Webex by Cisco Unveils AI-Powered Solutions to Enhance Contact Center Agent Performance

Webex by Cisco a prominent provider of collaboration and contact center technologies, is introducing new AI-powered features in Webex Contact Center. These innovations are designed to foster agent well-being and productivity, resulting in superior customer experiences. In response to the arising issue stress and burnout are pervasive in the workplace, particularly among contact center employees, where agent turnover is twice as high as in other professions. Research indicates that burnout is responsible for 50% of agent turnover, costing businesses with 100 agents an average of $4.8 million annually.

“At Webex, we are embracing agent wellness as a core value to contribute to a more compassionate, inclusive, and progressive business culture. Our commitment to nurturing the well-being of agents means that businesses can build a foundation for growth, empower innovation, and provide exceptional experiences to their customers,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration, at Cisco.  

Webex has been at the forefront of providing contact center solutions for some of the world's largest customer-centric brands for more than 20 years. The latest AI-powered capabilities introduced within Webex Contact Center are tailored to enhance agent well-being and efficiency while simultaneously elevating the quality of customer interactions. These include:

• AI-Powered Agent Burnout Detection: This feature enables businesses to proactively address agent well-being by implementing automated breaks, such as the Thrive Reset. And offering real-time coaching following challenging customer interactions.
• Suggested Responses: Utilization of generative AI, Webex Contact Center can automatically suggest responses to boost agent productivity while handling customer inquiries on digital channels.
• Conversation Summaries and Wrap-Ups: Agents receive clear summaries of issues and resolutions already explored via self-service. Moreover, a summary of the call or chat is provided to both the agent and the customer after the interaction ends. Agent wrap-ups automatically generate wrap-up codes and actions, saving an average of five minutes per agent.
• Coaching Highlights: This feature generates a dashboard for supervisors, showcasing the highest and lowest customer-rated interactions. It automatically summarizes the interactions with the best ratings, offering coaching tips for fellow employees based on these findings. Similarly, it captures highlights from the lowest-rated interactions to coach lower-performing agents for overall improvement.

As employees beyond the contact center increasingly play a key role in addressing customer needs. The organizations face the challenge of connecting these employees to the customer experience journey. Webex addresses this issue with the introduction of Webex Customer Experience Essentials, which extends core contact center capabilities to Webex Calling users. This brings several benefits, which include:

• Specialized Agents Outside the Contact Center: Employees outside the contact center can become specialized agents, leading to faster issue resolution and improved customer satisfaction, potentially eliminating the need for callbacks.
• Streamlined Issue Escalation: Organizations gain a better understanding of customer issues requiring escalation outside of the contact center. This leads to more contextual engagement from back-office employees during issue escalation.

This Webex Customer Experience Essentials is designed for customer service-oriented industries and is available for purchase by Webex Calling users.

The new Webex Contact Center capabilities are currently in various stages of development and are not yet generally available. The suggested replies are expected to enter beta testing by the end of 2023, while agent burnout detection APIs are scheduled to enter beta testing in February 2024. The Webex Customer Experience Essentials package is anticipated to be generally available in the first half of 2024.

Cisco has a longstanding commitment to AI with a focus on security, privacy, and human rights. Their Responsible AI Framework has tried to ensure that AI offerings align with transparency, fairness, accountability, privacy, security, and reliability standards. The Webex Contact Center capabilities are designed with security in mind and are set to align with Cisco's Responsible AI Framework.