From a tech giant entering a new customer experience arena to alleged layoffs, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Zoom Struts Into the Workforce Management Space
Zoom has expanded its contact center portfolio by introducing Zoom Workforce Management.
The platform provides solutions across the workforce management (WFM) cycle, which has four stages. These are: forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review.
At that final review stage, planners take learnings and apply those to their future plans, completing the cycle and ensuring continuous improvement.
Zoom has applied AI across the cycle to lighten the load on planners.
Moreover, as Ben Neo, Customer Experience Sales Leader at Zoom, tells CX Today:
Zoom’s WFM software is easy to use, intuitive, and reliable, and best of all is cloud-based to help customers scale up and down as their team evolves.
“This is another key element to further round out the Zoom Contact Center functionality and shows how we are reacting quickly to customer feedback.”
Interestingly, Neo also suggests that the platform will soon expand further, with Zoom Workforce Management the first offering within a wider Workforce Management Engagement (WEM) suite.
Alongside WFM tools, such suites often include contact center Quality Assurance (QA), gamification, and learning management solutions.
These will bring many further native capabilities to Zoom Contact Center customers. (Read on…).
Microsoft Launches Sales Copilot, Makes Many More CX-Related Announcements
Microsoft has unveiled Sales Copilot, an application that supports salespeople as they complete tasks across Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales.
In doing so, it aspires to improve productivity and personalize customer conversations.
That personalization comes from a CRM integration – be it Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.
By pulling in that data, Copilot autogenerates emails tailored to the customer, which the salesperson can review, tweak, and send.
Moreover, Copilot can automate tasks between the CRM and communication channels, craft meeting summaries, and prepare pre-meeting notes.
AI powers these notes, incorporating real-time insights, such as top business and customer opportunity summaries.
Finally, a post-interaction capability recommends the next moves to salespeople and suggests AI-generated follow-ups. (Read on…).
Cisco Continues Its Layoffs, with Webex a Reported Victim
Cisco has reportedly engaged in significant layoffs this week, sweeping numerous business units.
A source told CX Today that the actions – which started on Monday, July 17th – allegedly affected the following business units:
- Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
- Cisco Collaboration
- Cisco Cisco Data Center Services & Solutions
- Cisco Experience Centers (CxC) – Research Triangle Park, N.C. “dissolved”
- Cisco Security Business Group (SBG)
- Cisco Servers – Unified Computing System (UCS)
- Cisco Webex
Cisco has not yet confirmed this to CX Today when asked for clarity.
Nonetheless, the tech giant told Fierce Telecom that the most recent job cuts are a continuation of “the rebalancing effort” announced in November 2022.
As such, the layoffs may include the 4,100 employees Cisco suggested it would let go in December, which equates to approximately five percent of its workforce.
Doubling down on this, Cisco told the publication:
This is not about cost savings as we have roughly the same number of employees as we did before the process began. This rebalancing is about prioritizing investments in our transformation, to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations in the changing technology landscape.
“We will continue to do everything we can to help place affected employees in open roles and offer extensive support including generous severance packages.”
Despite these assurances, many individuals have taken to Blind – the verified employee community for large tech companies – to have their say.
“Another day, another Cisco layoff,” noted one user.
“Working at Cisco is like gambling at a casino,” wrote another. “Making it to grade 12 without getting laid off is hard.”
Of course, such negativity comes with the territory, and a Cisco engineer gave a more balanced take on LinkedIn.
Many more posts have appeared on the platform in recent days, alongside other platforms like Blind and TheLayoff.com.
While the latter does not provide verified responses, posts seemingly suggest IT support staff in India and Collaboration engineering teams in China have been primarily affected. (Read on…).
AWS Releases New Routing, Analytics, and Chat Capabilities for Connect
AWS has upgraded Amazon Connect to include new routing, analytics, and chat capabilities.
The cloud contact center’s latest updates aim to simplify and reduce workloads for agents and managers with the support of automation and machine learning technologies.
Let’s consider them one by one, starting with the new routing features.
Delete Routing Profiles and Queues
Connect users may now remove routing profiles and queue resources using APIs.
As a result, contact centers may more easily introduce new strategies and requirements for agent groups, call flows, and various routing configurations.
Indeed, by removing unused and unwanted resources, more space opens up within service limits, allowing room to add new profiles and queues.
This capability is supported in all AWS regions offering Amazon Connect.
AWS also added Intuit with extra APIs to further customize queues and remove agents from routing profiles.
As it monitors all contact center interactions, it can isolate the best-performing agents and relay that to the routing system. Customers can then be directed to the best available agents for their cases. (Read on…).
