Cisco Enhances Contact Center Portfolio

Today Cisco announced integrations with Voicea and Google Contact Center AI; Webex Experience Management (formerly CloudCherry), which empowers contact center staff with real-time visibility into how customers are feeling; and Cisco Webex Contact Center Enterprise.

"For decades, Cisco has partnered with the world's largest contact centers to solve their most complex problems. Today, we are making possible an entirely new and improved customer and agent experience," said Omar Tawakol, vice president and general manager of contact center at Cisco Collaboration, in a statement. "Through the application of AI, we will help contact centers of all sizes radically transform their customer's experiences to meet the demands of today’s sophisticated consumer."

With the integration of Voicea, as a contact center agent talks to a customer on the phone, Voicea provides a call transcript and summary to automate the agent's call wrap-up. Additionally, call highlights can be automatically synched with CRM systems so agents and supervisors can reference past support issues.

Through an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, Cisco is bringing CCAI-enabled capabilities (such as conversational IVR, chatbots, and agent assist) to its contact center portfolio. With conversational IVR, businesses can provide natural, conversational experiences to the contact center. Customers can say what they're looking to do and, using Google's natural language understanding, the customer can either self-serve simple tasks or be routed to the best available agent for more complex tasks.

"When it comes to the contact center, Cisco and Google Cloud share a common goal: improve the customer experience while increasing operational efficiency. That's why we're working together so closely to build an end-to-end solution for our customers," said Antony Passemard, conversational AI and CCAI lead at Google Cloud, in a statement. "By combining Cisco's rich contact center technology with Google Cloud's CCAI NLU and speech capabilities, businesses will be able to reduce average handle time, help agents provide the best possible customer service, and ultimately increase the brand's [net promoter and customer satisfaction] scores."

Webex Experience Management blends contact center data and sentiment data. It empowers contact center staff with real-time visibility into how customers are feeling and identifies at risk customers so organizations can close the loop and be proactive in serving them better.?

Cisco also launched Webex Contact Center Enterprise, a cloud solution for large contact centers based on Cisco's Contact Center Enterprise product and built on the Webex Platform for Contact Center, an open and flexible multitenant cloud architecture. It supports up to 24,000 agents.