By now you may have already heard about Webex AI Agent. You might have been there when the company unveiled its new self-service solution at WebexOne 2024. We were.
We wouldn’t miss it. As a proud Cisco partner and WebexOne sponsor, this conference is one of the most important dates on our calendar. We also knew that Cisco had some big announcements to make that could shift customer expectations in the contact center—something our customers remain significantly invested in.
A recent report found that only 25% of customers were very satisfied with their last service engagement. Even in the age of contact center AI, the same complaints still nag and torpedo customer satisfaction scores:
- Inability to quickly find answers
- Scripted, cookie-cutter chatbots
- Lack of customer-specific context
- Having to call when self-service would do
- Long wait times and repeated transfers
Coming hot on the heels of the Agentforce release from Salesforce, Webex AI Agent marks Cisco’s heavy bet on the AI automations in contact center/AI helping humans trend. Here’s the details from our perspective as a Cisco partner, including what it could all mean for how you orchestrate customer self-service.
What is Cisco Webex AI Agent?
Cisco describes Webex AI Agent as a self-service concierge for voice and digital channels—a native Cisco AI solution capable of handling customer inquiries without human intervention. When the customer does need an agent’s help, AI Agent is there to assist. For example:
Demo – AI Agent for HR
Like its Salesforce counterpart, AI Agent relies on natural language understanding and conversational intelligence to handle a variety of self-service applications:
Webex AI Agent for automation and self-service
When voice-based or digital self-service is successful, customer experience (CX) leaders see a 39% improvement in CSAT scores (Webex CX maturity model research). By now, most customers know the score: that chat window they’re using to troubleshoot their tax filing software, or to find the correct steps for freezing their credit card? It isn’t human.
Doesn’t have to be, as long as it gets the job done.
Webex AI Agent stands to improve CSAT scores by handling these and other self-service inquiries, whether via a digital channel or voice, fast and with a human feel—all backed by deep access to customer data, recommended content, and guidance for human agents when their help is needed.
As for insights, Cisco AI Agent empowers contact center leaders too. It can deliver topic analytics to help spot top call drivers, as well as automatic CSAT scoring based on operational data and voice/chat transcripts. Both features put leaders in a better position to assess the state of their customer service journey and develop new means for a more proactive experience.
AI Agent Studio for Generative AI use cases
With AI Agent Studio, you can select from available models to train and deploy custom agents in voice and digital channels. The ability to build your own agents opens the door to a variety of internal and external applications, or the industry-specific use cases that Cisco’s AI Agent may be unable to meet.
As of now, details related to AI Agent Studio remain limited, though Cisco promises the ability to deploy these agents “in minutes.” Ostensibly, your business users and IT admins can use Agent Studio to spin up whatever they need to support self-service and case deflection.
Maybe your customer base prefers WhatsApp for customer support. Or maybe you need an employee-facing agent that automatically centralizes customer information in the CRM for your sales team. Now you have a native tool with which to build these use cases for AI.
Webex AI Assistant for agent enablement and empowerment
Speaking of human agents, Cisco is expanding the functionality of its AI Assistant, beyond the Webex app and towards Webex Contact Center, to provide even more assistance to contact center agents. According to Cisco, 56% of agents are experiencing growing workloads. But when CX leaders empower agents and supervisors with AI, they see 38% less agent turnover. Of the contact center leaders, 73% equip agents with AI assist.
Hence Webex AI Assistant, built to ease much of this information/case overload. It provides automated guidance for busy support agents, sitting alongside them as they help customers. New or improved features, currently in beta for Webex AI Assistant, include:
- Context summaries that make for a more seamless handoff between AI agent to human agent.
- Suggested responses that reduce call time by putting contextually specific recommendations at the agent’s fingertips (within their agent interface)
- Dropped call summaries that make it easier to pick up where the customer left off before they disconnected.
AI Wellness
Somewhat buried in Cisco’s announcement is AI Wellness, a smaller but high-potential product/feature-set, designed to help leaders address agent burnout. AI Wellness will help automate:
- Breaks for support agents
- Changes in agent scheduling
- Capacity adjustments based on need
What’s the next step?
Though Cisco has formally announced Cisco AI Agent to the world, much of its functionality won’t be available until the first half of 2025. Details, including pricing, remain limited at the time of press. The good news is that, if you’re already running your contact center on Cisco, the path to adopting AI Agent is there.
For Cisco’s cloud customers, all of these Webex AI solutions will be available Q1 2025. On-premise customers will have to wait until Q2 2025, at which point customer trials will begin.
Work with a trusted Cisco partner
Bucher + Suter has partnered with Cisco for more than 20 years. We continue to help enterprises across industries, from finance and the public sector to insurance and tech, develop tailored contact center solutions. Our approach is to always recommend and design the solution most suited to our customers’ use cases and required time to value—whether that’s Agentforce, Webex AI Agent, or otherwise.
When it’s time to seriously consider Webex AI Agent for your contact center, our team of Cisco experts can help.
