Delivering exceptional customer experiences with new AI-powered Webex innovations

At Cisco Live Amsterdam, we’re excited to bring new innovations to the Webex Customer Experience portfolio, along with the general availability of the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center.

Today, it’s paramount to create exceptional experiences that make your customers feel valued in every interaction, every time. We have all had poor experiences that we can barely comprehend.

Metrigy and Webex recently surveyed CX professionals and discovered there is a growing divide in customer satisfaction among European businesses. One major shift is the rise of AI implementation to enhance customer satisfaction. Nearly all respondents with the highest levels of customer satisfaction incorporate AI into their CX strategies, whereas only 9% of those with low satisfaction have adopted AI to enhance their customer experience.

It’s time to evolve beyond the status quo to create a customer experience center that takes the connection with your customers to a new level. We believe the best path is an integrated one across all business teams, where we use technological breakthroughs to solve the problems that have plagued us for a long time. And today, that breakthrough is AI.

AI is the foundation for a modern customer experience and deliver the vision of a customer experience center. Aspects like automation and intelligence can anticipate customer needs, deliver always-on service and create personalized experiences. Analytics that can enable faster decision making and deliver impactful business results. And in a hyper-connected world, organizations need to make customers feel valued in every single interaction, which requires these essential components of an experience center:

• Anticipate customer needs: Meet customers with intelligent engagements through proactive communications and AI-powered service.
• Build a 24/7, always-on front door: Greet your customers with engaging AI interactions that feel natural and human-like.
• Automate intent fulfillment: Automation that enables intent realization to close the loop on customer requests, helping to prevent the need for escalation.
• Augment your workforce with AI: Unlock new potential and enhance efficiency with AI-powered tools to empower customer-facing employees and leaders. 
• Turn insights into action: Leverage robust analytics to understand customer needs and proactively address them.

The result? Customers get the experience they want – quick, personalized, and empathetic response. This makes them feel heard, valued, and understood, building loyalty and a stronger relationship. 

We’re announcing the availability of critical functionality within our portfolio that allows organizations to start the evolution to an experience center.

The Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center is now generally available

The Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center presents agents/supervisors with AI-powered assistance, offering automated guidance, context, insights, and summaries to optimize customer interactions. Today, the AI Assistant is generally available and ready to order for the Webex Contact Center customers.

For customer-facing teams, we are deploying AI to augment the agent experience and, when possible, automate manual tasks like conversation summaries, contextual handoffs, and monitoring agent well-being. We are also utilizing AI for the supervisor experience to identify key call drivers and emphasize agent behaviors that impact CSAT.

Built on Cisco’s AI platform and designed specifically for the Webex Contact Center, these features support and empower busy agents and supervisors to achieve business results more quickly and with less stress.

• AI Agent Transfer Context Summaries: Facilitate seamless handoffs from AI agents and IVR transfers to human agents, ensuring customers do not need to repeat themselves.
• Dropped Call Summaries: Ensure continuity after a point of disconnection by capturing and documenting interaction details to seamlessly resume a conversation with all the previous context.
• Agent Wellbeing: Agent Wellbeing automatically identifies signs of burnout in real time, providing insights that enable proactive actions such as automatic breaks, schedule changes, and capacity management across channels.

The AI Assistant also includes AI-powered analytics to help customer experience leaders operate a smarter, more efficient contact center:

• Topic Analytics: this analytics feature uses historical data to help users quickly identify the reasons for incoming calls and analyze them to enable proactive action such as training, FAQs, or process updates.
• Automatic CSAT Scoring: this solution leverages operational data and transcripts to evaluate 100% of voice interactions, effectively overcoming the challenge of low customer survey response rates. This capability will be extended to also delve deeper to help train and coach agents.

We will be adding more advanced capabilities such as suggested responses, real-time transcription for agents, wrap-up summaries and mid-call summaries in Q2 2025.

Virtual Agent Summary

Dropped Call Summaries

An AI front door that delivers intelligent engagements

Webex AI Agent, designed to transform customer self-serve experiences, will also become generally available in the coming months. Research shows that while customers want self-service options, 55% of customers avoid them due to rigidity and lack of helpfulness. Webex AI Agent addresses these challenges with:

• Flexible and autonomous AI agents that combine intelligent, human-like conversations with real-time automation and action resolution. These AI agents offer an always-on conversational AI experience across voice and digital channels for customer interactions and can also be used to support employee interactions.
• 24/7 operation across voice and digital channels without queuing, enabling businesses to drastically reduce agents’ time spent on routine tasks, freeing them up to concentrate on more complex, high-value interactions.
• Build AI Agents in a matter of minutes with a user-friendly design tool that enables business users and IT administrators to effortlessly build, deploy, and manage AI agents. It seamlessly integrates with workflows to complete actions and fulfill customer intents, speeding up time to market without relying on third-party solutions.
• Enterprise controls provide the flexibility and choice required to identify the appropriate AI engine depending on the use case and establishing appropriate guardrails to ensure security. In addition, tools designed specifically for enterprises enable easy and simple management across all stages of the AI Agent lifecycle, from development and testing to ongoing knowledge management.

Webex AI Agent is natively integrated with Webex Contact Center today and will be available for integration with third-party contact centers later this year. Language support beyond English will be available later this year to include the following: French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

Adhering to Cisco’s principles for responsible AI, the solution is built with privacy and safety at the forefront, ensuring organizations can trust that the AI is safe and secure.

New Release 15 for Cisco & Webex Contact Center Enterprise

Our dedication to customers both on Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) and Webex Contact Center Enterprise remains critical to our innovation delivery. I’m excited to announce that our upcoming CCE 15 release offers additional digital capabilities, scalability improvements, and security and accessibility enhancements. Additionally, with release 15, customers will have the opportunity to participate in early trials for the Webex AI Agent and AI Assistant.

The future of customer experience, is now

Customer experience is about making customers feel that you care about them and the loyalty they bring to your business. With Webex Contact Center, the new AI Assistant, and the upcoming AI Agent it’s easier than ever. To assess how we can help you transform your customer experience goals into reality, visit the World of Solutions to see these new AI innovations in action or contact our sales team to discuss your specific needs.

The last thing I’ll leave you with is stay tuned for an exciting customer experience roadshow coming in March where you can get an insider’s look at our latest AI innovations and learn how you can deliver exceptional customer experiences with our Webex portfolio.

Resources:

• Webex Contact Center
• Webex AI Agent
• What’s New Cisco Live EMEA 25
• Future Proofing the Workplace in the Age of AI
• Redefining Workplaces: Intelligent, Sustainable, and Future-Proofed