From new big-name CCaaS offerings to the latest Copilot developments, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Webex Announces Two New CCaaS Packages: Customer Experience Basic & Essentials
Cisco has announced two new CCaaS packages: Webex Customer Experience Basic and Webex Customer Experience Essentials.
Unveiled at this week’s Webex ONE event, both are extensions of Webex Calling, adding contact center features to the solution.
However, Cisco has tailored both packages for separate use cases.
Webex Customer Experience Basic targets smaller businesses that don’t need a fully-fledged CCaaS platform.
Instead, they simply wish to extend their UCaaS platform – whether that’s Webex or Teams – so employees across the business can engage with customers.
The Basic offering enables that, with Cisco describing it as “a collection of features that deliver call center-like functionality.”
Meanwhile, Webex Customer Experience Essentials goes deeper and targets businesses that already have a formal contact center operation but want employees from across the enterprise to chip in.
Whether that is to leverage their specialist knowledge or, more simply, to support service teams in handling massive shifts in customer demand – it builds a bridge between the contact center and the broader business.
As such, external employees don’t need to log into a contact center platform to contribute, but they may do so through Webex Calling, which offers a familiar environment. (Read on…).
Microsoft Makes More Contact Center Use Cases for Copilot Generally Available
Microsoft has made three more Copilot features generally available for its CCaaS platform: Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
These follow the first capability – auto-summarizing customer cases and conversations – which the tech giant released last month.
Microsoft’s own contact center agents have trialed these use cases, with the vendor claiming that they helped agents troubleshoot customer queries quicker and more accurately.
However, supervisors may also benefit from Copilot – as evident in the third use case below.
Jeff Comstock, Corporate Vice President of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, noted this when announcing the news on Microsoft’s blog.
In addition, Comstock reassured potential users of the solution’s safety. He wrote:
Copilot uses knowledge and web sources that your organization specifies, and your organizational and customer data are never used to train public models.
He also stressed how the CCaaS platform enables data encryption, secure storage, and data access controls after introducing the following three use cases in greater detail. (Read on…).
Zoom Launches ISV Exchange Program That Includes Prominent CX Players
Zoom has kickstarted an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) Exchange Program to sell specific third-party solutions to customers.
Launch partners include Success KPI, Theta Lake, PCI Pal, FaxSIPit, and Verint – with many more expected to come.
One of the most notable names on this list is Verint, which kickstarted a partnership with Zoom last year.
As such, many Zoom customers have had the chance to bring several of Verint’s customer experience (CX) solutions into their own environments.
Yet, John Bourne, SVP of Global Channels and Alliances at Verint, seemed excited to take the relationship to a new level.
“It’s been a pleasure working with Zoom this past year on integrating our open platform with their unified communications solutions as well as Zoom Contact Center,” he said.
“Our announcement today makes the Verint open platform available to Zoom customers through Zoom for the first time.
As Zoom continues to expand its capabilities, we will remain in lockstep with them and enable our mutual customers to leverage the power of this unique platform-to-platform approach.
Verint’s platform contains many tools that may support Zoom customers. Its workforce optimization (WFO) suite, voice of the customer (VoC) tools, and self-service solutions are just some examples. (Read on…).
SAP Embeds Generative AI Across Its Customer Experience Suite
SAP has paved its CX portfolio with generative AI (GenAI), adding several capabilities for service, sales, marketing, and commerce teams.
Announced at SAP Customer Experience LIVE, these aim to support each function in streamlining workflows, generating new insights, and leveraging cross-function data.
As an excellent example of the latter, consider one new use case that starts with the SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP).
The platform combines data from across business SAP’s CX Clouds and other business applications to create customer profiles.
GenAI then scans these profiles to produce a summary that matches the context of a customer’s query when they next contact support.
For instance, perhaps the customer has reported a delayed delivery. In this scenario, an agent then receives a summary with information most relevant to the query – such as their order history, recent interactions, and preferences.
With this capability, SAP suggests that service teams can “quickly resolve issues and provide a better customer experience.”
Across digital channels, SAP goes further with another new GenAI capability. This uses that data and knowledge content to automatically craft customer responses for agents to review, edit, and send. (Read on…).
