Webex by Cisco, a leading provider of collaboration and contact center technologies, has announced the introduction of innovative AI-powered capabilities within Webex Contact Center.
These groundbreaking capabilities are designed to tackle challenges faced by contact center agents, with a focus on improving their well-being and productivity, ultimately resulting in exceptional customer experiences.
Contact center employees often grapple with stress and burnout, a prevalent issue within the industry. Studies have revealed that agent turnover rates are twice as high as in any other profession, and burnout contributes to a staggering 50 percent of agent turnover within contact centers. This has significant financial implications, costing businesses with 100 agents an average of $4.8 million annually.
For more than two decades, Webex has been at the forefront of providing contact center solutions, empowering customer service operations for some of the world’s largest customer-centric brands. The latest AI-powered features within Webex Contact Center aim to address the agent well-being challenge, boost productivity, and enhance overall customer experiences. These features include:
AI-Powered Agent Burnout Detection: This feature enables businesses to proactively monitor and address agent well-being. It automates the scheduling of breaks, such as the “Thrive Reset,” and provides real-time coaching following challenging customer interactions.
Suggested Responses: Utilizing generative AI, this capability automatically suggests responses to help agents increase their productivity when handling customer inquiries via digital channels.
Conversation Summaries and Wrap-Ups: Agents are provided with concise summaries of issues and resolutions explored through self-service, as well as a summary of the call or chat to enhance communication between the agent and the customer. Automated wrap-up codes and actions are generated after each customer interaction, saving agents an average of five minutes per transaction.
Coaching Highlights: A dashboard is generated for supervisors, showcasing the highest and lowest customer-rated interactions. It summarizes the best-rated interactions and offers coaching tips to train other employees. Conversely, feedback from the lowest-rated interactions is used to coach underperforming agents, leading to overall performance improvement.
To expand their offerings, Webex is introducing “Webex Customer Experience Essentials” designed to enable employees outside the contact center to become specialized agents, thereby facilitating faster issue resolution and improved customer satisfaction. This addition also enhances contextual engagement from back-office employees during issue escalations. Webex Customer Experience Essentials is available for purchase by Webex Calling users, specifically targeting customer service-oriented industries.
In a groundbreaking move, Webex is deepening its collaboration with Thrive Global, a behavior-change technology company founded by Arianna Huffington, to introduce “Thrive Reset” into the agent workflow. This partnership aims to reduce agent attrition and enhance productivity through stress reduction. Thrive Reset offers a library of 60-second Reset videos, including stretches, breathing exercises, mindfulness, and gratitude breaks, all complemented by calming visuals. In addition, Webex’s AI technology detects situations leading to agent burnout, automatically scheduling Thrive Reset breaks to help agents recharge and relax before their next customer interaction.
One financial services customer reported a 4x improvement in time spent handling customer inquiries and increased customer satisfaction scores, moving from 4.8 to 4.9 (on a 1-5 scale) during a 60-day trial of Webex’s AI-based burnout analysis coupled with timely Thrive Reset breaks for agents.
The new Webex Contact Center capabilities are currently under development, with “Suggested Replies” expected to enter beta testing by the end of 2023 and “Agent Burnout Detection APIs” planned for beta release in February 2024.
