Citing a proven track record in Customer Engagement Management (CEM) Cisco plans to acquire five-year old CloudCherry. In doing so, Cisco ups its ante in a high-stakes poker game among incumbent providers of Contact Center “platforms” versus insurgent firms with more “open” Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) offers. It feels reflexive. The deal will close approximately two years after Genesys completed its acquisition of AltoCloud, a start-up chartered to apply “AI” to support Customer Journey Management.

CloudCherry’s services are not totally congruent with AltoCloud, but there are functional similarities. Both specialize in Customer Experience Management. That is a broad category that includes Journey Mapping, AltoCloud’s forte. CloudCherry adds a dose of Predictive Analytics, which AltoCloud also lays claim to, and it looks across up to 15 channels in real time. The differentiator is a focus on Voice of the Customer (VOC), which maps well to popular, high-visibility performance metrics surrounding customer satisfaction (CSAT), including Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

Platform versus Point Solutions?

CloudCherry, as the name implies, is a 100% cloud-based solution. It offers services such as sentiment analysis, VOC and predictive analytics through APIs or connectors to either premises-based or cloud-based Contact Centers. As Cisco’s Zack Taylor notes, it will reside in the cloud, but support premises-based solutions including Unified Contact Center (UCC Express and Enterprise), as well as the cloud-based WebEx Customer Service Platform. As Taylor noted, Cisco is defining “the least disruptive route to The Cloud” for the thousands of companies with perfectly functional premises-based implementations.

Expect to see more and more of this hybrid approach as Contact Center administrators join Customer Experience executives and Digital Transformation specialists to infuse customer care infrastructure with the appropriate elements of “Conversational AI”. Cisco, with the impending purchase of CloudCherry, signals that it will play the role of “personal shopper” to help its customers choose best of breed. With CloudCherry that brings the ability to capture sentiment and apply predictive analytics across 16 communications channels.

As CCaaS providers expand their footprints, offerings and capabilities, Cisco joins Genesys to build a line of defense against their ability to steal the march to The Cloud. It has not been totally coherent. The acquisition of BroadSoft inspired the launch of a CCaaS that carried the short-lived brand of Customer Journey Platform (CJP) but is now called the WebEx Contact Center. At the time, stepped up attention to CJP felt like a demotion for the flagship, premises-based UCC Enterprise and Express platforms. Now, all three are major parts of the Cisco Contact Center portfolio and have access to services like CloudCherry and the recently acquired Voicea through APIs. The least disruptive route to the cloud is through purpose-driven connections to AI-infused resources that are owned, operated and vouched for by Cisco, itself.

Continuity: The Litmus Test for CPaaS and CCaaS

Businesses, regardless of size, are not shy about infusing AI-informed resources into their sales, marketing and customer care infrastructure. In many instances, these efforts are manifest in stand-alone proof-of-concepts (PoC’s): an Alexa Skill here; a Q&A bot there. Experienced companies, as well as Cisco, have come to realize that this is a highly inefficient approach. Continuity is key to success. In the world of Conversational Commerce, that means offering consistently correct answers or recommendations, over multiple channels and modalities, over time and at scale.

By launching all those PoC’s, enterprises of all sizes have gained experience and familiarity with the capabilities of current technology, as well as the abilities of their internal staff to develop, train and maintain intelligent assistants. They may call them “bots,” “automated virtual assistants” or any variant of Eva, Ava, Erica, Ted or [branded name here]. Cisco’s longest-standing and best customers add the word “business” to the concept of continuity. Cisco’s belief is that an emphasis on business continuity is just as important as conversational continuity and that they will turn to the long-standing provider of reliable contact center infrastructure and hooks into the promise of Webex-branded collaboration resources to ensure success.

Continuity and Conversations are much bigger than Customer Engagement Management.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants