Cisco Brings the Power of the Cloud and AI to Contact Centers with Release 12.5

“I need the business agility, flexibility, and speed of new feature delivery that cloud offers while protecting my contact center investments.”

“I need to modernize my customer and agent experiences to remain competitive.”

“I need easy access to cloud-based applications that work seamlessly with my on-premises contact center infrastructure”

Do These Challenges Sound Familiar?

You’re not alone! Many of our customers across the globe and from many industries have shared with us their struggle to balance the need for innovation with cloud-based capabilities powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to stay competitive while maximizing their valuable on-premises contact center investments in people, process, and technology.

They’ve expressed their desire for an open and secure platform that gives them reliability and business continuity, with new flexibility and agility needed to meet the ever-changing demands of their business. And they’re looking for unique ways to create differentiated experiences for both their employees and customers that will result in better customer experiences, repeat business, and improved performance of their contact center.

Cisco is addressing these needs with Release 12.5 – our latest software for Unified Contact Center Enterprise, Packaged Contact Center Enterprise, Unified Contact Center Express, and Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center.  We’re introducing some exciting new capabilities designed to simplify how you manage your contact center, make your agents more productive, and create better experiences for your customers.

Highlights of What’s New

◉ Webex Experience Management (formerly CloudCherry), our new customer experience management solution, is integrated into the Cisco agent desktop providing agents and supervisors with customer sentiment, journey insights, and feedback metrics in real-time.

◉ An intuitive conversational IVR, powered by Google Dialogflow improves customer self-service experiences over the phone by easily adding modern speech interfaces to existing self-service options.

◉ Customer Journey Analyzer, our cloud-based advanced analytics reporting solution is now available for trial to all our on-premises contact center customers.

◉ AI-based Voicea call transcript and summary are also available for trials to improve agent productivity, call wrap-up and accuracy of action items.

◉ Smart Licensing provides a simple, automated way to add/activate new software licenses to keep up with fluctuating interaction volumes.

Integration with Webex Experience Management (formerly CloudCherry)

Our new AI-powered, cloud-based customer experience solution can be integrated with your contact center via two new agent desktop gadgets. The solution enables contact centers to capture customer feedback utilizing an easy-to-use survey designer.  Once feedback is captured, agents have the ability to view customer feedback scores within their agent desktop via the new Customer Experience Journey gadget, giving them real-time visibility into customer sentiment and past journey experiences so they can truly understand how the customer is feeling and be able to personalize their interaction with the customer. The Customer Experience Analytics gadget displays the overall pulse of customer feedback through industry-standard metrics, such as NPS, CSAT, and CES.

Innovative AI-Powered Self-Service

Our Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal leverages Google Dialogflow, allowing AI to bring speech-to-text, NLU-based intent detection, and text-to-speech capabilities to create an efficient conversational self-service experience for your customers while relieving agents of simple and repetitive tasks.

Business Insights via Cloud Analytics

Bringing the power of cloud analytics to all Cisco on-premises contact centers, Customer Journey Analyzer provides advanced out-of-the-box reporting, arming contact center managers with historical data from multiple contact center deployments to generate specific business views across the business.  It displays trends to help supervisors identify patterns and gain insights for making continuous improvements, and it includes an Abandoned Contacts dashboard to identify where customers are abandoning the journey so that appropriate and proactive actions can be taken. Available for trial now.

Voicea Call Transcript

We’ve created a new Cisco agent desktop gadget that uses our very own Voicea AI, leveraging accurate speech-to-text technology to provide a complete transcription of the interaction between agent and customer. This exciting new feature, which is available now for field trial with Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise, simplifies call wrap-up and helps agents accurately capture the details of the conversation, improving call continuity and agent productivity. 

Licensing Made Simple

Smart Licensing enables contact centers to remain agile and quickly add/activate new software licenses to keep up with fluctuating interaction volumes.  Using the Cisco Smart Software Management Portal, our customers can easily see in real-time how many total licenses they have and how many are in use, giving them peace of mind and an accurate measure of their license inventory.

Improved Agent Experience

We’re making your agents more productive and their experience more intuitive with new keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop desktop gadgets, and the ability to update call variables during interactions. Agents can also view their statistics in real-time now.

Secure and Scalable 

Our new release also includes a variety of security-related enhancements that further harden the solution against potential vulnerabilities.  At the same time, we continue stretching scale limits by doubling outbound calls per second and total supported dialer ports, and 2.5 times increase in simultaneous active campaigns.

