The evolution of customer experience with Cisco

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our fireside chat. Today, we have John O'Luck. He's the VP of product management for customer experience at Cisco, and also Ryan Swanger, who is our global sales leader at TTEC Digital, who will be discussing the evolution of customer experience and some of the advancements that we've made with AI and other innovations in this space. So, we'll start with about a twenty minute discussion between Jonno and Ryan, and then we'll open it up for group questions and discussion. We are recording today's, webinar just as a heads up. So feel free to come off mute at any point if you do have questions before we get to the official Q and A portion of it, and we'll be happy to address those. So, Ryan, I'll let you take it away. Great. Thanks so much. So, Jono, just to kick things off, you know, there's a lot that's changing with AI across the customer experience market. So to get started today, I'd love to hear your perception on how AI is impacting customer experience. Yeah. I think the first and biggest thing, Ryan, I always say to folks is it's leading everyone to ask why not. And I'll explain that a bit more. Actually, we're just joking about this before we we hopped on here. November thirtieth twenty twenty two, Chat g b d three came out. And the number one thing I think that's done is it showed us that AI can talk to me like a human. It can give me an answer in a way I can understand. There's a reason why kids are trying to use it to write their essays for school. And what that's done is it's raised the bar of expectation. If I can use that in my regular life, why is I why why can't I as a customer expect that of the business that I'm working with? Right? My cell provider, my my cable provider, my hospital. So that bar of expectation had been driven up. And that's at the heart, I think, of really what we're what we're seeing. Right? How how it's impacting CX. The other side too, we're hearing more and more examples of how from the delivery of customer care and support and experience, it can drive efficiency. I think we we saw the pendulum swing really far at first. It's always happens. Is my job going to be replaced by AI as a human agent? Right? And and we're finding the pendulum because it's it's momentum. Right? It's coming back into that middle where the answer is, in some cases, tasks absolutely can be automated by AI. But really, it's more about enhancing the human agent, How efficiently they can deliver something or how effectively, right, they can learn something new and do sort of bigger and better tasks. I think those are just some of the the ways, you know, where we're seeing AI show up. And as as the hype and the shininess have changed and settled, the reality is now, how do I use it? Right? Yep. How what do I get to expect, and how do I use it as as the business to drive that experience and efficiency? No. That that's a great point, Jono. And, you know, it's interesting when we talk about, you know, automating of jobs and the like. I I come back to, you know, very few companies deliver amazing customer experience. So AI is really just becoming a tool to help us further that as opposed to that concern around, you know, automating, how do we improve CX. Well, let's narrow in a little bit more around with your role, around product at Cisco. What advancements is Cisco focused on in, in bringing AI into Webex contact center? Yeah. The the thing you're gonna hear us say over and over and over and over again is experience matters. Right? At the end of the day, I as a customer of a business, again, it could be any of those businesses I work with in my life, I usually have choice. Certain industries, it's harder to move. But at the end of the day, if I don't get what I need from you, it could be a service or the way in which it's delivered, the experience, I'll pick someone else. And so with Cisco, that's what we're leaning in on, that that experience matters. And to a large extent, a lot of the AI, back to the whole end of the last year and a half, has been focused on text. Right? The written word, ChatGPT is a text based large language model. What we're with Cisco here, we're what we're doing is we're focusing as well. So it's an and, not the or. It's Mhmm. About the real time. So right now, as you and I are having this conversation, two things most folks have probably noticed. I talk a lot with my hands. Right? I smile. There's things that happen and are being conveyed that's just a richer signal set than if I'm writing to Ryan. Yes. I agree that AI is fantastic. You know? And so with Cisco, we're looking to harness that kind of signal as well to help the human agent or the business understand the customer. So not just the words that are spoken to understand intent and others, but that that tonality, right, which contributes to understanding a sentiment. Everyone's heard those examples of the same sentence said two ways could mean very different things. Right? That that but that's true. That's where the understanding of that interaction, not just the words, is key. So we call that the real time media. Right? Those elements that make this a real time discussion. I I talked about sort of understanding sentiment or fatigue or or differences