The Future of Customer Experience Begins Now

The WebexOne series highlights a wave of Webex innovation to drive experiences that are 10x better than in-person interactions, help organizations collaborate seamlessly, and transform their employees and customer experiences to power an inclusive future for all.

The All-New Webex Contact Center Lays the Foundation for the Next Generation of Customer Experiences

If customer experience wasn’t important enough already, among the many things 2020 has taught us is that it is the essential ingredient to sustained business success. And throughout the year, the physical world was impacted such that a significant increase in digital interactions and an elevated status for contact centers came to be.

We’re excited to announce last week’s launch at WebexOne of the all-new Cisco Webex® Contact Center – a truly next generation cloud contact center.

See the all-new Webex Contact Center in action:

What’s so NEW about the all new Webex Contact Center?

Digital-first customer experiences — when and how customers want

Today’s consumers love messaging as a preferred way of communicating with each other. They now expect that same ease when communicating with businesses. Since digital interactions have increased by an estimated 40% for the average business, support for SMS, Messenger, chat, and social media is essential. With the new Webex Contact Center, customers can connect through the channels of their choice. In addition to making it easier for consumers to message support, the new platform makes it easy for agents to message back and track those communications across channels.

End-to-End Customer Experience Management

In today’s world where customer experience can make or break a brand, capturing customer feedback while it is top of mind is essential. With the new Webex Contact Center, we’ve integrated Webex Experience Management post-call surveys which can be sent to customers via text, email, or IVR so you can get immediate feedback about their experience. In addition, digital “listening posts” can be deployed to capture customer sentiment at any point in the customer journey – and these key insights can be delivered right to your agents at their desktop – in real time.

Your agents are fully empowered with context about how your customers are experiencing your brand and can personalize their interaction accordingly during the interaction. For example, customer experience journey context displayed on the agent desktop and customer experience analytics reports that capture customer feedback trends and allow for proactive, closed-loop response.

See Cisco Contact Center Chief Growth Officer Vinod Muthukrishnan’s WebexOne session “What’s shaping your customer experiences?” to learn more about these capabilities and where we’re headed next with experience management.

The all-new Webex Contact Center agent desktop with integrated Webex Experience Management customer experience feedback history

Intuitive Agent Experiences and Super-Agent Intelligence

We worked with real-life contact center agents and our own UI experts to build an extensible, cloud-native, intuitive agent desktop. The result is an ideal central command center for agents to provide the best possible customer experiences. Its fresh, modern, widget-based design allows agents and administrators to have everything they need at their fingertips provided in a single intuitive user interface. Optional integrated Webex Workforce Optimization provides tools for workforce management, quality management, and workforce analytics.

The advent of AI has made it possible to make an agent’s daily work much more productive. The most successful approach to deploying AI has been to augment an agent’s skill by first removing the simple repetitive tasks and handing those to a voice bot, while then playing a support role for the complex tasks more suited to human agents. The result is that an agent gets recommendations from the AI on how to solve a customer problem so that consumers don’t have to wait through long hold times. This fusion of human and AI results in natural, fast, and easy around-the-clock self-service.

See Cisco Contact Center AI product management lead Nikki Heyder’s WebexOne session “Artificial intelligence: the real power behind super agents” to explore these solutions.

Webex CC - FB-Widgets - Dark Mode — The all-new Webex Contact Center agent desktop features light and dark mode options. Widget-based design allows integration of third-party applications to provide agent’s most-used tools in a single interface.

Next-Generation, Fully Customizable Platform

The existence of a CPaaS industry (Communications Platform as a Service) has trained customers to expect APIs to customize their application. Gone are the days where a solution would only be customized through professional services. The all-new Webex Contact Center is built on microservices, and we have adopted an API-first approach for some of the components of the platform. Having said that, sometimes programming an API requires the participation of a developer skillset that isn’t always available. The low-code/no-code movement has begun to make it possible for business operations users to customize the way an application works without waiting on a developer to be available.

The simplicity of our management tools such as the drag-and-drop flow control builder empowers non-technical business users to alter workflows without burdening IT resources. An open, API-first approach allows ultimate extensibility.

In addition to making it easy to drive workflows, the new platform comes with integrations with business applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zendesk. These integrations reduce the need for agents to traverse multiple systems.

See Cisco Contact Center CTO Ryan Plant’s WebexOne session “The next generation platform powering the new Webex Contact Center” to learn more.

Webex CC - Admin - Flow Control and Control Hub — Webex Contact Center features a new UI-based flow control builder and integrated collaboration tool management through Webex Control Hub for ultimate management ease and flexibility.

Complete Collaboration Portfolio From a Single, Security-Focused Market Leader

Solving a customer’s problem is fundamentally an internal and external collaboration task. With Webex Contact Center, agents can leverage the support of cross-department, cross-functional subject matter experts—all with a common goal of providing delightful customer experiences—the first time, every time.

By combining Webex collaboration tools for messaging, calling, meetings, and even headsets and phones, agents benefit from a common user experience. Organizations and administrators benefit from ease of management of contact center, collaboration tools, and users through the singular Webex Control Hub interface. In just one recent example, a recent Forrester Total Economic Impact study illustrated one customer’s benefit of a 262% ROI achieved by using complementary Webex collaboration tools in conjunction with Webex Contact Center. Because of these native capabilities, the all-new Webex Contact Center is the industry’s most collaborative contact center platform.

See the WebexONE session “Investing in the contact center of the future: a conversation with Omar Tawakol, Javed Khan, Lorrissa Horton, and Vinod Muthukrishnan” to hear their perspectives on why Webex Contact Center is a crucial element of the complete Webex collaboration portfolio.

Next Up: Customer Experience as a Service (CXaaS)

The launch of our new Webex Contact Center solution is pivotal to Cisco’s vision of delivering 10x better customer experiences. But this new offering represents a beginning, not an end. This week, we announced our acquisition of IMImobile, which represents yet another milestone in our continued investment in enabling our customers to deliver the future of customer experience.

By combining IMImobile with the all-new Webex Contact Center offer, Cisco will be able to provide a robust CXaaS offer, leveraging technology like artificial intelligence, experience management, collaboration tools, omnichannel capabilities and programmability for customization. The goal of CXaaS is to enable an organization to understand all the drivers of a customer experience way beyond the walls of the contact center. In addition to having a full understanding of that journey, the customer interaction capabilities of IMImobile will now allow the organization to act on this insight throughout the full journey and across departments within the enterprise.

The IMImobile acquisition is subject to IMImobile shareholder approval and satisfaction of required regulatory conditions.