The symbiotic relationship between contact centers (CCTRs), customer experience (CX) and unified communications (UC) was never more apparent than at Enterprise Connect 2015 (#EC15).  The purpose of “unifying” communications infrastructure is to facilitate simple, secure connections for enterprise employees to communicate, collaborate and, apparently, video conference with one another. Cisco, with heavy emphasis on its introduction of Spark (formerly called Project Squared) and Microsoft, with a number of initiatives branded as Skype for Business set a high bar for open, agile and friction-free ways to get every enterprise to pick a single vendor’s unified approach to accommodating its competitors’ devices, clients, protocols and standards.

Its a message that resonates among IT professionals and customer experience specialists as they provide users with control over when, where and how they initiate (or receive) messages or conversations with other employees, workgroups or companies. Individually and severally solutions vendors have defined methods for rapid recognition of who’s on the line, what device they are using, what their status entitles them to do and other metadata (like location). Cisco deserves special mention in this context.

I use the word “context” advisedly in this case because the biggest news from Cisco, through the lens of Intelligent Assistance, was the announcement of the cloud-based Cisco Context Service for the Contact Center. As Tod Famous, product line manager for the Customer Contact Business Unit, explains in this blog post, the purpose of putting Context Services in “the cloud” is to provide customer service agents with access to a information about a customer’s previous interactions at that “moment of truth” when they expect immediate resolution of a problem or help in completing a transaction.

One of the major announcements from #EC15 is a partnership between Cisco and Altocloud to bring a predictive dimension to the handling of customer interactions, including timely response to and routing of a contact to the proper resource. Altocloud’s specialty is deliver “pieces of data” (PODs) to customer interaction systems to inform agents of IVR systems of the proper way to respond to a customer query or set of instructions based on its analytical assessment of where that individual is along its “customer journey.” That makes Altocloud the first among what is likely to be many partners who take advantage of Cisco’s API-based approach to receiving data into the Context Service cloud.

Cisco’s partners are taking advantage of the Cisco InterCloud Fabric for establishing highly-secure, hybrid cloud services on the fly. This is a very important source of differentiation because it creates an secure end-to-end security framework that enables companies to take a “security first” approach to information sharing that spans time, medium and (most importantly) corporate firewalls. It is the product of a calculated investment made by Cisco on behalf of efforts to encourage UC across enterprise boundaries. Finding that piercing enterprise firewalls and session border controllers is the major impediment to multi-company communications, it devised a system to encourage secure cloud-to-cloud communications, including a mechanism for establishing a “client key” or “client secret” that can be kept in place as long as needed to serve their purpose.

Using the InterCloud Fabric the APIs provided by Cisco, AltoCloud was able to integrate their predictive solution into the Cisco Context Services Cloud in a matter of days. That, in turn, made it available for integration into the customer care fabric of thousands of customers for Cisco’s Customer Collaboration platform. Instead of having to circumnavigate the security fabric of enterprise networks, it has security baked-in automatically.

The Cisco/AltoCloud partnership is one of many more to come. More times than not, context will come from multiple sources and a growing amount of that information resides outside enterprise firewalls. Cisco has devised an uncanny way of supporting secure communications over multiple clouds and that will serve it well in real-time, customer-controlled, multi-vendor, multi-enterprise world of intelligent assistance.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants

Tags: Cisco, Customer service, Intelligent Assistance, Journey management, Enterprise Connect