in behavior. That's a signal set. The other thing we're focusing on, so much customer to business engagement, is where the the customer isn't at home. And so we've been investing in something we call our AI codec back to that real time media. The AI codec, which we're hoping to get out here real soon, is able to use a tenth of what the industry standards out there use for bandwidth. Meaning, if you're a health care organization, if you're financial services, retail, education, fill in the blank, your your customer, your students, your patients, they don't have to be sitting in a high bandwidth area to get your services and get your help. That materially changes the the term customer experience, right, because the experience is better. One tenth. So I could have poor bandwidth in rural areas. Think about the roadside assistance kind of scenario. Or it can mean that I'm in a saturated area. Because I only need a tenth, I can get through it better. And so again back to that experience that's where AI fits in as well. We actually are applying generative AI techniques to network and packet transmission. People much smarter than I can go much deeper on that that's the extent of of my understanding but again it elevates the opportunity to deliver an amazing experience. The last thing I'll quickly throw in there too is but there's a knock on effect. If I can see and hear Ryan better, we can transcribe what Ryan said better, which means the AIs can learn from that better. Right? The whole garbage in, garbage out, that's the truth behind large language models. If you have poor quality of input, you learn from the poor input, you're gonna have poor output. So it's both that initial experience that gets better because of our focus on real time media, as well as the downstream learning from it. So that's why I that that is what I'm super excited about bringing online for, again, businesses everywhere. Right? Now you can communicate with your customer no matter where they are. Oh, that's really exciting. Well, so let's move along, and talk about some other technology innovations that Cisco is driving. You know, I've been working with Cisco for about twenty five years, and you guys have long been trusted to deliver very reliable voice solutions in the contact center. But we also know, you know, companies are looking to use digital channels as well to interact with their customers. What's Cisco doing to address that need? Yeah. That that's a great point, Ryan. So I'll start by saying one thing. What's really interesting when I when I talk with businesses, right, and and customers, I always phrase this as don't forget, it's actually your customer's preference how they wanna interact with you. So I was putting that out there. Right? Like, you as a business, you have to respond to your customer the way that they wanna interact with you. So to your point about digital, that could be SMS or a web chat on the front home page of your site all the way through to email and then, of course, voice and video. So our contact center, Webex contact center, architecture is omnichannel enabled. Right? We have support for those digital channels as well as, of course, voice, like you said, that our heritage has been voice for a long time. And that's key because now the business can respond to the customer the way the customer wants. I'm a perfect example of this, and I apologize if anyone here besides you, Ryan, you've heard this before. I I make the joke of I'll do everything I can to not call into a business. I, as a consumer, will find spend five minutes finding the chat function when it could take thirty seconds to click call. Right? And then my mother will choose the opposite. She'll find every reason to walk into the bank. And so that's a perfect example of but we both bank with the same bank. So you have to allow for that customer preference. That's why omnichannel is so key. And then all of that being captured as the journey for the customer is also key. Right? The the ability to have the conversations that are needed and then that understanding of all the conversations that have happened. Again, bringing AI back into that, how do you learn from that? Right? How does your how do you have your large language models interpret, understand, and then drive that next interaction? So that's very much where, where we are on that. And then to your point about most reliable voice, something that I often, I often refer refer to here is we built media AI well before the industry was excited about this because we had background noise removal for almost everyone else. And, again, that contributes to if you're pissed off, Ryan, if you're a customer, your card was just, you know, potential fraud. You're at the grocery store. The grocery store is loud. You're calling in to your bank, and they go, I'm sorry. Could you say that again? I can't hear you. Like, you're you just escalated this customer's frustration with you. So, again, that type of AI applied to the the voice channel is so key to improving the experience, but also the interaction outcome. Oh, that's awesome. Well, let's transition into the agent experience, Jono. And, you know, we talked about AI in the beginning, but one of the things we've seen at TTEC Digital is as AI starts to automate some of the more