At WebexOne, Cisco unveiled new AI-powered innovations, including the Webex AI Agent, AI Agent Studio and Cisco AI Assistant features for Webex Contact Centre.
These AI solutions leverage advanced conversational intelligence and automation to enhance customer interactions, streamline issue resolution and improve overall customer satisfaction. This enables business leaders to deliver faster, more effective and more empathetic interactions that improve customer trust and brand loyalty.
Webex AI Agent: Addressing the Need for Immediate and Effective Self-Service
To address rising customer expectations for helpful and immediate assistance, Cisco announced the new Webex AI Agent. This self-service concierge swiftly takes actions and handles customer inquiries with natural dialogue and conversational intelligence to eliminate wait times and provide faster resolutions. Webex AI Agent incorporates the latest in responsible AI and automation into the Webex Customer Experience portfolio. It will transform the experience for customers, eliminating the complexity and frustration they are accustomed to.
“Customer experience can make or break a brand, and unlike other solutions on the market, the Webex AI Agent solves customer problems instantaneously and will fundamentally transform the experiences we have all reluctantly been using for far too long”, said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. “At Cisco, we’re building AI solutions natively. We start product design with the assumption that AI is going to be in the core fabric of the product and an essential ingredient in how we reimagine customer experiences. We believe that in the next few years, a large majority of first-time calls will be handled by an AI Agent that will be just as interactive, dynamic, engaging and personable as a human agent”.
According to a new global study conducted by Cisco, there is a link between customer satisfaction and effective self-service tools. Current options are failing to meet their needs. For example, rebooking a flight or replacing a lost credit card typically require live agent support, leading to long queues and hold times, multiple transfers, frustrated customers and agent burnout. Webex AI Agent provides self-service options for scenarios like these, which can result in a 39% improvement in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores according to customer experience leaders.
AI Agent Studio: Simplify and Scale the Contact Centre
Webex AI Agent includes a new design tool called AI Agent Studio, which makes it easy for business users and IT administrators to train and deploy AI agents, providing them with unmatched scalability and user-friendliness. The AI Agent Studio allows contact centres to quickly deploy a voice or digital AI agent in minutes and choose which AI models are used to support customer inquiries. This AI front door will reduce calls in the contact centre so that agents can focus on higher touch and relationship-based customer service.
Webex AI Agent along with the AI Agent Studio will be generally available in Q1 2025 for cloud customers, with customer trials for on-premise customers in Q2 2025.
Building on Cisco’s AI Momentum in Webex Contact Centre
Customer-facing teams often struggle with information overload and growing workloads, leading to longer resolution times and decreased CSAT scores. In fact, customer experience leaders report that 1 out of 3 agents lack the customer context needed to deliver ideal customer experiences. With the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Centre, becoming generally available in Q1 2025, busy agents and supervisors benefit from automated guidance at their fingertips to provide expert-level customer support, including:
- Context Summaries: When an agent is required, context summaries facilitate seamless handoffs from an AI agent to contact centre agent. All necessary background information is provided to continue the conversation while eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves.
- Suggested Responses: Recommendations appear directly within the contact centre platform, providing agents with the information they need right at their fingertips to reduce call times.
- Dropped Call Summaries: Interactions are captured and documented up to the point of disconnection, ensuring continuity when the call is resumed.
Also becoming generally available in Q1 2025 is Agent Wellness for the contact centre. These AI features allow for proactive actions such as automatic breaks for agents, changes in agent schedules and shifting of which channels agents support to increase or decrease capacity based on need.
AI is also powering analytics to help customer experience leaders operate a smarter, more efficient contact centre:
- Topic Analytics: Generally available now, these analytics quickly identify the drivers of incoming calls and customer issues to enable proactive issue resolution.
- Automatic CSAT Scoring: Available January 2025, this solution leverages operational data and transcripts to evaluate 100% of an organisation’s customer interactions, addressing the common issue of low customer survey response rates. With these new insights, business leaders can resolve challenges as they arise and anticipate future needs, delivering a new wave of proactive customer experience.
Image Credit: Cisco