Webex looks to enhance customer experiences for digital era

In its second major launch for its collaboration services in as many days, Cisco has announced new features and capabilities for its Webex Customer Experience (CX) portfolio to deliver new omnichannel customer experiences.

With Webex CX, Cisco said it stands as the only company that can deliver unified communications as a service (UCaaS), contact centre as a service (CCaaS) and communications platform as a service (CPaaS) under one roof, enabling streamlined customer journeys across digital and voice channels powered by a “robust” ecosystem. 

“Digital-first consumers now demand a more responsive and personalised experience from the brands they love,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice-president and general manager of Cisco security and collaboration. “This trend is driving companies to reconsider their approach to CX. They want a single vendor offering that brings together advanced CX capabilities with the security and reliability they’ve come to expect from Cisco.”

Cisco said Webex CX will deliver smart, proactive and personalised customer experience capabilities that drive brand loyalty and adoption for customers. Indeed, the company adds that with the offering, businesses can “effortlessly” engage with customers across their unique CX journeys for both digital and human (voice and messaging) interactions. The omnichannel experience is made possible through the integration of Webex Connect and Webex Contact Center to create a connected customer experience.

Key features include the ability to improve the customer experience by reducing auditory distractions through Webex’s artificial intelligence-powered background noise reduction technology, which will be available in Webex Contact Centre and on PSTN voice calls.

Background noise reduction improves the customer experience by reducing distraction and improving comprehension for both the customer and the agent. Cisco added that the product can offer improved engagement through more digital channels – more than 16 of them, including Instagram and Google Business Messages.

With Webex Connect, businesses can now be where their customers are for customer support and new commerce experiences.

Another key element is that Webex Contact Center is now certified for Microsoft Teams, enabling improved interaction and skill-based routing of inbound Teams calls. Webex Connect includes integrations with leading CRM, contact centre, commerce, database and storage, and helpdesk suppliers, notably including Salesforce, AWS and Microsoft Azure.

The service also aims to improve the agent auditory experience through a Cisco Headset 720 Series designed with agents in mind. The headset features a 276° rotation boom arm with flip-to-mute, and features one button to join for Webex and Microsoft Teams. Users can choose from a single or dual ear-wearing-styled headsets.

Webex Contact Center also offers an enhanced cloud-based supervisor dashboard to monitor agent performance, send messages in the Webex App and view detailed agent information and important call highlights. Webex is also expanding reports on its Analyzer product so supervisors can optimise team performance with real-time and historical insights.

Webex Connect enables bot capabilities with support for 93 languages. The bot capabilities now use a unified natural language processing (NLP) node to enhance language capabilities.

Webex Connect is integrating with Sycurio to enable easier and quicker payment processing for users as part of the workflow. A partnership with Epic will help healthcare customers integrate their existing back-end systems to improve timely and relevant communications with patients across all touchpoints.

As part of a bid to automate new workflows and customise and expand possibilities, Webex recently launched a customer experience developer portal featuring access to application programming interfaces (APIs), and documentation to personalise contact centre experiences.

APIs are available for the customisation of agent desktop, routing, orchestration, automation, artificial intelligence and more.