basic tasks, the agent job can get harder as the more they're getting inundated with the most complex of of interactions. So what types of innovations is Cisco looking to drive to address that? Yeah. Actually, well, you and I have been in some of these conversations together with the businesses. And, again, acknowledging the pattern you just described. If we get this right, and AI and automation, largely speaking, right, virtual agents automate the simple, we just made every human agent's life harder. I I cannot underscore that. That is the pattern we're driving towards. And so what we've been doing here at Cisco is so we we've been focusing on the the theme we call agent wellness. Right? How do you care for that human agent? Because we just made their life harder. Right? And, the feature we've built first, the first of many, is burnout detection. Agent burnout detection. People watching this right now and, you know, watching the replays later will probably be nodding their heads. We see anywhere between twenty to forty percent churn turnover of agents in on an annual basis. That's not healthy for the agents. That's not healthy for the business. And so what we've done with agent burnout is we're watching two signal sets. The first signal is me, the agent. If every progressive call my fatigue is increasing, that's a bad sign. Again, we're giving all the hard problems now to human agents. So if my fatigue increases and over time, the customers I'm engaging with, their sentiment is decreasing. That's a bad pattern. Right? That's the cross of death because the next call, I will probably do worse because I'm more fatigued, which will lead to a bad customer experience. With burnout, we built an AI model to detect those signals. And, actually, depending on the customer, you could say automatically give this agent a break when they hit the threshold or notify the supervisor. So the supervisor can say, hey, Ryan. How's it going? Do you need a break, etcetera. Right? So the choice is the businesses, but the detection of it is by AI. And that's that's the key. That's the start to giving them that reset moment, helping them, supporting them. It may be that the last call they were on, they weren't they weren't prepared. Right? They weren't prepared to give that answer. And that's the other part. The more traditional AI, of course, we do as well. Agent answers all these things so that I'm better prepared because on day one, it may not have all the answers. And this goes right back to that first question. What large language models and the new conversational AI tools give us is a way to give the agent the answer to say to the customer, not the KB article that best provides it because now I have cognitive load to understand. But presenting the answer in a way that literally you could just read if you wanted or or hit enter if it's a digital engagement, that reduces my cognitive load as an agent. And now I can add to it, not create it, which is faster. It's easier. Right? So these are the kinds of things that better support the human agents in their day to day task. The last thing I think that's key, and I'll go back to is AI is to drive efficiency. And as we think about the efficiency of the human agent to give the answer by presenting it, there's the flip side. How do I, as that supervisor, know things are going well? The burnout detection is one. Right? We've hit a threshold. But better and smarter quality management, understanding for the whole conversation how that went. It's no longer true that every call, every engagement is one topic. We see this all the time. Right? You snake through. You initially engaged on this, and there's four. Well, we've applied AI there as well to chapterize the conversation, the different topics so that you can better, as a supervisor, support your agent. This topic, you did awesome because that's why it's got sent to you in the first place. That's what routing and skilling is all about. But that third topic, Jono, you need to x y z. Right? Read up on this or get help. So so those are the things I think that support all parts of delivery of a really good experience. No. That's awesome, Jono. And I'll just add a couple of of insights from TTEC Digital around that. You know, we've seen that the lower quartiles, quartile three and four of performers often with AI, can start performing like quartile two performers, you know, raising their game. But we've then got feedback of, well, but what if with my top half of performers? Well, what we've started to see is you can actually expand the different types of interactions they handle with customers, augment them with AI till they get to that proficiency. And so across the board, there's some really powerful operational efficiencies that can come from that. Yeah. You and you hit on something there, Ryan, which I think is so key. Right? We we we right now are kinda focused, like you said, on the simpler tasks and automation, and that enables us to focus more human. But I think there's this it's almost analogous to degrees of freedom or complexity. Your upper half quartile, like, your top two quartiles, you could be having them on the more free form, the more ambiguous. Right? So there's definitely a way to shift the whole of your workforce towards solving every need. So I think