Shaping a new era of customer experience with Webex: 2024 sparked ...

As we wrap up another year, on behalf of the Cisco Webex Customer Experience team, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to our customers and partners for playing such a vital role in our success and growth. Your support and positive feedback has been instrumental in shaping our journey.

2024 has been an exciting and dynamic year of progress. Webex Contact Center achieved remarkable growth, innovation, and industry recognition. These accomplishments would not have been possible without the unwavering dedication of our customers, partners, and employees.

Looking ahead to 2025, we remain committed to our core principles: to help our customers strengthen their relationships with their own customers by enabling more thoughtful, human, and effective communication. Naturally, we will continue to focus on investing in artificial intelligence (AI) to drive innovation and prepare our customers for an AI-driven future.

Here are some of the key achievements from this year and a glimpse of what’s to come in the year ahead.

Continued Webex Success in Gartner Magic Quadrants for CCaaS and CPaaS

Cisco’s strong performance in both Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision are reasons why it was recognized as a Challenger in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). We are proud that our secure, reliable, and scalable cloud contact center platform continues to deliver exceptional value to customers worldwide.

Cisco was also acknowledged for its “solid portfolio of CPaaS services without any major weaknesses, recognized for the second year in a row as a Visionary CPaaS Provider in the 2024 edition of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Communications Platform as a Service. This distinction reinforces the continued growth of Webex Connect, the value of our visual flow builder and the pervasiveness of CPaaS within key industry verticals that is driving value for our customers.

Our unified Webex platform enables us to innovate across a comprehensive solution that enhances experiences for both employees and customers. This approach earned us a unique distinction: being one of only two vendors recognized in three Gartner Magic Quadrants for CCaaS, CPaaS, and UCaaS. This underscores the power and versatility of our integrated platform and portfolio.

In addition, we were named as a leader in the IDC MarketScape

Global Growth in Cloud Adoption and Market Expansion

Webex Contact Center experienced impressive growth in Cisco’s fiscal year 2024, with agent licenses increasing by over 75% year-over-year. In the fourth quarter alone, we saw significant year-over-year cloud contact center momentum across all industries, with largest growth in financial services, healthcare, and retail. Notably, the financial services sector nearly doubled its number of seats. These achievements highlight the growing adoption of Webex Contact Center as a trusted solution across diverse industries worldwide.

Read our customer success stories

Driving innovation from within

Unifying our solutions is at the heart of our strategy. When our products are seamlessly integrated, it empowers our customers to work more cohesively as well. It fosters collaboration, simplifies IT management, accelerates onboarding and training, streamlines processes, and ultimately improves both employee and customer experiences.

This commitment to unity is why we decided to merge two key business units (our CCaaS and CPaaS functions) into a single, cohesive organization – the Webex Customer Experience team. This transformation has made us more agile, collaborative, and innovative in delivering value to our customers. By merging these teams, we’ve brought together top talent and engineering expertise to create exceptional products, deliver a robust roadmap, and fulfill our promises to customers.

In addition, our strong Cisco brand, industry recognized security infrastructure, AI-powered unified platform, and flexible deployment options, should empower our customers to future-proof their CX strategies with confidence.

Relentless AI innovation throughout Webex Customer Experience

Throughout 2024, Webex launched several innovations to further enhance our Customer Experience portfolio and enable our customers to enhance their CX strategy. Customer expectations are higher than ever. They expect simplicity, convenience, efficiency, and speed; all are essential, not optional. To support our customers in responding to these demands, we’ve developed cutting-edge AI solutions designed to enhance customer service, empower agents, and boost operational efficiency.

Webex AI Agent

In October at WebexOne we announced the all new Webex AI Agent solution that seeks to revolutionize self-service by combining conversational intelligence with real-time automation enabling more authentic, human-like interactions that lead to resolutions. We believe your AI front door needs to focus on intelligent engagement, not call containment. The Webex AI Agent ensures your customers are greeted with smart, personalized, intuitive interactions that feel more humanlike and effective.

To build and customize your AI Agents, we also announced a new design tool called AI Agent Studio, which makes it easy for business users and IT administrators to build and deploy self-service workflows, providing them with unmatched scalability and user-friendliness. The AI Agent Studio allows contact centers to quickly deploy a voice or digital AI agent in minutes and choose which AI models are used to support customer inquiries.

Check out the Webex AI Agent in action

Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center

Currently in beta, the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center is a comprehensive solution that blends humanity with technology, striking the perfect balance between automation, personalization, and human touch. This helps agents be more efficient, and deliver a more effective, conversational engagement with customers.

Some customers are already benefiting from the AI Assistant. Early feedback from our beta users include reduced handle times and improved net promoter scores (NPS). One customer saw a 4x improvement in time spent handling customer inquiries and has reported last mile improvements in customer satisfaction scores from 4.8 to 4.9 on a 1-5 scale – all within a two-month period.

Some of the exciting features in beta today include:

Suggested Responses: Automatically suggests replies for agents while bringing in customer context and history for quicker, more accurate responses.
Virtual Agent Summaries: Generates a recap of every virtual agent chat and voice call, providing agents with important context of a customer’s previous interaction to avoid repeat conversations and improve customer experience.
Dropped Call Summaries: Generates a recap of all voice calls that are dropped, enabling contact centers to identify network issues and proactively reach out to dropped callers to avoid missed opportunities or customer churn.
Agent Well-being: Can predict potential agent burnout and mitigate it by re-routing calls to other agents, switching agents to another less demanding digital channel, and adding a break to their schedule to help the agent reset.

AI-powered enhancements for analytics

Customer experience leaders can rely on AI-powered Topic Analytics to quickly identify current call drivers based on call summarization data to pinpoint issues or areas for improvement. Leaders can also better understand a customer’s experience with Automatic CSAT scoring, which leverages operational data and transcripts to evaluate 100% of your interactions, solving the common problem of customers ignoring survey requests.

Innovative AI Outbound Video sets sail

Customer experience includes the entire customer journey and all its touchpoints. In the second half of 2024, we saw the first successful beta test of AI Outbound Video powered by Webex Connect by Carnival Cruise Line, who utilized this innovative AI-powered tool to streamline and improve their passenger port experience by creating and delivering personalized, interactive videos at scale. The videos arrived over SMS and delivered critical port directions, itinerary information and boarding instructions with the intention of improving embarkation for passengers.

Channel and Integration Enhancements

RCS Channel Expansion

In 2024, a significant CPaaS messaging milestone was reached with the release of Apple’s iOS 18, with Rich Communication Services (RCS) Business Messaging now available across Android and iOS devices. With the update, the channel is poised to grow massively and based on current projections, 80% of all US consumers will be reachable via RCS by Q2 2025. Businesses, especially in the US, are now leveraging the rich messaging capabilities of RCS, such as quick replies and carousels, to create interactive two-way experiences for promotional campaigns, reminders, alerts, and much more.

Learn more about RCS here.

Enhanced CRM Integrations

Contact center agents rely heavily on other software to help customers, which can impact productivity and timely resolution. To simplify workflows and improve overall efficiency, we introduced new deeper integrations with leading business applications including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and ServiceNow. These out-of-the-box integrations are easy to install, and allow agents to quickly access relevant customer information, process inquiries seamlessly, and manage advanced call related tasks all from a simple unified application experience.

Empowering Partners through Integrations

Webex Connect introduced the innovative Partner Integration Studio, empowering partners to craft their own custom integrations that can be seamlessly reused across their customer base. This not only enhances operational efficiency but also opens up new monetization avenues, ultimately optimizing workloads and enriching the customer experience. What’s more, the Partner Integration Studio will be an essential piece in creating and improving AI Agents. In alpha this year, we onboarded a few test partners who have already began utilizing the studio to drive efficiency.

What’s next in 2025

I’m incredibly excited about the future of customer experience and the opportunities ahead in the coming year.

The pace of AI innovation is advancing faster than any other technology we’ve seen before and has reached a groundbreaking moment with GenAI – unlocking unprecedented potential and making AI more relevant and practical. At the same time, expectations for customer experience are getting higher. We are committed to delivering cutting-edge innovations to help our customers excel in this new era of CX and AI. In fact, Cisco launched a $1BN global investment fund in AI to expand and develop secure, reliable and trustworthy AI solutions for our customers as well as investing in world class start ups such as Scale AI, that build upon Cisco’s AI strategy. These investments underscore Cisco’s commitment to helping our customers enable more thoughtful, human and effective communication through innovations in AI.

Some of our priorities for the year ahead include:

Revolutionizing experiences with the new Webex AI Agent, ensuring your customers experience more humanlike, personalized, and intuitive interactions that lead to faster/timely resolution
Ensuring seamless engineering integrations across the entire Webex portfolio to deliver intuitive, effortless experiences for all Webex users.
Continuing to responsibly embed purpose-built AI into our solutions, maintaining the quality, security, and reliability that define Cisco products.

We look forward to empowering our customers as they embrace and thrive in this dynamic new era of innovation. Wishing everyone a festive holiday season from the entire Customer Experience team.

Resources

The post Shaping a new era of customer experience with Webex: 2024 sparked … appeared first on Webex Blog.