Cisco Revamps Contact Center Solution, Capitalizing on 3 Acquisitions

Cisco Systems is integrating recently acquired artificial intelligence (AI) assets into its contact center portfolio.

The vendor announced several updates to its contact center portfolio at its Contact Center Summit in Hollywood, Florida, this week. Some of the updates to the Cisco Webex Contact Center solution include increasing capacity to up to 3,000 agents per tenant, integrating Webex Calling into the contact center solution to improve call quality, and adding data centers for Webex Contact Center in the United Kingdom and Australia.

Users can now access the contact center solution through the Webex Control Hub, signaling a more centralized management experience for Webex users.

Cisco’s Amy Chang

“Integrating cognitive collaboration into the contact center and offering it through a cloud-based solution is an industry game-changer,” said Amy Chang, general manager and senior vice president of Cisco Collaboration. “Webex Contact Center is steeped in intelligence and business insights to help our customers deliver massively personalized experiences. More and more AI and [machine learning] will be integrated into our solutions over the coming months as we work to offer phenomenal customer experiences that lead and define this industry.”

Other upgrades include a more conversational interactive Voice Response (IVR) feature and a redesigned agent desktop.

Cisco is using its 10th annual contact center conference to demonstrate how three recent AI-related acquisitions will bolster its contact center portfolio. The company three weeks ago announced the purchase of CloudCherry, whose customer experience management (CEM) software makes life easier for call center agents and the people they help. That came not long after buying Voicea, whose transcription and voice search features can turn Webex meetings into a “treasure trove of digital meeting notes and insights, with robust data privacy.” Cisco in the spring closed its acquisition of Accompany, which uses artificial “relationship intelligence” to create a large database of businesses and executives.

Cisco states that more than 3 million agents across more than 30,000 companies utilize the contact center portfolio.

We wrote earlier this summer about how Cisco was working to give the Jabber collaboration tool similar functionality compare to the rest of the collaboration profile.

We wrote about Cisco’s Viptela-powered SD-WAN solution Tuesday in a column.