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Cisco Is Bringing Cognitive Collaboration to the Contact Center

Cisco unveiled three AI features for its Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Unified Contact Center Express at Enterprise Connect 2019. These features should help, but don’t replace your agents with bots anytime soon.

• Customer Journey Analyzer: Available to both cloud and on-premises contact centers, this feature allows you to perform end-to-end analytics on the customer journey.
• Cisco Answers: This cloud-based feature provides call agents with real-time information on their customers (including information from social media). It is powered by Google AI.
• Customer virtual assistant: An AI bot that integrates with UCCE.

Our Take

With these features, Cisco Collaboration is living up to its reputation of adapting to change – it is currently scoring 73% on Product Strategy and Rate of Improvement in SoftwareReviews, with 31% of respondents saying that they are delighted (N=51, March 20, 2019).

The Cisco Answers feature is aligned with market trends. According to this study of 5,000 people, 76% of callers expect agents to know relevant information about them and their history with the company. As more people engage with companies over social media, this visibility can be very beneficial (if not a little creepy).

I hesitate with chatbots. In the same study, 33% said “the most important aspect of a good customer service experience” is “getting my issue resolved in a single interaction (no matter the length of time).” When the chatbot reaches its functional limits, it will need to quickly and smoothly trade off with an agent. This critique isn’t against Cisco’s product; it’s against chatbots that are poorly implemented and too heavily relied upon by customers.

The Customer Journey Analyzer and the Cisco Answers features should help improve the customer experience. Don’t over-rely on chatbots and undo that hard work.

Want to Know More?

SoftwareReviews: Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise

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