Does the New Cisco Webex Contact Center Live Up to the Hype?

Many of us have fallen victim to bad customer service before.

Long hold times. Multiple transfers. Limited communication options. Repeating your problem to agents over and over… and over again.

As consumer expectations continue to rise, these hiccups in the customer experience can cost organizations valuable return customers and market share.

Contact centers face increasing pressure to leverage omnichannel customer communication to modernize their platforms and create frictionless customer service experiences.

But these types of transformations are no small feat. There is much to consider when overhauling a contact center — from weighing cloud vs. on-premises solutions, to incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), to leveraging automation and interactive voice response (IVR) systems.

Webex Contact Center

To help simplify contact center transformations, Cisco launched its newly rebuilt Webex Contact Center solution at WebexOne 2020.

The new Webex Contact Center is a unified cloud solution built with scalability, omnichannel communication, AI and contextual capabilities in mind. It's truly an all-in-one, modern contact center solution.

Watch the video below for a high-level overview of Webex Contact Center.

Given the accelerated shift to cloud this past year, a cloud-native contact center solution is the right move for Cisco and makes sense for organizations interested in:

• Expanding their cloud presence
• Reducing contact center complexity
• Enhancing the customer and agent experience
• Accelerating transformation

In this article, we explore Webex Contact Center's new features and benefits, deployment options, integrations, and whether we believe it's worth the hype.

Benefits and features of Webex Contact Center

Organizations often integrate multiple contact center solutions to meet complex business requirements. This approach can be costly, time consuming and create confusion due to overlapping features.

The amount of work required to properly manage and utilize overlapping contact center solutions can quickly outweigh the overall benefits to your transformation efforts.

Cisco Webex Contact Center incorporates all the key features required for a cutting-edge contact center so you can reduce complexity and start leveraging new capabilities faster.

Key features include: 

• Multichannel interaction (voice, email, chat) routing
• Omnichannel capabilities
• Outbound voice/campaign management
• Touch-tone and speech-enabled interactive voice response
• Automated callback options
• Screen-pop
• Workforce and quality management tools
• Enriched historical reporting
• Configurable real-time dashboards and analytics
• Single agent desktop
• Consolidated administration

Watch the video below to view the improved Webex Contact Center agent experience.  

Webex Contact Center also allows organizations to use existing calling devices, such as cell phones, instead of replacing them with new voice endpoints. This lets organizations provide consistent features to both local and remote workers.

Deployment options

With marketshare at stake, organizations must be able to transform quickly.

Whereas building a complex, on-premises contact center infrastructure can add months to an organization's transition, Webex Contact Center can be deployed in as little as five days, if needed.

The solution also includes pre-packaged connectors for various customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, such as Salesforce, Zendesk and Microsoft Dynamics, to drastically reduce integration and migration times.

Organizations can choose from five flexible deployment options:

1. Webex Contact Center with Cisco-Bundled PSTN: This is the simplest option. Cisco handles everything and provides calling access. Customers pay one bill for the entire contact center solution.
2. Webex Contact Center with Service Provider Connectivity: Choose a Cisco cloud-connected partner (CCP), such as Masergy or Veracity, to provide the right calling access right for your needs. This allows for greater PSTN flexibility without impacting your existing environment.
3. Webex Contact Center with Bring-Your-Own (BYO) PSTN: Integrate Webex Contact Center into your existing PSTN dial plan. This allows your devices to control how and where your calls are routed between cloud and on-premises environments.
4. Webex Contact Center + Webex Calling with CCP: Move your entire unified communications experience to the cloud by bundling Webex Contact Center and Calling. Choose your preferred CCP to access Cisco's cutting-edge PBX and contact center without redesigning your current architecture.
5. Webex Contact Center + Webex Calling with BYO PSTN: This is like option #3 but includes bundled Webex Calling.

Watch the video below to learn more about each deployment option.

Google Contact Center AI (CCAI) integration

Webex Contact Center includes built-in integration with Google Contact Center AI (CCAI), an AI platform that provides intelligent natural language conversation capabilities across all channels.

This integration allows organizations to rapidly deploy virtual agents, accurately monitor customer/agent journeys and better manage risk with key features like:

• Flexible load balancing and disaster recovery routing options
• Rich reporting capabilities
• Analytics
• Easy-to-configure statistical and customer experience widgets

Watch the video below to learn how to build your own virtual agent using Google CCAI.

So, is it worth the hype?

Absolutely. 

With Webex Contact Center's vast built-in features and capabilities, WWT believes it is poised to leapfrog the competition. Currently, no other vendor offers the same level of out-of-the-box functionality or deployment flexibility as Webex Contact Center. The ability to drastically reduce complexity and quickly improve the agent and customer experience makes this a highly desirable solution.