As demands for better customer experience continue to accelerate, companies with their fingers on the pulse are hunting for the ultimate contact centre experience. The right technology delivers quicker, more memorable customer care. Cisco, one of the leaders in communication experience on the market today, is making it easier to access that crucial tech.
Today, the company announced the release of numerous essential enhancements for their contact centre portfolio. The updates are designed to improve flexibility, efficiency, and scalability for today's customers. Named the 12.0 release, the latest transformation in the Cisco contact centre is set to offer fantastic value for businesses through an approach that Cisco terms "cloud first, not cloud only."
We spoke to Vasili Triant the VP and GM of Customer Care at Cisco, to get a behind the scenes peek at the latest solution. Triant was brought into the Cisco environment with the distinct aim of enhancing and evolving the ecosystem.
Where is Cisco's Contact Centre Portfolio Headed?
Up until now, Cisco has had a relatively impressive on-premises focused contact centre. Outside of the cloud, Cisco can deliver exceptional support for between 5 agents, and tens of thousands of users. Cisco is responsible for some of the largest and most significant contact centre deployments on the market. While they do have a cloud-based solution, they believe in a "cloud first" model, rather than cloud only. That means they want to make sure that each customer can access the cloud in the way that's right for them.
"Today, companies need to access a certain stack of features for experience and customer care. However, the way those features are deployed can be flexible. You can have private tenant, on-premises, hybrid, public cloud and so on"
Vasili told me that there are 5 key pillars that Cisco is focusing on right now. "One is the full-stack portfolio integration. That's about blending everything, including contact centre, video, telephony, and meetings technology. The second thing is that we're maintaining our global cloud footprint. We have a presence in virtually every country in the world."
Triant also detailed the demand for "graceful cloud migration." As companies move further into the cloud, they need to avoid as much of the confusion of the rip and replace strategy as possible. Cisco hopes to make those transitions easier. There's also a significant focus on data at the heart of all solutions, as well as taking a unified and open approach to technology development.
How Is the Cisco Contact Centre Changing?
To provide context into the latest changes, Triant told me about the current contact centre tech that Cisco has available. Currently, there are two on-premises options available, including contact centre express for up to 400 users, and contact centre enterprise. Contact centre enterprise is designed for more advanced functionality, and it's also available on the cloud in the form of "HCS." Aside from those options, there's also the Customer Journey Platform (formally BroadSoft CC-One), which isn't affected by the current update.
Cisco has been listening carefully to the needs of their audience when it comes to things like improving agent and customer experience. Today's IT staff needs to be able to handle an ever-more complex contact centre in a way that's efficient, cost-effective, and secure.
"Release 12.0 will help our customers to address all of these modern challenges in the contact centre. The update enhances both our hosted and on-premises solutions, delivering a more seamless experience for everyone in our network. With Release 12.0, we'll be improving customer experience, boosting IT productivity, enhancing agent experience, delivering better security, and making ecosystem expansion easier too."