Have you ever wondered if a contact center employee is burnt out? The AI-powered feature in Cisco Webex can help
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Cisco is bringing new AI power to its Webex portfolio with a range of features designed to improve productivity, whether users are in the office, at home, or in a contact center.
AI-powered capabilities include the general availability of a number of generative AI features that Cisco first announced in October 2023, including Cisco AI Assistant for Webex, which provides summary and chatbot capabilities. Cisco is also introducing new software and hardware, including Cisco AI Assistant for Customer Experience (CX) with a beta version of its contact center agent burnout feature, which is designed to help determine when an agent is likely to need help.
The Cisco Webex AI update comes in response to growing competition in the AI-powered meeting and collaboration market, with Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom and Otter AI among vendors offering a growing list of features. While some features such as meeting summaries are currently available to gen AI meeting collaboration vendors, Cisco wants to differentiate itself by introducing more contextual and networking capabilities.
“We’re starting to talk about how AI is going to impact the customer service space, not just for knowledge workers and frontline workers who primarily use phone calls and meetings and maybe chat, but in the contact center space” – Anurag Dhingra , senior vice president, chief technology officer and chief engineering officer for collaboration at Cisco, told VentureBeat.
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Is agent burnout a problem? AI to the rescue
Among the most unique and interesting aspects of the Cisco Webex AI update is the series of Webex Contact Center technology updates.
Webex is Cisco’s overarching brand of collaboration and meeting tools, including desktop software for video and voice, as well as enterprise collaboration and messaging. There is also a specific product designed exclusively for customer contact centers, and this is where Webex Contact Center comes into its own.
Cisco Webex Contact Center gets topic intelligence AI capabilities to analyze why customers are reaching out and what issues are trending. The system will also provide the ability to suggest reactions, thanks to which artificial intelligence will be able to recommend responses to agents. Additionally, there is an AI-powered summary and end-of-call summary feature that helps draw conclusions.
While the summaries, answers, and topic analysis are interesting, Cisco goes a step further by introducing the agent burnout feature.
“This is where we apply AI to predict when an agent is getting burned out, which starts to impact the quality of the interactions they provide to customers,” Dhingra explained. “You can then take appropriate action based on that, such as removing them from call queues for a while, giving them a break, or maybe start forwarding calls to someone else.”
Cisco AI Assistant for Webex has also been improved
Cisco is also expanding AI capabilities for enterprise users.
Cisco AI Assistant for Webex is expanded to include real-time message translation in chat spaces and messaging channels. Previously, translation was only available for closed captioned meetings. Translation support is extensive and supports over 100 languages.
In addition to software updates, Cisco also announced a pair of new hardware devices. The Cisco Board Pro G2 is a touch-based collaboration device, while the Cisco Desktop Phones 9800 Series provide integrated Webex capabilities in a network-optimized device.
The new equipment is intended to help handle back-to-the-office orders that are beginning to appear in enterprises. A new global survey from Cisco, which surveyed 14,000 employees and more than 3,000 employers in 19 different countries, found that 80% of employers worldwide are mandating a return to the office.
Dhingra said the new hardware is intended to provide users in the office with greater capabilities. For example, some environments used hot swap desks instead of a dedicated desk when needed. This is a scenario supported by the Cisco 9800 Series Desk Phones, allowing users to easily log in and out of the phone to gain full access to their messages, calendar, and collaboration tools.