All Our Customers Benefit

I’m excited about how the cloud brings all these enhancements to our on-premises customers. Our goal continues to be to bring all our customers the latest technological innovations available today, regardless of whether they own their contact center system or subscribe to it as a service, and to give them a practical and simple path to the cloud at a pace that’s just right for them.

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The Artificial Intelligence Journey in Contact Centers

I would like to share some thoughts pulled together in discussions with developers, customer care system integrators and experts, along one of the many possible journeys to unleash all the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into a modern customer care architecture.

First of all, let me emphasize what the ultimate goal of Artificial Intelligence is:

“Artificial intelligence is the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.”

AI in the Contact Center

In a Customer Care (CC) environment, one of the primary objectives of any AI component is to support and assist agents in their work and potentially even replace some of them, so we should ask ourselves  how far are we from such a goal today? Let me answer by posting here a recent demo on stage from Google:

Google Duplex: A.I. Assistant Calls Local Businesses To Make Appointments – YouTube

Seen it? While clearly Google Duplex is still in its infancy, I think it’s evident that a much wider application range is behind the corner and we are not too far away since the moment where a virtual agent controlled by an AI engine will be able to replace the real agents in many contexts and with a natural conversation and flow like humans would have with each other.

“Gartner projects that by 2020, 10% of business-to-consumer first level engagement requests will be taken by VCAs… today that is less than 1%….”

Google Duplex Natural Technology

The interesting piece, which leading players such as Cisco (Cognitive Collaboration Solutions) will be able to turn into an advantage for their Contact Center architecture, is related to the way Google Duplex works. It is essentially made of the 3 building blocks:

1. The incoming audio goes into an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) able to translate audio into text
2. A Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) formulates a text answer based on the input text
3. Other inputs and finally a Text to Speech (TTS) converts the answer back in audio using speech synthesis technology (Wavenet)

For those of you dealing with customer care it’s rather clear how such an architecture would fit very well into an outbound contact center delivering telemarketing campaigns: this is the way Google is already positioning the technology in combination with their Google assistant.

A part the wonderful capabilities offered by the front and back end text to audio converters, the intelligence of the system is in the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) able to analyze the input text and context, understand it and formulate a text answer in real time, de facto emulating the complex behavior and processes of human beings.

The most of the CHAT BOTs used today in CC are not even close to this approach as they are doing the dialogue management in a traditional way, managing flows with certain rules, similar to a complex IVR, struggling with the complexity of natural language. Duplex (Tensorflow) or other solutions, such as open sources communities in the world of AI developers (Rasa Core), are adopting neural networks, properly trained and tuned in a specific context, to offer incredibly natural dialogue management. The RNN needs training, which was in the case of Duplex done using a lot of phone conversations data in a specific context as well as features from the audio and the history of the conversation.

CISCO and AI in Contact Centers

Some of the unique approaches explained above could make the customer care solutions of those vendors able to adopt them quite innovative and well perceived, especially when there is an underlying, solid and reliable architectural approach as a foundation. In news out last year, Cisco announced a partnership with Google:

“Give your contact center agents an AI-enhanced assist so they can answer questions quicker and better. …. we are adding Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) to our Cisco Customer Journey Solutions … Contact Center AI is a simple, secure, and flexible solution that allows enterprises with limited machine learning expertise to deploy AI in their contact centers. The AI automatically provides agents with relevant documents to help guide conversations and continuously learns in order to deliver increasingly more relevant information over time. This combination of Google’s powerful AI capabilities with Cisco’s large global reach can dramatically enhance the way companies interact with their customers.”

This whole AI new paradigm demands further thoughts:

1. The most of AI technology is OPEN SOURCE so the value is not in the code itself but more in the way it is made part of a commercial solution to meet customer needs, especially when it is based on an architectural approach, such as the Cisco Cognitive Collaboration..

2. The above point is further driven by the fact that it is difficult to build a general-purpose AI solution, as it will always need customizations according to the specific context of a customer or another. The use cases change and the speed of innovation is probably faster than in the mobile devices’ world, so it is difficult to manage this via a centralized, traditional R&D. This fits more into a community approach made of developers, system integrators and business experts such as the Cisco Ecosystems.

