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?”
Fortunately, embedded CPaaS functionalities within the Webex Contact Center help operations to dip their toe into the water of cloud software.
Consider the banking industry. With digital disruptors increasing their market share from one to eight percent over the past four years, the need for stalwart financial institutions to innovate quickly is clear. Yet, their complex networks of on-premise systems limit CX agility.
Thankfully, CPaaS allows banks to reimagine customer journeys while keeping much of their heavily customized technology and expensive security systems on-premise.
Deep Insights for the Analytical Leader
In many forward-thinking organizations, the contact center is a critical cog in their CX strategy. Why? Because it is an immense source of customer insight.
Unfortunately, many operations fail to harness this insight, with their technology unable detect network jitters, technology failures, and sentiment lapses that curtail customer experiences.
However, the Webex Contact Center is designed differently. As Horton says:
What has excited clients is the ability to dig into bad customer calls. Instead of asking agents; what happened, why is the customer so upset? Was it the quality of the call, a latency issue, a technology failure, or a coaching gap? We’re building a lot of technologies to solve those questions.
Moreover, the vendor offers an advanced supervisor dashboard to dig deeper into the team’s performance in real-time.
As a result, they can keep their finger on the pulse of agent activity, capturing an instant view of the types of calls they’re currently handling and sentiment level. Team leaders may then quickly identify where their support is best placed.
Agent Support Tools That Elevate the Employee Experience
In addition to supervisor dashboards, each Webex Contact Center user can access “collaboration insights”, which offer personalized statistics on how they use their time.
Yet, Webex has pivoted to provide these unique insights not only for every agent, but every customer too.
As such, contact centers have a clear view of how frequently customers call, which agents they speak to, alongside their intent and sentiment. These insights add to a rich customer profile that supports teams in solving their queries.
Yet, this is not the only data that can enrich agent experiences. The “work-life balance” section of their dashboard presents statistics on how many calls back-to-back they’ve had and the duration of those calls, uncovering worrying patterns likely to lead to burnout. As Horton says:
The solution can notify supervisors when customers use cuss words and yell at agents, allowing them to step in, take charge of the conversation, and offer the agent a wellness break.
Similarly, supervisors can investigate whether agents work longer than they should and take breaks, using these insights to optimize their experience.
So, Is It Right for Your Contact Center?
Cisco could have taken old BroadSoft code and tried to retrofit a CCaaS solution. That was the fast approach. Yet, it had greater ambitions with Webex.
Instead, it returned to the drawing board, rebuilt its Contact Center from the ground up, and created a cloud-native backend. From there, the vendor harnessed its massive R&D resource to close feature gaps, and now offers a complete solution.
Gartner echoes this: “Cisco’s Webex Contact Center offers good functionality across the four pillars of great customer service in terms of resource management, analytics and a growing number of technology ecosystem partners.”
Alongside complete functionality, Webex differentiates itself with tight UCaaS and CPaaS integrations, advanced analytics, and agent experience innovation.
As such, it meets the needs of contact centers across all verticals. Yet, it is perhaps ideal for collaborative enterprises looking to kickstart their cloud transformation, harness customer insight, and reposition their contact center as the cornerstone of CX.
Looking to learn more about the Webex Contact Center? If so, visit: www.webex.com
