The Contact Center Made Cognitive
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the contact center enables organizations to deliver the kind of intuitive, contextualized, and seamless experiences customers and service agents need. But what other innovative capabilities are needed to build one? Cisco’s new guide helps you build the future today.
Many networks cannot adequately support cloud communications, which is why IT leaders are coupling UCaaS/CaaS with SD-WAN. Nemertes Research offers this guide to an integrated approach.
B2B companies are differentiating themselves through the experience they deliver to customers. This strategy will grow in importance, while differentiating on products and price will become less important.1
Customer experience is becoming a strategic imperative for how businesses compete and differentiate their brands. At the same time, customers want to reach out in a wide variety of ways (voice, email, text, chat, and social media), making it challenging for contact centers to manage all these channels and route customers to the right resources.
These channels are often siloed in how they arrive at the contact center, leaving agents frustrated by having to deal with multiple disparate applications, and leaving customers dissatisfied by fragmented and impersonal experiences.
What happens when you use leading technology to build a cognitive contact center? You get powerful information about your customers, predictive and proactive customer experiences, and seamless integration into the rest of your organization.
With the right resources and solutions, the contact center can lead the charge in increasing positive business outcomes.
When it comes to improving the customer experience, it’s important to find solutions that address your customers’ biggest concerns:
17% U.S. consumers say they’re willing to spend 17 percent more to do business with companies that deliver excellent service.2
59% In the United States, even if people love your company or product, 59 percent will walk away after several bad experiences, and 17 percent after just one bad experience.3
46% of all consumers will abandon a brand if the employees are not knowledgeable.3
While you’re addressing those problems, keep in mind that your contact center agents also have their own set of pain points that keep them from performing their job to the best of their ability:
A cognitive contact center has intelligence woven throughout every portion of the customer and agent experience. At Cisco, we’re using technology to transform those experiences from the inside out.
Powerful cloud data analytics that help you learn more about your customers
Artificial intelligence (AI) that adds context, makes suggestions, and creates predictive, proactive experiences for your customers
Integrated collaboration so your agents can easily reach experts quickly to improve first-contact resolution
Cisco Contact Center solutions deliver innovative capabilities:
Contact centers used to not have enough data. Now we have an abundance, which means you can gain tremendous insights into your customers’ experiences. This insight helps you learn about your customers’ journeys as they navigate throughout your entire organization—beyond just the contact center.
Being able to gather, consolidate, and analyze all that wonderful data helps you improve and enhance what your customers are experiencing. It helps you understand what they like and what they don’t like. It helps you identify patterns in their behavior that allow you to make their experience even better and more profitable.
Artificial intelligence, when combined with data, provides a powerful tool to enhance how you engage with your customers. And it provides your agents with the context, knowledge, and relevant information they need to deliver proactive and predictive care for your customers.
Cisco’s Customer Journey Analyzer enables you to dynamically improve customer experiences to drive deeper satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value. Customer Journey Analyzer is cloud based, and it also works with your on-premises Cisco® contact center solutions. It collects and unifies all your customer data, from multiple data sources and systems used across your organization, and it provides a 360-degree view of your end-to-end customer journey—all in one tool.
Using statistical performance analytics, Analyzer assesses customer and agent attributes and behaviors that result in the best business outcomes. You can model what-if scenarios that help you predict business impact when anything changes, such as customer routing, agent skilling, staffing, and more. It even predicts customer needs, matches them with the best agent, and routes them accordingly.
Analyzer provides a complete and consolidated business view of your customer journey, so you can optimize for operational efficiency, financial performance, and an improved customer experience.
Cisco brings cloud technology and AI together, and layers them on top of your contact center—whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud. You keep your Cisco contact center on-premises, while adding advanced cloud services that won’t disrupt your business. Now you have a hybrid deployment that lets you enjoy cloud innovation and all the benefits that come with it, until you’re ready to migrate completely. And you protect your valuable on-premises investments.
To make your transition to the cloud even smoother, we’ve created the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan for contact center. Collaboration Flex Plan makes it easy for you to buy a mix of cloud, on-premises, and hosted contact center services in a user-based subscription, pay-as-you-grow consumption model. This way, you can move your users however and whenever you need to, and you gain additional investment protection.
It means finding the right resource—whether it’s a person or information— at the right time, based on conversations as they happen. And then using that information to solve problems on the first try.
Let’s say a customer reaches out to a contact center using chat. As they communicate with an agent, Cisco Answers—powered by AI—listens to the conversation and suggests relevant articles and solutions to the customer’s problem in real time.
But what happens when we take it one step further? What if we used AI and machine learning to predict the customer’s issue and send them a solution before they even know they have a problem? This is where the magical moments begin.
Cisco is weaving artificial intelligence into the contact center to help you go beyond bot self-service capabilities and agent efficiency. With the right technology, you’ll have personalized, predictive, and proactive interactions with your customers that will drive their loyalty and lifetime value.
A predictive customer experience has three main goals:
68% Companies that empower their agents with unified communications (UC) experience a 68 percent greater annual increase in customer profit margins.4
98% of companies experience improved customer retention rates when their contact center is UC-enabled.4
25% of companies have a decrease in agent turnover rate with a UC-enabled contact center.4
Agents, whether digital or human, are seen as the difference makers in creating meaningful customer interactions. But they often need a little help from experts to deliver solutions to customers. Traditionally, the contact center has been in a silo, making it difficult for agents to reach out and talk with subject-matter experts and others within the organization.
Cisco solutions are making it possible to break down communication barriers and extend the contact center to include the rest of the organization. This is accomplished with an integrated portfolio of collaboration solutions that work seamlessly with your contact center.
Imagine the entire company as a giant contact center, where every question can be answered by the right person. When a complex inquiry arises, the contact center agent can easily find, call, or shoot a message over to a subject-matter expert, without ever having to leave their agent desktop.
In this way, agents are more productive, they build strong connections with back-office colleagues, and customers get answers right away.
How your organization benefits:
Your customers are not always easy to please, but when you make their experience a strategic priority to your business, you can create all sorts of positive business outcomes such as improved customer satisfaction and competitive advantage. Happy customers will spread the word, creating more references for you and helping to improve your brand’s reputation.
All of this can be accomplished with leading technology and the right partner who has the expertise to help you get there.
How your customers benefit:
Delivering exceptional customer experiences—every single time— has never been more important. After all, this is how buying decisions are made. Cisco delivers the most complete contact center portfolio, combining world-class cloud calling, meetings, and team collaboration solutions with audio and video devices and headsets.
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