Customer Journey Solutions Release 12.0 has arrived

Contact centers play an essential role in shaping a company’s direction and have become a strategic imperative to driving customer loyalty, innovation and business growth. No other organization touches customers more closely.  The agent experience in particular has a direct correlation with how your customers make buying decisions. In some cases, they are the only interaction customers will have with your organization. Therefore, empowering agents with modern and intuitive tools that enable them to have the right information and resources at their fingertips, helps drive quicker resolution closure and create more meaningful customer interactions that can last a lifetime.

Many of our contact center customers have shared their challenges with us, on how they strive to improve agent and supervisor productivity, improve first contact resolution, and enhance their customers’ experience. At the same time, their IT staff needs to be able to manage the contact center efficiently and cost-effectively, while ensuring compliance with the latest security standards and protecting the privacy of their customers’ data.

To help our customers address these challenges, I’m thrilled to announce the availability of Release 12.0, which includes enhancements to our on-premises and hosted solutions: Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE), Packaged Contact Center Enterprise (Packaged CCE), Unified Contact Center Express (Unified CCX), and Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center (HSC-CC).

Release 12.0 includes essential capabilities that enable our customers to:

Deliver next generation seamless, omni-channel customer interactions

Improve first contact resolution by better leveraging agent resources

Improve agent and supervisor productivity, collaboration, and workflows

Manage larger, more scalable systems to improve IT resource productivity and reduce management complexity

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key 12.0 features:

Consistent UX for admin resources – We’ve significantly simplified the admin experience for the Packaged CCE offering to enable IT to manage both Cisco and partner solutions from a “single pane of glass” portal, and provide the same UX as the other Cisco collaboration products. This saves admin time, reduces complexity, and provides a more intuitive and productive management experience.

Modern agent omni-channel experience – We’re introducing a beautiful next-gen browser-based desktop client that supports multiple channels of interactions, provides enhanced chat capabilities, gives agents quick access to subject matter experts, and provides a more intuitive experience that allows them to stay more engaged, so they can deliver superior service to their customers. In addition, the Unified CCX solution now supports chat with Facebook Messenger.

Better team collaboration – Supervisors can now send broadcast messages to their teams, and 1-1 chat is available for collaboration between agents and supervisors, and with colleagues outside the contact center. This makes it easy for supervisors to provide guidance and coaching, and enables agents to easily reach subject matter experts to drive quicker issue resolution.

Advanced supervisor capabilities – Supervisors on the Unified CCX now have new capabilities to more effectively manage their teams, contact center calendars and applications, and outbound campaigns. This improves overall contact center productivity and customer satisfaction.

Increased scalability – The number of agents supported on Unified CCE and HCS-CC has increased up to 24,000 – a doubling in scale allowing customers to have even larger deployments with a single instance. For the Packaged CCE, we’ve increased it to 12,000 agents, bringing all the benefits of the Packaged CCE solution to a larger set of customers. Increasing scale enables our customers to consolidate multiple contact centers which reduces infrastructure costs and complexity, and enables them to better leverage agent resources across sites.

Support for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services – A popular request from many of our customers, VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services support is now available for Unified CCE, Packaged CCE and Unified CCX deployments.

Higher security – We’ve enhanced security for Unified CCE by securing end-to-end transport of PII data, simplifying certificate management and monitoring, de-coupling authorization dependency from Active Directory, and much more.

These enhancements prove our commitment to helping our customers deliver more enriching customer experiences, achieve faster resolution closure, manage larger, more scalable systems to improve IT resource productivity, and reduce total cost of ownership.

For more information on Release 12.0 read our release note, and visit our website.