Delivering superior customer experiences is more important now than it has ever been for companies of all sizes. In a study by Bain & Company, a 10x disparity was found between how brands perceive their customer service and how customers perceive that same service. Their survey of 362 firms found that although 80% of the firms believed that they delivered a “superior service” only 8% of the firm’s customers believed that. This massive gap is driving a large investment in re-building how companies deliver customer experiences. In our own Cisco survey of 700 contact center executives across 7 countries, 79% agreed that customer experience has a significant impact on business results. Indeed, in a significant number of enterprises, measures of customer experience, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), have made their way into executive compensation. All of this is driving significant change in our industry.
This should come as no surprise to any of us. But the real question is “how do we create those experiences that help us produce the results we desire?” These are the conversations my team and I are having with our customers as we collaborate with them to better understand their business needs. At Cisco we believe it starts from the inside out, beginning with your employees. When you delight and empower your employees, it has a domino effect on how your customers feel about your company, resulting in greater satisfaction, repeat business, and improved NPS.
This is why I’m excited about the announcements we’re making today at Cisco Live in Barcelona. We’re introducing many new capabilities that help our customers enjoy greater efficiencies and customer insight, and we’re providing a seamless path for large contact centers to move their operations to the cloud.
Announcement Highlights
- Integration of new cognitive capabilities powered by Voicea and Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI that turn your agents into “super agents”.
- Introducing Webex Experience Management (formerly CloudCherry), our new customer experience management solution that uniquely integrates with Cisco Contact Center solutions.
- Webex Contact Center Enterprise, our new cloud contact center solution for large enterprises is now globally available.
- Our latest and greatest release 12.5 for Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Express is now available and includes a variety of compelling features including agent desktop integrations with Voicea (in field trial) and Webex Experience Management.
Creating AI Augmented “Super Agents”
According to a study by Global Data, improved agent satisfaction and reduced agent turnover were the number one benefit of deploying AI technology in a contact center. In addition, the cost to onboard a new resource is high – often averaging between $10,000 and $20,000 per agent. This is why Cisco is focused on making life easier and more productive for your agents by infusing artificial intelligence into their everyday experiences. This will lead to more productive agents, lower agent attrition and therefore better customer service. One of the ways in which we accomplish this is by leveraging best-of-breed technology that combines our in-house AI capabilities through recent acquisitions like Voicea, along with best-in-class partner technology such as Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI.
For example, our new Voicea integration leverages accurate speech-to-text technology to provide a call transcript and summary to automate the agent’s call wrap-up, saving them time and ensuring no action item goes unaddressed. And we’ve made sure call highlights can be automatically synced with your CRM applications so that agents and supervisors have all your customer information in one place.
Our AI-enabled self-service capabilities, built with Google Dialogflow, leverage AI and NLU to improve experiences for both agents and customers. Customers who are calling in to a contact center enjoy a more intuitive experience for handling simple requests and agents are relieved of repetitive and mundane tasks that can easily be handled by an IVR or a chatbot, or virtual assistant.
How Well Do You Know Your Customers?
Last fall we completed our acquisition of CloudCherry, and now we’re introducing Webex Experience Management as Cisco’s first customer experience management (CEM) solution. We’re doing a lot more than just providing our customers with an incredible AI-powered CEM platform that enables them to do a meaningful analysis of their customers’ feedback and journey experiences across their company.
To start, we’re going to uniquely blend it together with the contact center, revolutionizing agent and customer experiences. Contact center agents now have real-time customer sentiment data at their fingertips, empowering them to truly personalize their engagement with the customer with greater awareness, creating better relationships and business outcomes.
As consumers, think about how powerful it would be if the agent you were speaking to, knew exactly how you felt about their company and was aware of your past experiences (both good and bad), and previous purchases, without you having to tell them. And wouldn’t you appreciate an immediate and personalized follow-up to any feedback you gave across any interaction channel? With Webex Experience Management this is now possible. All this context will turn contact center agents into world-class journey guides that know your path and are there to help you when the need arises.
Meeting the Unique Needs of Larger Contact Centers
With the help from our large enterprise customers, we created a solution they can trust in the cloud – Webex Contact Center Enterprise. This robust cloud contact center solution scales to tens of thousands of agents and provides a practical low-disruption path to the cloud, combining scalability, feature depth, and security.
Designed for the needs of large and sophisticated enterprises, Webex Contact Center Enterprise is Cisco owned, managed, operated in our own data centers, and powered by our own cloud infrastructure, while adhering to Cisco’s market-leading security and privacy standards. It’s feature-rich, includes APIs for integration with 3rd party applications, and has a full complement of advanced applications available as cloud services. Webex Contact Center Enterprise is available globally in Cisco data centers across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. It is a unique SaaS offering that is part multi-instance running in Cisco data centers with multi-tenant components on the public cloud. Unlike previous HCS offerings, a basic account can be provisioned in hours, not months, and many of its features enjoy continuous and seamless upgrades.
To learn more about this impressive cloud solution, stay tuned for my upcoming webinar with Sheila McGee Smith, Principal Analyst and President of McGee-Smith Analytics.
Cloud-Powering our On-Premises Portfolio
Our goal, whether our customers own their contact center system or subscribe to it as a service, is to help them benefit from innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud data analytics. This is evidenced by our latest release 12.5 which makes it easy for customers to integrate their contact center with advanced cloud services such as cloud-based analytics reporting tools and integrations with Voicea for voice transcription, and Webex Experience Management for customer feedback metrics – right at the agent desktop.
What’s Next?
I’m both confident and excited about the opportunities these new offers will bring to our customers. We will continue to evolve our portfolio and add new capabilities that will benefit all of our customers and how they deliver memorable experiences to their customers.
To learn more about Cisco Contact Center solutions, visit our website
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