Cisco has revealed that Webex Contact Center seats surged by 75 percent in FY24.
That growth spans industries but is particularly pronounced within the financial services, healthcare, and retail sectors.
In the former, Cisco almost doubled its cloud seat count.
The enterprise tech giant also signed "one of its largest deals to date" last quarter, this time in the travel sector.
Such large deals come as feedback from Webex Contact Center customers improves.
Indeed, according to the Gartner Peer Insights "Voice of the Customer" 2024 report, 95 percent of customers gave the platform a four- or five-star review. That’s up significantly from 2023.
Yet, according to Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, the recent growth principally stems from the conversion of its on-premise contact center base. He told CX Today:
Cisco has a massive enterprise contact center install base, and while it's easy to poke at Webex and say they were late to CCaaS (they were), the reality is that much of that install base wasn’t ready to shift to a SaaS model until recently.
"Feedback from customers is that while Webex is a relatively late entrant, they have done a fantastic job getting the product to feature parity and have invested heavily in AI," continued Kerravala. "This should bode well as we go into the next wave of CX."
However, as Cisco heads into that next wave of customer experience, it has undergone a large-scale restructure. That will impact the Webex Contact Center in two central ways:
- CCaaS will become part of a broader Webex CX portfolio.
- Webex will unite with Cisco's security and networking business units under the same leadership.
Recognizing the significance of these moves, CX Today contacted Jay Patel, SVP & GM of Cisco Webex, to learn more about how they will impact Cisco's customers and its newfound CCaaS momentum.
The All-New Webex CX Portfolio
Cisco Webex now splits into two core portfolios: CX and EX.
Webex CCaaS sits in the CX portfolio alongside Cisco's on-premise contact center and CPaaS.
By unifying these products, Cisco aims to close the gap between its on-premise and cloud offerings while simplifying innovation for its large legacy customers.
CPaaS is a critical bridge here. It allows these operations to leverage elements of the cloud and AI while keeping essential loads of data on-premise.
As such, Cisco may go further in meeting customers where they are, innovating with them, and slowly migrating them to the Webex Contact Center.
Moreover, CPaaS helps secure tight integrations with solutions beyond the CRM. That includes point-of-sale, fraud detection, and the many other backend systems on which its on-premise install base relies.
By making these capabilities readily available in the cloud, Cisco can help large enterprises better manage the complexity of CCaaS migrations and deliver greater customization.
"We aim to empower them with the latest technologies at their own pace," said Patel.
We’ve developed different upgrade paths for on-premise software that will allow customers to use some of the tools we’re developing in the cloud.
Alongside inspiring faster innovation and delivering more integrated technologies, Patel believes the new CX portfolio will enable simplified pricing.
In the CCaaS space, pricing is notoriously complex, with agent-, outcome-, and usage-based models. By building on its existing bundle strategy, Cisco senses an opportunity to further differentiate.