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How Cisco is using AI to enhance customer experiences

My team and I are excited to be participating at Google’s Cloud Next conference in San Francisco this week where we are announcing enhancements to some of the solutions we are building with Google for our joint customers. At the conference, we will be highlighting some of the compelling  innovations we’re creating in the contact center space that combine Cisco and Google cloud technologies.

We are leveraging the Google Contact Center AI framework to enhance our portfolio as part of our vision to transform the contact center from delivering reactive care to predictive care, and moving from isolated customer experiences to cohesive and engaging journeys.

A great example of this is Cisco Answers, which we announced at Enterprise Connect last month and are demonstrating this week in our booth at Google Cloud Next. Cisco Answers, a cloud-based AI solution powered by Google Contact Center AI, empowers agents with the needed context and information to deliver personalized and proactive care, while they’re interacting with a customer.

Instead of requiring agents to manually search for information during interactions, Cisco Answers proactively presents intelligent suggestions, documents, and key forms of enterprise knowledge to the agent desktop in real time. Agents feel empowered because they’re more informed, and it minimizes the need for triple-tasking which can be distracting while assisting customers. This speeds service, improves agent productivity, and drives differentiated customer experiences that lead to customer loyalty and improves customer lifetime value.

According to a survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group, agents spend 17% of their time searching for relevant knowledge to do their job. This is because most agents need access to multiple back-end systems and sources of information in real time.

Sopra Steria, a Cisco contact center customer and European leader in digital transformation, is an early adopter of AI solutions applied to their contact centers. “AI is transforming our business models and enables us to provide our clients with unmatched offerings while reducing total cost of services without compromising on quality. We expect Cisco Answers to be an integral part of our solutions by cutting down search time in half, allowing our agents to be much more effective,” said Jean-Marie Souchu, Director of Infrastructure Management at Sopra Steria.

Visit us at booth #1507 and see Cisco Answers in action. If you’re interested in participating in our early field trial program for Cisco Answers, contact us at cc.cloud@cisco.com to learn how.

To learn more about our Customer Journey Solutions, please visit our website.

 

*Source: Aberdeen Study June 2018: The Intelligent Contact Center: Get Smarter to Drive Customer Satisfaction.



Authors

Tod Famous

Senior Director, Product Management

Cisco Customer Contact Business Unit