Cisco’s Webex Contact Center platform gets AI-powered chat bots

Cisco Systems Inc. said today that it is bringing agent-based AI capabilities to its contact center and video conferencing platforms, helping customer service agents and employees increase their productivity through automation.

The new capabilities, announced at the company’s annual Webex One event in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., features a new Webex AI agent designed to take customer calls on behalf of human agents. The company also announced the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, which is a digital assistant for human contact center employees designed to help them be more efficient while dealing with customers.

Additionally, the company announced a new AI Agent Studio for businesses that want to build their own custom AI agents for use in the Webex Contact Center.

Agentic AI chatbots

With today’s updates, Cisco is looking to take the lead in a contact center industry that has enthusiastically embraced AI capabilities. Virtually all contact center software vendors offer some form of AI-based chatbots to handle basic customer inquiries, before handing off more difficult ones to human agents.

But with Webex AI Agent, Cisco says it’s going one better, as its chatbots will be able to perform much more complicated tasks and reduce the workload humans have to deal with. The Webex AI agent leverages advanced natural dialogue and conversational intelligence to deliver faster resolutions, reducing caller wait times.

As an example, Cisco said issues like a consumer needing to rebook a flight or replace a lost debit card almost always involve a human agent, but this one no longer does. With Webex AI Agent, businesses will be able to create customized self-service options for these use cases, so consumers can complete these tasks without the assistance of a human agent. According to Cisco, early adopters have seen a 39% improvement in customer satisfaction since they began implementing the technology.

Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief product officer, said the quality of customer service has a huge impact on a brand’s reputation, so they can’t afford to get it wrong. “Webex AI Agent solves customer problems instantly and will fundamentally transform the experiences we’ve all grown accustomed to,” he promised.

Within the Webex AI Agent, customers will also be able to play with Cisco’s AI Agent Studio, which provides an interface and tools for training custom AI bots that have more context about their business. Customers will be able to use their own AI models and train them with their own data and deploy them in the Webex Contact Center, further enhancing the capabilities of their chatbots, the company said.

Cisco said Webex AI Agent and AI Agent Studio will be generally available to cloud customers in the first quarter of next year, while on-premise customers will be able to preview them starting in the second quarter.

Helpers of human agents

As for Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, it’s an AI bot designed to help human agents, who will still be needed to handle more complicated customer issues that Webex AI Agent can’t handle. Generally available now, it provides automated guidance for call center agents as they deal with each caller, providing at-a-glance summaries of context to make it easier to hand off the chatbot to the human, who can immediately see what is the caller’s problem.

In addition to context, Cisco AI Assistant will also provide suggested responses to agents. It is smart enough to listen and understand the conversion between the agent and the customer, and will immediately tell the agent what to do next to solve the customer’s problem as quickly as possible.

The AI ​​Assistant isn’t the only way Cisco is dealing with human agents. With the new agent wellness capability announced today, it gives contact center managers some useful capabilities, such as automatic breaks for agents to prevent burnout. Other features include better agent scheduling and tools to increase or decrease each agent’s workflow on the fly.

More immersive virtual meetings

Finally, the company also revealed a series of updates for business users of the Webex video conferencing platform to facilitate virtual meetings. New features include a feature called Spatial Meetings that can transform any space equipped with a Cisco Room Bar into a more immersive studio. as an environment with immersive and spatial audio.

There’s also new hardware, called the Cisco Ceiling Microphone, that helps capture natural conversations from anywhere in the room. It uses AI to detect where voices are coming from and adjust the microphone on the fly, so you can always focus on the person speaking. It is compatible with multiple Cisco cameras and room systems and replaces the need for individual microphones for each user.

Featured image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer