Webex Contact Center: Now ‘Full-Throttle’ With Baked-In Webex UCaaS Features

“This is where you actually get this beautiful spectrum of capabilities that comes together. It’s not just about collaboration, it’s not just about customer experience. It’s about tying in networking and the security stack, all into a single platform,” said Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s EVP and GM of security and collaboration ahead of Cisco’s WebexOne 2022 event.

Cisco’s contact center-as-a-service platform has been given the same audio intelligence and AI capabilities that users have come to expect from the popular Webex collaboration platform as the tech giant seeks to bring all its features and functionality into the full Webex suite.

“Every investment we made in AI is actually now being taken advantage of by the entirety of the [Webex] stack … that’s the beauty of having one platform,” Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration, told an audience of analysts and reporters ahead of its WebexOne event in San Jose.

Webex Contact Center is also now integrated with Microsoft Teams, which will give call center agents a more seamless experience with skill-based routing of inbound Teams calls. Webex Connect also includes integrations with leading CRM, contact center, commerce, database/storage and helpdesk vendors, including Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft Azure, among others, according to the San Jose, Calif.-based tech giant.

[Related: Move Over Webex: Microsoft Teams To Be Available On Cisco Meeting Devices]

Cisco has made a number of acquisitions in the collaboration space in recent years to bolster its videoconferencing capabilities, as well as customer experience. One such deal was for center-as-a-service provider IMImobile PLC in 2020, whose technology has been integrated to make Cisco’s own CaaS offering more insightful, the company said.

But Cisco is also integrating its other collaboration-focused investments and technology into Webex Contact Center to improve the customer and agent experience dramatically. These integrations are operating at “full throttle” now inside the contact center, Patel said.

Webex’s background noise reduction technology first introduced in 2020 after the company’s acquisition of BabbleLabs technology, will now be available in Webex Contact Center and available on PSTN voice calls.

Webex Contact Center customers can now engage with their end clients in more than 16 channels, including Instagram and Google Business Messages. Webex Connect also now supports bot capabilities in 93 languages.

“The way in which expectations for how people think about customers experiences are fundamentally getting altered,” Patel said. “The way that people are communicating is not just by waiting on-hold on a call, they are communicating on multiple different channels.”

Patel said that on average, humans are on hold for 40 hours of their lives. “That’s a problem that’s worth solving. Enabling communication channels that are different that people can engage with, but still maintaining continuity [is] super important,” he added.

Webex Contact Center features an enhanced cloud-based supervisor dashboard to monitor agent performance, send messages within the Webex App, and view detailed agent information and important call highlights. Cisco is also expanding Analyzer reports to arm supervisors with real-time and historical insights into team performance.

Cisco also introduced a new Headset 720 Series for agents that includes a lightweight 276 degree rotation boom arm with flip-to-mute and features one button to join for Webex and Microsoft Teams.

“This is where you actually get this beautiful spectrum of capabilities that comes together,” Patel said of the contact center updates. “It’s not just about collaboration, it’s not just about customer experience. It’s about tying in networking and the security stack, all into a single platform.”