We’re living in a world where customer experience is everything.
If you want any hope of surviving in any industry, then you need to provide your customers with a fully immersive and memorable experience. The question for many companies, is how do they deliver those meaningful moments, particularly in an environment complicated by COVID-19?
Cisco, one of the world leaders in business communications, believes that its vision for the future of contact centres could help to drive businesses in the right direction. Agent and customer experiences are directly connected to the technology that supports them, Cisco’s ability to innovate at speed is allowing the company to redefine the standard for what the next-gen contact centre should be.
The latest Webex Contact Center solution is built around five key principles: multi-cloud federation, open functionality, universal accessibility, intelligence, and orchestration. I caught up with the CTO of Cisco Contact Center, Ryan Plant, to learn more about what this means.
In 2018, Ryan Plant was recruited by Cisco to come in and develop a path to the cloud for its cloud contact centre offering. Around that time, Cisco had acquired BroadSoft and it was his job to develop a cloud strategy while supporting BroadSoft customers.
All companies felt some shockwaves from the COVID-19 pandemic, including Cisco. Ryan told me that in the last year, Cisco was under a lot of pressure to simultaneously build its own CCaaS solution “from scratch”, while handling the growing demand from its customer base.
“We had to maintain the momentum of developing our own system while still supporting existing customers as much as possible.”
Developing a Next-gen Contact Centre
Plant told me that when Cisco was working on the new cloud platform, they knew that they had to begin targeting public cloud environments. They needed to enable multiple clouds at the same time – not just give customers access to one cloud option.
“Our customers need the freedom to choose where and how they want to operate. Our services are targeted towards the cloud, but they aren’t specific to any single cloud space.”
Notably, Ryan said that Cisco has taken elements from its heritage in the communication space to make the Cisco Contact Centre portfolio what it is today.
“As we continued to make progress on this new cloud experience, we discovered more ways to bring functionality and capabilities into our environment. This is how we built this incredible experience.”
A Tectonic Platform Shift
Ryan describes the Cisco Webex Contact Center platform as a “tectonic platform shift” that will pave the way for the contact centre of the future.