Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Cisco Reveals Cloud Customer Service Ambitions

April 19, 2018

Cisco is making an “aggressive investment” in its contact center efforts, recently hired Vasil Triant, and aims to be the leader in the cloud contact center space.


That was the word today from Triant, the former CEO of cloud-based contact center company Serenova, speaking at Cisco Collaboration Summit in Phoenix.

“We will be the leader in the cloud contact center space,” said Triant, Cisco’s new vice president and general manager of customer care.

Cisco will be introducing new reactive, contextual, suggestive, and predictive solutions that enable businesses to address all parts of the customer journey, he said, noting the need for one data depository across all customer channels. And he announced the merging of two existing products. (More on that in a minute.)

He talked about how instead of doing a screen pop of customer data when an agent answers an incoming customer call, advanced contact centers will be more contextual, and thus will be able to display only the customer data related to that particular call. That way, he said, agents won’t have to scroll through three or four pages of online customer information to find what they’re looking for. They’ll just get exactly what they need.

Triant went on to note how he recently had a problem with a new refrigerator for his home. An advanced contact service solution, he said, would be able to see he’d read two knowledge base articles on the product. That way, the fridge company would know what he was calling about when he reached out or, better yet, be able to reach out to him with a solution. This is an example of how predictive capabilities might come into play.

He said Cisco’s recent AppDynamics and MindMeld acquisitions will help power some of these kinds of things. And he indicated that his employer’s investment in MindMeld was “just the beginning” of a larger AI acquisition strategy.

Speaking of customer journey, Triant announced today that Cisco has combined its CC-One and Spark Care solutions into a mid-market, cloud-based offering called Customer Journey Platform. (Cisco’s cloud-based enterprise solution in this realm is called Hosted Collaboration Service for Contact Center.)

But not all customers want to move to the cloud, he said. So Cisco continues to cater to mid-market customers with the Contact Center Express and to enterprises with Contact Center Enterprise.




Edited by Maurice Nagle



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