3. Rather then coding AI software, the winning factor is the ability of vendors like Cisco to leverage an environment made of Ecosystem partners, System Integrators and Customer experts to surround and enrich the core Customer Care architecture offerings.

The availability of ecosystem partners, able to package specific CONVERSATIONAL engines, specialized for certain contexts and the role of system integrators, able to combine those engines into the Cisco Customer Care architecture to meet the customer needs, are KEY CISCO competitive advantages in the coming AI revolution.

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Demystifying Artificial Intelligence’s Role in Contact Centers

AI is shaping the future of customer experiences and the contact center.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creating a lot of excitement and there are good reasons for this. According to Forbes, 50% of IT professionals believe artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing a role in cloud computing adoption, growing to 67% by 2020. This week I will be speaking at UC Expo about the role that artificial intelligence is playing in advancing contact center productivity and efficiency, and in particular how this is benefiting the agent and customer experience.

With all the news around AI, it’s easy to get lost in the hype versus reality. I’d like to demystify some of this and share my view of the five most common myths I’m hearing about as I travel the world talking to colleagues, partners, and customers.

Five myths:

◈ AI is new
◈ AI = chatbots
◈ AI can replace all your people
◈ AI is all about automation
◈ AI will reduce call volume

1. AI is new

The concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has actually been around for a long time. In 1950, the English mathematician and computer scientist, Alan Turing documented his ideas for testing a thinking machine. Turing’s test theory suggested that if a machine was able to communicate in full conversation via a teleprinter without any detectable differences from a human, the machine could be deemed “thinking.”

Contact centers have been using AI in some form or another for decades. We just didn’t call it AI. Even with basic automatic call distribution (ACD) technology it was possible to filter and route calls to the right agent at the right time using an algorithm to determine the best agent. AI at its core is a series of fast predictions, and contact centers have been using predictive algorithms since the early 1990s. AI continues to show up in new places and make a major impact in revolutionizing contact centers and customer service.

2. AI = chat bots

Chat bots have become mainstream in contact centers and are just one of the ways in which AI is used to optimize agent workload and enhance customer self-service. Bots are being used for everything from qualifying customer requests, to booking hotels, and providing shopping assistance. Bots helps answer questions and direct your customers to the appropriate person with the best skills and experience. Our Customer Virtual Assistant provides a highly effective way of offloading simple, mundane, and repetitive requests from your agents, allowing them to spend higher quality time helping customers on more complex requests. This results in providing faster self-service to customers, while improving agent optimization, productivity and costs. While chat bots utilize AI, there are many other forms that AI takes in contact center operations beyond chat bots – including routing schemes, forecasting, deeply inspecting customer interactions – and more. Cisco’s Customer Journey Analyzer, for example is a cloud based solution that allows companies to gather data from multiple sources to draw correlations between operational and business data to improve customer experience.

3. AI can replace all your people

This is probably the most misunderstood belief about AI and one that grabs the attention of senior executives when they’re looking for ways to cut costs. AI promises benefits far beyond just cost savings, and has the potential to help and improve how your employees work, rather than replace them. AI will certainly change workloads, staffing and processes that may lead to reduced staffing, but a primary advantage is that it augments agents to make them more scalable and efficient. Take the example of a chat bot. When the bot detects that the interaction needs to be escalated to a human agent, it brings along with it the history of the conversation to enable a seamless transition from self-service chat to assisted chat. The agent can then very quickly and effortlessly take over the interaction with everything they need displayed right in front of them. In this regards, AI is an enabler for better live agent assistance, not a replacement of it.

4. AI is all about automation

Business process automation is a key benefit of AI in the contact center because it increases agent efficiencies and workflows, however it is better to think of it in terms of agent augmentation as much as automation. Many people still want to engage with a human, so as you take advantage of automation in your contact center, make sure your customers can still reach a person when one is needed. According to a study by PwC, only 3% of U.S. consumers want their experiences to be completely automated. In addition, automation of customer processes inevitably leads to exceptions that cannot be addressed by AI, and need human assistance. These exceptions are often make-or-break moments in a customer relationship.

The automated process should learn from the data that you have spread across a multitude of systems, and from human interactions so that those experiences are improved resulting in better service to your customers. Understanding and analyzing that data can tell you so much about how your customers are experiencing your brand, so that actions can be taken to make their journey better. A great example of this is our new Cisco Answers intelligent agent which is powered by Google Contact Center AI. Cisco Answers listens to customers conversations in real-time, and proactively presents intelligent suggestions, documents, and other key forms of enterprise knowledge to the agent desktop, while the agent is interacting with a customer. This empowers agents with the needed context and information they need to deliver faster, more personalized and proactive care.

