Cisco has rolled out a CCaaS mega-deployment with Maersk, the global shipping giant.
With its 15,000-agent-strong support team spread across 150 global locations, the implementation allowed Maersk to develop a centralized contact center for everything.
In doing so, Cisco replaced Maersk’s complex patchwork of on-premise systems, which would have required a $10 million upgrade to scale.
After making that estimation, the company concluded that its environment was no longer fit for purpose, lacking the reliability, agility, and cost-effective operational capabilities it required.
Indeed, IT teams had a tough enough job to maintain the architecture across 120 countries, let alone build on it.
As such, Maersk took the opportunity to streamline its operations. Already working with Cisco for UCaaS, it adopted the entire Webex suite to create one platform for enterprise communication.
To start, Maersk decoupled the contact center application from the underlying phone system.
It then implemented 21 features with Webex, such as intelligent routing, integrated CRMs, a unified desktop, and conversational intelligence. In doing so, supervisors opened up access to data and controls that weren’t available previously.
Meanwhile, Maersk also worked to consolidate all agent and customer-related data on Salesforce, enabling its agents to access relevant data during customer conversations by leveraging Webex for Salesforce connectors.
Adding to this point, Steven Vickery, Enterprise Voice and Contact Center Service Owner at Maersk, noted:
[T]he Salesforce CRM integration… allows our agents to view customer data in real time. The enhanced reporting capability helps our supervisors no end. With Webex Contact Center and analyzer, we have granular-level information that our supervisors can consume.
“We’re utilizing Webex Connect and Webex Contact Center to allow truck drivers and agents to exchange SMS messages,” Vickery continued. “We’ve never had to consume before, so this is a new, exciting opportunity for us. Webex has massively saved us operational costs.”
The legacy phone system comprised UCCE and UCCX solutions cobbled together with several third-party plugins. That meant agents had to log calls manually, resulting in inaccurate data and limited visibility into customer needs and trends.
Meanwhile, supervisors lacked access to call and agent performance data, which hindered effective decision-making.
The new setup helps team leaders monitor call volumes, evaluate agent productivity, and better align resources to optimize performance quickly.
Now, Maersk highlights how the move has helped to reallocate resources to address shifting customer needs. With the previous, fragmented system, Maersk had limited its ability to introduce digital enhancements like AI. But with a single infrastructure now in place, Maersk plans to use AI to manage call volumes and enhance agent support.
Next, the company plans to incorporate features from Webex’s suite of AI tools, like topic analytics, agent assist, and AI agents.
Cisco Builds CCaaS Momentum
Alongside announcing the mega-deployment in a blog post, Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP & COO for the Webex Customer Experience Business Unit, shared several other recent CCaaS achievements Cisco has made this year.
Notably, he highlighted how the Webex Contact Center is now available in 157 countries and added 180 new features to the platform.
Meanwhile, Cisco has extended the number of internal agents its CCaaS platform supports to over 50,000.
Muthukrishnan also claimed that over the past year, the number of contact center seats deployed has scaled “drastically”, as a result of Cisco attracting new cloud customers and existing on-premise customers migrating to the cloud platform.
From there, he highlighted several differentiators in Cisco’s omnichannel approach, flexible deployment options, and AI and automation capabilities.
These earned plaudits as Cisco secured its position as one of two “Customers’ Choice” CCaaS providers, outlined in Gartner’s recent Peer Insights report.
Yet, they’ll also be one show at the upcoming WebexOne event, running from September 28–October 1, 2025.