that's that's the mentality that we as as a business have to think about. Right? It's not get rid of. It's not any. It's it's move people towards those those types of tasks. Yes. Oh, it's fantastic. Well, so we've covered AI. We've talked about customer and agent experience. Let's close out with the topic of architecture. And so, you know, so many of the innovations that we see in the market today, Jono, are coming out as cloud solutions, but we still see customers that say, yo. Don't forget about me. I actually want to stay on premise for certain aspects of my architecture. How's Cisco looking to still enable those companies that wanna stay on premise? Yeah. So I'll I'll say two things first. So Cisco is the only company right now that is supporting and continues to support true on premises innovation for for contact centers. Right? I'll I'll I'll say this as a joke, but it's serious. Sometimes I think businesses get in their own head about needing to stay on prem. There are other businesses or public sector customers where they actually need to for certain reasons. From my point of view, if you're in the former account, we'll have that conversation. But I will absolutely respect your decision as a business where you need to run. Right? You're the the heart of your customer engagement, experiences. What we do is we support, like we were, I was just saying, all of those types of architectures. We have a premises set of products. We have cloud architectures as well. Our innovation, we build first in the cloud. It's easiest to iterate. Right? It's easiest to get right. It's easy to roll out. And And then where and when possible, and I use the word possible very specifically, we extend that to our premises customers, meaning that you're able to get that innovation in place because you have those requirements to stay that way. You're not ready. It could be a variety of reasons. The problem is you can't always do everything and extend it to prem. That's sort of where we we get into the gray area where it's a capability by capability. Right? But our intent is absolutely our premises product portfolio is here to stay. We are the only vendor that can solve all of these patterns of customer need, and we're bringing that innovation to the prem, the prem customers that need to stay, you know, in that world either for the next several years or the foreseeable future. You know? And I think that that's the key. It's we meet the customers, the business, where they are on their journey towards the cloud. And, you know, as we go deeper into these conversations, I often find the answer isn't a or b. It's it needs to be a right now. How do I start getting bits of b? And that's why our strategy is build it cloud first and extend it to premises. Alright. Fantastic. Well, this is a great discussion, Jono. I think, Nicole, at this time, are we gonna open it up to questions? Yeah. We'll open it up. I'll go ahead and take everyone off mute, so feel free to just ask your question. If you're more comfortable chatting it in, I'll keep an eye there too. Around the Splunk acquisition and bringing some of that, heavy hitting AI into collaboration? Yeah. So, I mean, it's an active conversation we're having right now. Everyone, I think, knows Splunk, what it does, and what it can help us do. Right? So, we are actively talking about how do we harness those capabilities. We've actually got a couple of features we're hoping to tie in here relatively soon. Interestingly enough, I mean, Splunk does so many things great. Something that we're hearing more and more, Jeff, you know, to to your point in is with our financial services and retail customers, they think about fraud. They think about those app those elements of and and that's a strength that Splunk has, right, to drive those kinds of data science and AI exercises. So that's an example where we think we can do obviously, Cisco has a security division. Right? We have all those products as well. So that plus Splunk together offers us a really perhaps unique way to bring that type of detection and and data based understanding into the product. And back to, I think, what you said, Ryan, the key there is not just to integrate the thing. It's how does it surface to the people that need it. Right? So the human agent kinda having the risk, you know, the risk detector. It's it this one's kinda yellow. This is green. This is red. That's the the the kind of the the magic, right, that makes it business relevant. So those are a couple of the places where we're thinking first. And then as we talk more with customers, the what are your unmet needs really drives then the what else could we do with this. So Yeah. I do have one. It's we are with Cisco where we look at things as a platform approach from an AI perspective. Can you just speak to that a little bit? It's not just unique to customer experience, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, Jim, that that's a great that's a great point. So something you'll hear us talk about a lot, and I'll describe what it actually means is we talk about our Webex platform, like you said, Jim. So the Webex portfolio, our collaboration portfolio, actually has three major areas. This customer experience. So in this case, when we say customer experience, we mean contact center. We