Cisco has introduced a range of AI-powered features in its contact center solutions, including the Webex AI Agent, AI Agent Studio, and Cisco AI Assistant, enhancing its Webex Contact Center offerings.
These AI-driven solutions leverage advanced conversational intelligence and automation to improve customer interactions, streamline issue resolution, and boost overall customer satisfaction. This development aims to help business leaders deliver quicker, more effective, and empathetic responses, thereby enhancing customer trust and brand loyalty.
To address the growing need for immediate self-service, the Webex AI Agent is designed to enable agents to respond swiftly and manage customer inquiries through natural dialogue and conversational intelligence. This approach reduces wait times and accelerates resolutions.
Cisco’s research found a strong link between customer satisfaction and effective self-service tools, revealing that many current options fall short. For example, tasks like rebooking flights or replacing lost credit cards often require live agent support, resulting in long wait times, frustrated customers, and agent burnout. Customer-facing teams frequently grapple with information overload and increasing workloads, leading to longer resolution times and diminished customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. Additionally, the research noted that one in three agents often lacks the context needed to provide ideal customer experiences.
The Webex AI Agent aims to offer self-service solutions for such scenarios, with customer experience leaders suggesting this could improve CSAT scores by as much as 39%. It also incorporates “responsible” AI and automation into the Webex Customer Experience portfolio, simplifying processes for customers and alleviating frustration.
“Customer experience is crucial to a brand’s success. The Webex AI Agent stands out by resolving customer issues instantly, fundamentally changing the frustrating service models we’ve relied on for too long,” stated Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief product officer.
“At Cisco, we design AI solutions to be integral to our products, fundamentally reshaping customer experiences. We believe that soon, a significant percentage of first-time calls will be handled by AI agents that are as engaging and personable as human agents.”
The Webex AI Agent features a new tool, AI Agent Studio, which streamlines the scaling of contact centers. It allows business users and IT administrators to easily train and deploy AI agents, offering exceptional scalability and user-friendliness.
The AI Agent Studio enables contact centers to implement a voice or digital AI agent within minutes and select the AI models to support customer inquiries. This “AI front door” is expected to decrease call volumes in contact centers, allowing agents to concentrate on more complex, relationship-based customer service.
When human agents are needed, context summaries facilitate smooth transitions from AI agents to human representatives. This feature provides background information, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves. Furthermore, recommendations appear directly within the contact center platform, giving agents immediate access to essential information, thereby reducing call times.
The Webex AI Agent and AI Agent Studio are scheduled to be generally available for cloud customers in Q1 2025, with trials for on-premises customers expected to start in Q2 2025. Additionally, Agent Wellness for contact centers, which includes AI features for proactive management of agent schedules and automatic breaks, will also be available in Q1 2025.
