Cisco is acquiring CloudCherry, a customer experience management (CEM) software provider, to enhance its contact center portfolio.

CloudCherry provides predictive analytics, customer journey mapping and survey capabilities for businesses operating contact centers in the cloud or on premises. The acquisition is expected to close this quarter. Financial details weren’t disclosed.

Vasili Triant, Cisco’s vice president and general manager of contact center solutions, tells Channel Partners the acquisition will help partners when it comes to transforming the customer experience in the contact center. The new solution will allow partners to help their customers go from “delivering reactive care to providing cutting edge predictive support and an overall better customer experience resulting in improved business outcomes,” he said.

Cisco’s Vasili Triant

“An example of this is an airline and a flight got cancelled,” he said. “A customer tweets saying they are upset about the cancelled flight as they are going to miss their daughter’s birthday. Based on the predictive analytics CloudCherry has, when the customer calls the airline contact center, the agent can already see that the customer tweeted about missing the birthday and make a mention of it and say they are going to do their best to put the customer on another flight to get home. This helps with the overall customer experience and the agent experience so the customer isn’t repeating over and over all the same information to different contact agents.”

CloudCherry helps companies understand the correlations between various factors that influence customer experience, Cisco said. Predictive analytics help agents make real-time journey modifications, (up and cross-selling, expansion, discounts, service modifications and so on) to meet customer needs and improve loyalty, it said.

Cisco collaboration customers include 95 percent of the Fortune 500, more than 30,000 Cisco contact center customers and more than 3 million contact center agents.