5. AI will reduce call volume

This is another misconception – AI may reduce call volumes via automation – but it’s likely that the calls that do make it to live agent assistance (the exceptions) will be longer and more complex in nature. This could mean that the same amount of staff are handling less, but longer calls. AI enables more accurate decisions and routing so that many customer interactions can be handled without a human agent. It has the ability to classify information and make predictions faster and at higher volumes than humans can accomplish on their own. As an example, in an omni-channel contact center, customers can be routed much more quickly and efficiently to the right resource that can add the most value to the experience based on the channel (e.g. email, phone, chat) the customer is using. According to PwC, 46% of all consumers will abandon a brand if the employees are not knowledgeable. This will require contact centers to redefine how they do agent staffing and how they measure call volume and call success.

So where do we go from here?

While AI for contact centers isn’t necessarily “new”, advancements in algorithms and the ability to apply them in real-time to massive amounts of data being created from contact center operations is. This combination opens up exciting new possibilities for companies to break free of constraints to address issues that have been challenging contact centers for decades. These include contextual routing real-time work to agent attributes, more precisely forecasting agent schedules, and higher degrees of customer personalization. As more and more data accumulates, processor speeds increase unabated, and algorithms march forward, AI will have a larger and larger role in making contact centers more efficient and effective.

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What Your Collaboration Strategy Is Missing

Why your new collaboration technology isn’t catching on as you expected

When organizations want to update their collaboration technologies, IT departments spend weeks, sometimes months, focusing on the right products that will help their company meet their goals. They rigorously check requirements, ensure all the right specs are in place, and carefully configure the new technology before making it available to end users. Everything goes as planned. Yet three months in, management is wondering why no one is using the new technology. Sound familiar?

Most new collaboration investments fail to reach their full potential not because of the technology itself but rather because of how it’s introduced to its end users. People often don’t like change, even if it’s for their own benefit. So, when a new technology is introduced, people tend to stick with what they know and what they are comfortable with. They also might not want to learn new things and can be hard to convince. Or they might not feel compelled to use the new technology if they don’t see their colleagues using it as well.

All these reactions are normal. But the good news is, there are several things you can do to help your teams in the process:

◈ First, make sure to involve executives early in using the new technology. Set up some time with them to have them interact with the technology. And lastly, walk them through some best practices so they feel more comfortable using and promoting it.

◈ Second, focus on raising awareness throughout the organization via marketing and communication. Good ideas include:

     ◈ Posters in hallways (clearly visible to support organizational change)
     ◈ Internal forums to help answer questions
     ◈ How-to videos that help users get acquainted or that helps solve basic issues
     ◈ Quick reference guides and recorded trainings that help answer “What’s in it for me?
     ◈ Language specific material so people can learn best in their native language

◈ Finally, set up some hands-on training options before the rollout and some support desks afterwards to ensure users that they can have any questions they have answered.

Infographics and engaging posters that match your company’s colors and brand guidelines, such as the images above, are two good ways raise awareness throughout your organization.

Learning to how facilitate a change management approach for your organization is no easy task. However, it is a crucial element to establishing buy-in and usage for your new collaboration technology. The question is, are you willing to champion these kinds of actions for your organization?

Help is here if you need it

If you’re unsure about committing yourself to the extra work, there are other ways you can ensure your organization adapts properly to a new technology change. Cisco offers many different options that could potentially aid you in finding the perfect fit – from basic insights to expert advice and assistance.

One of the most common, initial customer introductions is from Cisco’s Customer Success (CS) team. Here, Customer Success managers help guide you to understand your technology further, based on agreed upon capabilities, licenses, features, services, and bundles. They also help monitor your adoption progress and better measure the impact to your organization.

Another available option is Cisco’s User Solution Empowerment (USE) Adoption services. USE is another, yet less familiar, alternative that can help your employees adopt collaboration technologies with greater speed and effectiveness through a change management approach. With access to customized processes, materials, and techniques from Prosci Certified Change Management Professionals, you can directly influence and improve:

◈ User behavior

◈ Product and technology use

◈ Organizational adoption

◈ Business processes and workflows

Simply introducing a collaboration technology to someone and getting their feedback on how you can help raise awareness is a great way to lower anxiety among those who are unsure about a new technology change.

