been a key component of the customer experience strategy of many businesses for well over two decades.

As customer expectations have increased and business requirements evolved, enterprises are looking at adding more capabilities to their contact center. They are looking at increasing agent productivity, improving contact center efficiency and enhancing customer experience.

With increased agent attrition, tools to improve agent productivity are top of mind for many businesses. Customers want to connect with businesses with the same tools they use for social communications such as text, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and at the same time they want the business to understand the context of their interaction so that they do not have to repeat themselves.

The best of both worlds: cloud innovation while leveraging your current investments

Businesses want to avoid the pain of a forklift upgrade to a new architecture and the productivity loss that invariably comes with such transitions. Businesses need a solution where they can leverage the investments they have made, make best use of the expertise they have, and rapidly deploy new features that accelerate business outcomes.

Many of the requirements that businesses have today for their customer support function, such as digital channels, AI, and analytics are best provided by a cloud solution.

Integration with our native cloud digital communications platform (CPaaS) solution, Webex Connect, enables customers to contact businesses over the digital channel of choice. Businesses can also launch proactive digital engagement campaigns, personalized by customer journey insights, to provide each customer an experience that is tailored to their specific needs at a point in time. Digital self-service is an easy-to-build capability using Webex Connect, with a powerful low-code/no-code environment that enables call deflection and reduces costs.

Cisco has invested over $1.4 billion in acquisitions alone to create a powerful set of artificial intelligence capabilities. These services help increase agent productivity with features like Agent Answers that can provide recommended answers to customer queries in real-time as well as capturing post-call transcripts which enable features like sentiment analysis.

With many businesses considering customer experience a key differentiator, experience management is critical to monitoring, predicting, and acting. Experience management capabilities from Webex enable businesses to measure customer experiences, analyze the journey, and proactively improve customer experiences and business outcomes.

Access the full power of the Webex cloud portfolio with your enterprise contact center

Cisco’s Architecture for Cloud Experiences framework enables customers to have the best of both worlds – to leverage the investments they have already made in customizing their current Contact Center Enterprise solution to their requirements, while at the same time being able to take advantage of new services available in the Webex cloud.

Cisco provides two paths to achieve these capabilities. On-premises customers, using cloud augmentation with Cloud-Connected Contact Center Enterprise can incorporate these new experiences, while customers who are looking for a path to fully migrate to the cloud can easily migrate to Webex Contact Center Enterprise.

Partner with Cisco to map your enterprise’s personalized cloud innovation journey

Both these approaches enable digital transformation, provide the fastest time to value and the lowest pain of adoption. So, what should businesses do now? Rather than a forced migration when your business is not ready, Cisco recommends a three-step process:

1. Consider your contact center and collaboration needs today – and for the future
2. Decide which cloud-based services make sense now
3. Plan how to integrate cloud-based apps into your contact center – either with a hybrid, cloud-connected approach or with a migration to Webex Contact Center Enterprise

These approaches provide not only innovation, but also flexibility in how to deploy them. As the Webex platform continues to add new capabilities, the Architecture for Cloud Experiences enables Cisco’s Contact Center Enterprise customers to rapidly deploy them and provide their customers a differentiated experience.

Contact us today to start the discussion. Our experts are here to help you map out your best path forward to start getting all the benefits of cloud innovation for your enterprise contact center.

Learn more about the Webex Contact Center:

• Webex Contact Center unlocks digital customer engagement with powerful communications platform integration
• Break through the Noise with a Better Customer Experience: Announcing Contact Center Flex Plan 3.0
• Rethinking ‘contact center’ technology in the travel insurance industry 
• Embedding the Power of Data in Contact Centers to Create Super Agents
• Contact Center Innovation in the Age of the Customer