Increase Customer Engagement with Webex Contact Center

At Webex, we’re passionate about empowering companies to be able to create intelligent, personalized connections with their customers. Customer engagement

And for decades, Cisco has provided contact center solutions that power the customer service function of some of the world’s largest customer-centric brands. That started with providing market-leading voice quality for customers to engage by phone when they wanted high-touch support. But today, customers want far more – they want to reach out at any time, and not only through voice but also via any digital channel. Sometimes they want to interact directly with a live agent, sometimes they just want to message with an intelligent virtual agent for a quick response (they key word here being intelligent).

Connected customer journeys with Webex Connect

One of our latest innovations in the Webex contact center portfolio is the integration of the market-leading Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) solution, Webex Connect, into our contact center product. Part of our 2021 acquisition of imimobile, Webex Connect instantly gave us access to a wide variety of customer communication channels with a highly scalable infrastructure (and I really mean highly scalable: Webex Connect processes over 15 BILLION messages per year!).

Since May 2022, Webex Connect has been the engine that powers all digital channels in Webex Contact Center. Before the end of 2022, we will extend it to Webex Contact Center Enterprise and to our on-premises Unified/Packaged Contact Center Enterprise products too.

With the launch of the new Contact Center Flex 3.0 offer in May, we are now including Webex Connect in all contact center product subscriptions. That’s right: by bringing both our flagship communications platform as a service (CPaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) products together, Webex has created a powerful solution that gives companies the ability to orchestrate omnichannel, connected customer journeys.

Webex Connect provides a low-code environment that allows businesses to orchestrate customer journeys across digital channels in a centralized manner. Its powerful, visual workflow design tool can be used by contact center professionals to easily orchestrate the customer experience they want to deliver. The workflow tool will also appeal to software development teams, as they can use it in combination with a rich API set to create even more advanced applications.

Increase customer engagement with AI-infused customer journeys

In addition to creating customer journey workflows, companies can also enable AI-powered bots to automate intelligent and personalized interactions with customers across digital channels including chat, text, and social messaging.

Using the Bot Builder, companies can easily create Question and Answer (Q&A) bots and task bots. Q&A bots, as the name suggests, provide answers to frequently asked questions using AI and natural language processing (NLP) based on an existing knowledge base. Task bots can automate interactions with business systems such as checking account balances, recent transactions, placing orders, confirming shipment status, or scheduling or cancelling appointments.

While the automation of interactions via workflows and AI-powered bots is needed to increase customer satisfaction and reduce the load on contact center agents, many use cases will at some point require the contact to be transferred to a human agent for additional support. Webex Contact Center provides a seamless transition from digital automation to a live agent interaction, with the full customer context being passed to the agent in the Webex Contact Center agent desktop. The unified inbox on the Webex Contact Center agent desktop has been expanded to empower agents to handle digital channel contacts, in addition to voice calls.

The updated Webex Contact Center solution also provides reporting and analytics on digital channel interactions. Moreover, journey data insights displayed in Webex Contact Center can capture every step and detail of the omnichannel customer journey – relevant activities while browsing the company’s website, bot interactions, new transactions on sales or CRM systems, or even the most recent interactions with contact center agents. The rich data available from these customer journey insights can be used by companies to drive better customer experiences.

Better reliability, scalability, and lower channel usage costs

Finally, there is an additional bonus from the integration between Webex Connect and Webex Contact Center that is a key differentiator and value-add for our customers. Imimobile, now a part of Webex by Cisco, made tremendous strides to build its industry-leading CPaaS platform over the years and is one out of only two tier 1 providers of SMS services in North America, as well as a tier 1 provider in the UK and Germany. This means we have a direct relationship with all tier 1 operators, unlike other vendors who would have to rely on middlemen, additional potential points of failure and delays to deliver similar features.

From a customer perspective, this unique Webex value-add translates into better reliability, scalability, support and – as importantly – lower usage costs for customers in the region.

While we are excited by the innovation we are bringing to market with our Webex Connect (CPaaS) and Webex Contact Center (CCaaS) integration, we are not stopping there. Webex will continue to expand the solution and its feature set to deliver more value to customers.

P.S. I get a ton of questions about how we leverage Webex Connect in our overall collaboration portfolio. I’ll use the remainder of this blog to address a few of the common questions.

1. Every contact center subscription gets Webex Connect. You are now free to integrate it with your self-service applications and create custom workflows without any dependency on the contact center product.
2. For now, only Webex Contact Center uses Webex Connect for queuing digital channels to our agents. Our other contact center products will get a similar queuing capability by the end of 2022, but customers can leverage self-service applications of Webex Connect today.
3. Webex still has a CPaaS-only offer (Webex Connect) for those customers who are interested in it. And yes, the two offers can exist in the same customer (we will simply redirect digital channel usage to the Webex Connect subscription, so you don’t pay more than you need).

Learn more about the Webex Contact Center:

• A new era of customer experience:  Cisco named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Contact Center as a Service
• The cloud contact center and the future of customer experience (CX)
• Less Work, More Leads: New Webex Integrations with Eloqua and Salesforce;;;; New Webex Integrations with Eloqua and Salesforce