One of the main differences between CS and USE is that CS is usually complimentary to new customers whereas USE is an add-on service that requires an additional investment. To help articulate the difference easier, let’s look at a quick example of a USE engagement.

A major retail banking customer was experiencing lower-than-expected usage in its Webex Meetings solution. Consequently, it invested in USE Adoption services to better train, educate, and encourage end users to collaborate easily through the technology.

The USE team ended up creating a global training strategy that included:

◈ A detailed marketing & communications plan to create awareness through: 

   

     ◈ Executive sponsorship and communication

     ◈ Digital signage on the company website

     ◈ Company-branded posters throughout hallways and elevators

◈ 25 instructor-led sessions tailored specifically at helping event managers, help desk trainers, and administrative professionals best use Webex Meetings

◈ Multiple training recordings for all users, so users can access learning material at any time

◈ Custom educational reference guides created in four languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French), so users could maximize their learning by understanding best practices in their native language

Through this material, the company was able to reach thousands of employees over seven months. By providing the necessary resources to help them use the technology more, over 1800 users were trained during that span. Additionally, the company saw a 12-times increase in the number of registered Webex Meetings and active hosts conducting meetings.

What to do next?

As shown above, one of the most fundamental elements of successful adoption is a good change management approach. A proper one includes influential factors such as executive sponsorship, live training, user segmentation, and awareness throughout the organization. Each has its own specific purpose in influencing change, whether it be awareness, social proof, or even physical usage.

Think of ways you can approach executives to get their buy-in. Coffee breaks, for instance, might be an effective method for those who are busy and constantly on-the-go.

If you’re considering improving your adoption rate on your own, consider how you can broaden your approach beyond simple recordings and PDFs. Who has access to influence upper management? Who’s a good teacher and can volunteer to lead hour-long classes? Who can start a forum on the topic to answer questions and spark conversations? Who’s good at marketing?  Think through creative ways you can get your teams involved because without them, users can feel “left on their own” and even frustrated with the new technology. Or they might not understand how important it is to use.

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Increase Your Cross-Selling with the 3 P’s for Extended Enterprise

It doesn’t matter if you are an account manager or a customer success manager, you want to be a trusted advisor as your customer embarks on their digital journey.  Customers want personalized engagement with trusted partners, and it is important to be able to solve your customers’ business problems by recommending or suggesting related technology solutions.  When I was in the field, I was sometimes nervous about cross-selling unfamiliar products.  However, as I share what I know about the Cisco Ruggedized portfolio, I think you will agree that cross-selling Extended Enterprise use cases for this portfolio provides a simple way to leverage your current network knowledge and account relationships to generate additional revenue and solve top-of-mind customer concerns.

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Ten Technologies to Consider for Contact Centers in 2017: Part 2

Hybrid Services – Integrating cloud services with existing on-premises customer care services is currently a hot topic, not just in the contact center domain but throughout Unified Collaboration and other IT groups.   Hybrid Services architectures allow our Cisco IT teams to deploy some of the latest cloud technology, while knowing the investment made in the present premise environment can be leveraged.  Currently here in Cisco IT we’re exploring several options for our internal contact centers.

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Ten Technologies to Consider for Contact Centers in 2017

The line made famous by the Rolling Stones, “Time waits for no one”, is especially true for technology. A little over two years ago I wrote a blog titled “Ten Things to Consider for a Better Contact Center”. While all of the items mentioned are still relevant, the Contact Center technology space has gained significant investment in new capabilities since that blog was published. Contact Centers have expanded their technology reach and with that comes the importance of understanding how new technology improves customer service. Properly understanding and implementing the various new offerings may help to greatly improve the widely held corporate goal of increasing customer service, both quality and satisfaction.

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Ten Things to Consider for a Better Contact Center

The contact center is the front line for handling customer inquiries. Corporations large and small understand that it’s important to respond to inquiries quickly and effectively. A lot of money is budgeted for customer care departments to meet this growing need and respond via one or more customer contact channels. As evidenced by many stories in the news recently, one small, wrong move and your company could end up on the wrong side of a social media story gone viral. How many times have you heard of someone tweeting about being stuck in a plane on the runway for a few hours? It can make the nightly news and stir up bad publicity for the airline, potentially resulting in customer service headaches for months or years to come.

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