At its recent “Analysts’ Deep Dive”, Cisco Systems stepped up to the challenge of bringing clarity to the priorities and positioning of its Contact Center business unit. Acquisitions and related ‘acquihires’ over the past couple of years had led to both promise and confusion. Promise arose from its commitment to “The Cloud” and Conversational AI. Confusion resulted from the need to rationalize and assimilate the integration of expansive ecosystems and customer bases for Cisco’s Unified Communications and Collaboration services (UCCE and UCCX) and the BroadSoft’s Contact Center offering, CC-One, and the short-lived Customer Journey Platform (CJP).

Amy Chang EVP and GM of the entire Collaboration Technology Group set the tone when introducing Omar Towakol, who took the reins of the Cisco Contact Center business unit as of September 2019. She explained how Cisco regards the Contact Center business unit as a valuable asset and an opportunity to showcase the power of predictive analytics, natural language processing and other key components of Conversational AI. Indeed, deploying an intelligent assistant to capture conversations, recognize intents, and recommend actions was one of the goals of the Mindmeld acquisition a few years back, raising expectations for automated virtual assistants bird-dogging employee conferences.

Both Amy and Omar joined Cisco by way of acquisition. Amy was the CEO of Accompany when Cisco acquired it in mid-2018. Omar is founder and CEO of Voicea, which takes credit for introducing EVA (an Enterprise Voice Assistant) to listen in on conversations carried out over collaboration platforms for the purpose of indexing and analysis. Omar described how this form of Intelligence Augmentation (IA) when applied to contact center activities will provide insights, prompts and next-best actions that transform mere mortal agents into “superagents.”

If clarity of focus was the prime objective, Cisco scored very high marks. CJP has given way to the Webex Contact Center which serves as a global platform for businesses of all sizes under a “single subscription.” The focus is on cloud-based implementations, but it accommodates premises-based customers and provides both pricing and implementation mechanisms to simplify migration from prem to cloud.

A Single Solution That is Thoroughly AI-Infused

The entire stack is built on the Webex Unified Communications and Collaboration platform and tightly linked to “cognitive resources”, both internal and from 3rd parties, including Google and its Contact Center AI (CCAI) offerings. Internal AI offerings include “Webex Experience Management”, which is the new branding for CloudCherry’s suite of Experience Management and Voice of the Customer. CloudCherry, which was acquired by Cisco in August 2019, had been a Cisco investment and solution provider prior to the acquisition.

Voicea is the basis of the other internal AI resource. Cisco acquired Voicea in November 2019 and, less than 6 months later it had successfully integrated its AI capabilities into Webex meetings – starting with accurate transcription and indexing of the content of Webex meetings. When pressed into service to transcribe and index conversations between agents and customers, the value becomes quickly apparent, starting with the ability to use natural language generation to bear in order to produce call summaries.

Voicea and CloudCherry have been fused to the platform to support to enable companies to track conversations with their customers over time and across up to 17 different channels. When it comes to the voice channel, Voicea records, transcribes and indexes topics to create conversational intelligence while CloudCherry’s legacy in tracking the true “voice of the customer supports surveys that can be conducted post-call via IVR, email or Web intercept.

The Webex platform is also capable of performing extensive interaction analytics, but Cisco also made the point that its customers are not locked into Cisco-branded resources. For instance the company is already working closely with Google surrounding its Contact Center AI (CCAI) offerings. There is ample precedent for turning to more third-parties for other AI-infused features or functions.

On the Horns of The Innovator’s Dilemma

The recent death of Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and father of the concept of “disruptive technologies”, serves as a reminder of the underpinnings of Cisco’s market challenges. The parent company achieved dominance in the world of IP-communications by fostering demand for hardware, software and services that drive the need for the data switches and routers that comprise its core source of revenue. Unified Communications and Collaboration involving voice and video fit the bill nicely. The Contact Center business unit, in spite of the UCC (Unified Customer Collaboration) was never 100% in sync with a more broadly specified UC&C (Unified Communications & Collaboration).

The dozen or so firms offering Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) became the existential threat to Cisco’s premises-based contact center business. Indeed the CCaaS market and ecosystem has been distinctly different from both those providing Communications Platforms as a Service (CPaaS), exemplified by the likes of Twilio or AWS, and the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), a long-time battleground for providers of voice, video, conference bridges exemplified by Microsoft’s Skype, Vonage and a slew of newcomers that put a focus on de facto set up, like GoToMeeting, Slack and Zoom.

In the face of disruptive competition, Christensen would counsel established companies to “disrupt themselves” by taking a long-term view of future demand for their products or services. For Cisco Systems, such a strategy calls for embracing “the Cloud” and infusing it with resources that help their enterprise customers and prospects support their own digital transformations. With the long game in mind, Cisco is obliterating the lines between CPaaS, UCaaS and CCaaS using Conversational AI as the catalyst. CloudCherry and Voicea, which were already capturing conversations and extracting intent to support employee productivity in Webex meetings now can perform the same functions in the contact center; this time at scale.

It is an impressive story in the face of disruptive competition.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants