Driving business growth for customers
2020 has been an insane and yet exciting year for Cisco and our customers. This post-pandemic era we now live in has found us hard at work, helping our customers adjust to the “new normal” of the workplace. From enabling remote working, preparing for safe return to the office, and continuing to nurture your customer relationships by being responsive and making it easy for them to reach your business when they want and how they want.
During the first 60 days of the pandemic, we were able to enable more than 21,000 remote agents, expand contact centre solutions, and quickly deploy Webex Contact Center in less than five days for more than 150 businesses around the world who had an urgent need. All while we continued to innovate and advance our contact centre portfolio to help customers drive business growth and competitive differentiation.
Let me share the five most compelling elements of our solution set.
1. The complete Collaboration portfolio advantage
Cisco had been delivering world-class contact centre solutions for decades to more than 30,000 businesses and more than 3 million agents globally. We offer a full-featured, end-to-end contact center solution with flexible deployment options, whether cloud, on-premises, or a bridge between the two. Our cloud solutions are based on Webex, one of the world’s best known, scalable, and reliable cloud platforms, responsible for supporting >380 million meetings a day.
A key advantage of our Collaboration portfolio is that our customers can combine their contact centre with enterprise-grade cloud calling, meetings, team collaboration, customer experience management solutions, and audio/video devices/headsets to create a seamlessly integrated and consistent company-wide collaboration experience. Everything can be provisioned and managed from the Webex Control Hub in the cloud, which creates operational efficiencies and reduces costs.
Our platform is open, which enables our customers to take advantage of all Webex applications and third-party business applications to further enhance agent and customer experiences.
This benefits Cisco contact centre cloud and on-premises customers by enabling them to take advantage of advanced applications, continuous feature delivery, and a low-disruption path to the cloud. Having integrations between Webex applications, not only makes collaboration between back-office and front-office employees more seamless, it reduces costs and makes solution acquisition and management easier for our customers.
2. A clear path to cloud
Earlier this year we launched our suite of cloud contact centre solutions – Webex Contact Center, our omni-channel Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) for small, mid-sized, and distributed contact centres, available globally, and Webex Contact Center Enterprise, a robust, scalable, cloud contact centre solution that meets the unique and sophisticated needs of very large enterprises.
Our cloud solutions are highly scalable, flexible, and secure, and use artificial intelligence and data insights to power contact centre performance, and give agents greater knowledge and context so they can deliver enriched and more meaningful engagements with their customers.
3. Industry leading
This year we were thrilled that our contact centre portfolio and strategy was acknowledged for the second year in a row by globally recognized industry analyst firm Aragon Research. In their 2020 Aragon Globe for Intelligent Contact Center, Cisco was identified as a leader in its Intelligent Contact Center category. According to the report authored by Aragon Research lead analyst Jim Lundy: “Cisco, a leader in UCC, has made a series of announcements in 2019 that strengthened its overall focus on contact center, with AI at the center.”
4. Artificial Intelligence
Over the past two years, Cisco acquired AI companies Voicea and CloudCherry to accelerate our Webex Contact Center AI practice. We use a “best of breed” approach, using our own in-house AI, and AI technology from partners like Google Cloud to bring AI innovation to our customers. For example, Virtual Agents for voice and online 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, while offloading incoming inquires to the contact centre.
Read our announcement about the latest artificial intelligence innovations to our contact centre portfolio.
5. Customer experience
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.
We have uniquely embedded these capabilities directly in the contact centre desktop, empowering agents and supervisors with customer sentiment data in real-time, providing them a well-rounded picture of how customers are feeling and what they’re doing. For example, you might be able to see from a customer’s tweets that they have been going through a stressful situation. Their last chat interaction surfaced that they’ve been frustrated with impersonal support in the past. Proactively equipped with this information, you’re much more empowered to provide the best empathetic help they need to stay a loyal customer.
More to come
I’m excited about the opportunities these innovations will bring to our customers. We will continue to evolve our portfolio and add new capabilities that will help organizations improve productivity, efficiencies, and more meaningful relationships with their customers that lead to loyalty and financial outcomes.
Learn more about Cisco Contact Center solutions here.
