Cisco has updated its contact center portfolio with the goal of improving customer experience, security and deployment, and creating value for businesses by delivering connected offerings through a cloud-first model.

Release 12.0 includes enhancements to Cisco’s on-premises and hosted solutions: Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE), Packaged Contact Center Enterprise (Packaged CCE), Unified Contact Center Express (Unified CCX), and Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center (HSC-CC).

Cisco’s Vasili Triant

Vasili Triant, Cisco’s vice president of customer care for the collaboration, tells Channel Partners the latest release lets partners go back to existing customers for process re-engineering in addition to the upgrade itself.

“There [are] a lot of services revenue that partners can benefit from,” he said. “Partners always play an important role in everything we do. Product management determines feature release content from a variety of sources including customers and partners, as well as Cisco field personnel, UX field research and market data. Our partners’ feedback is a vital element of our strategy.”

In his blog, Tod Famous, Cisco’s senior director of product management, wrote that contact centers play an “essential role in shaping a company’s direction and have become a strategic imperative to driving customer loyalty, innovation and business growth.”

“The agent experience in particular has a direct correlation with how your customers make buying decisions,” he wrote. “In some cases, they are the only interaction customers will have with your organization. Therefore, empowering agents with modern and intuitive tools that enable them to have the right information and resources at their fingertips, helps drive quicker resolution closure and create more meaningful customer interactions that can last a lifetime.”

New features include:

“Many of our contact-center customers have shared their challenges with us, on how they strive to improve agent and supervisor productivity, improve first contact resolution, and enhance their customers’ experience,” Famous wrote. “At the same time, their IT staff needs to be able to manage the contact center efficiently and cost-effectively, while ensuring compliance with the latest security standards and protecting the privacy of their customers’ data.”

“Increasing scale and the new browser-based agent and supervisor desktop clients provide a superior omnichannel experience that exceeds those offered by most of our competitors,” Triant said.