The Webex Contact Center has hit the headlines for all the right reasons over the past 12 months.
Earning leader status in the Aragon Research Globe for Intelligent Contact Centers and winning Best Contact Center Platform at the 2022 CX Awards added glossy icing to the cake.
Nevertheless, savvy buyers factor in their unique requirements when considering new technologies.
As such, here is more of a deep dive into the Webex Contact Center, offering an inspection of the critical strengths that differentiate the platform.
The Contact Center Solution for Collaborative CX
The Webex Contact Center (CCaaS) benefits significantly from its tight integrations with Cisco’s collaboration portfolio (UCaaS) and Webex Connect (CPaaS).
Indeed, it boasts native UC capabilities and harnesses CPaaS as a foundational layer to build innovative apps, enabling the collaborative, intelligent digital contact center of tomorrow.
Consider the UC features first. As Lorrissa Horton, Senior Vice President and GM of Webex Calling and Contact Center, says:
We’ve taken many of our Calling and Meeting capabilities and built those into our contact center. This includes the capability to cut out background noise across voice and video – a feature sourced from our Webex Meetings solution.
As a result, customers only hear the agent’s voice when contacting the contact center, not those of people around them, their washing machines, or any other source of distraction.
Another capability garnered from Webex Meetings is auto-summarizations. Harnessing real-time transcriptions, the feature takes insights from the call – including customer intent – to streamline post-call agent activities and deliver significant cost savings.
Yet, perhaps most innovatively, Webex detects network connection failures and latency issues during customer interactions. While competitors must integrate with technologies such as Hammer or Cyara to offer this, Webex provides the solution natively and cost-effectively.
Finally, in regards to CPaaS, this technology – added to Webex following its 2020 IMI Mobile acquisition - paves the way for companies to insert communications into business processes. As such, they can reimagine many customer journeys.
Reinvent Contact Center Journeys with CPaaS
Consider this idea of building communications into customer journeys. This may include proactive outreach, bot engagement, and video.
Running with this video example, Webex has worked with healthcare companies to deliver CPaaS-driven contact center apps that provide customers with an interface to talk directly with doctors.
In utilities, it has provided the platform for engineers to solve problems over video without traveling to the customer’s house. Enabling such journeys is proving an excellent first step into the cloud.
Moreover, the advent of 5G brings the ability to take video calls from anywhere, enabling new use cases.
Without in-built CPaaS capabilities, businesses would have to "rack and stack" all their tools, access a host of APIs, and write lots of code to create such contact center journeys.
Sharing more during a recent ZKast episode, Jay Patel, Vice President and General Manager of Webex CPaaS, stated:
We see ourselves as the foundational platform on which you can build lots of different applications. These include contact center applications, but also applications unique to different industries.
As a result, Webex caters to contact centers across different verticals, harnessing partner innovation to build custom solutions that meet unique needs.
Services to Support Cloud Transformation
Webex’s CCaaS solution fits the needs of many businesses. Nevertheless, cloud readiness varies across different sectors.
Many organizations, which typically operate in highly compliance-driven environments, have reservations. Yet, Webex works closely with its considerable on-premises customer base to understand these.
As a result, the vendor has developed the expertise to listen and support them, developing a clear vision of what that transition looks like. As Horton says:
The goal should not be to rebuild everything in the cloud exactly as it is on-premises. Those who gain the most value from the cloud step back and say: how do we do this?
"Also, they consider; how can we reimagine our most fundamental contact center journeys in an omnichannel setting and ensure agents have all the support they need? And, what will that look like compared to how the contact center is run today?"