mean CPaaS as well, the digital, like, Ryan, you were talking about, the automation that comes with that, right, the customer engagement mechanisms. We have our UCaaS, right, or suite, which is focused more on that knowledge worker, the meetings, the messaging, the calling capabilities, and then we have our devices portfolio to help with workspace and how Gort gets done that way. The beauty of having these other two areas within our portfolio is a lot of innovation actually happened there first because they have hundreds of millions of users using their stuff. I I mentioned background noise removal as an example of feature. That actually was built in our meetings and calling services first. But, again, this platform that sits underneath is where it's implemented, which is why we're able to take that and then apply it to the customer experience portfolio and not only apply it, but apply it service side. Meaning, it doesn't matter whether it's a phone, a hard line, a landline, or a cell phone or anything. Right? That's the magic of that that, platform underneath. A lot of our AI is done that way as well. We have what we call, call drop summaries. I love this feature. We looked, and we actually saw between ten and fifteen percent of our phone calls over the period of the month were continuing a previous conversation. It was a dropped call. They called back within two minutes, but I think was what we said. We're a hundred twenty seconds sort of and if it's the same number, same contact, that that's what we realized. That's a lot of that's a lot of engagements where, hi. Thanks for calling. What's your name? Will really upset the customer. And so call drop summaries use a summarization. Summarization built off of regenerative AI, which is actually leveraged both in the meeting side for a meeting summary, for messaging to catch up on things, and within the customer experience portfolio, where we're able to summarize the conversation that was dropped, that was cut short. So those are some of those things. Right? Where built once, used everywhere gives us an acceleration of of how how we can get out the door, but also differentiates us. Not every in fact, I I would venture to say, there are no other vendors out there that have that breadth of portfolio and that heritage in those areas. Right? Then that that's why that is a key for us and how we're able to, hopefully, help business to satisfy their customers. John, just to point on that, though, like, you look at the people who I mean, with COVID, you know, obviously, the pandemic, a lot of agents went to work from home. Like, that's what what we shifted to. That you you know there's noise distractions in those environments. And so what you said was resonates a lot with me as far as, you know, you've got this platform. We start out with meetings, but now bringing in the context center, it makes that experience so much better. You don't hear the barking dog in the background. And or if if it's multiple agents, you don't hear the other agents' conversations in the background either, which is fantastic. You know, and it goes back to something, Ryan, you'd said as well where I think it's the evolution of the human in the contact center. If we automate the simple right? If we automate the simple, every human agent's job got more complex, but we're also seeing a different pattern, which is the term back office isn't the right way. Knowledge worker isn't right either. But, basically, we're seeing more people, employees outside the contact center being engaged to deliver an outcome for a customer. Yep. In which case, I work from home all day long. If I have to hop on a call, to your point, Jim, right, I'm not an agent. I'm a I'm a a knowledge worker, a subject matter expert. That same technology is key to deliver the best experience. Because I I do have a dog. She's sleeping right there right now, luckily. Right? But but yeah. Absolutely. It's the changing face of this this customer experience and contact center. Ryan, sorry. I think you're about to jump in. Yeah. I was just gonna add to that. You're spot on. It's not just work from home agents, especially in the retail space. We've seen, our customers, Jono, look at their retail stores as a burst capacity as well as, if they're busy with customers in the store, how can they tap back into the contact center to service customers that are contacting them on other channels. So, that's been a real benefit of the Cisco solution's ability to not to extend the contact center beyond the agents that are, so to speak, tapped into that, and and create more capacity. It's really great. And I really hope I really hope we do continue to go down this path. Right? As all of these industries, retail, I mean, banking has a retail front. You know, mobile carriers have retail fronts. And and the idea of it's the right person for the engagement, not the person that's sitting in that chair. You know, I think that that's where businesses really get to harness the benefit. Like you said, burst capacity. Banks transferring to another branch because they do have a policy expert there. Right? That's how we can help businesses to really optimize, optimize what's, what's possible. Fantastic. Do we have any other questions, Nicole? Or I don't see any questions coming in. So everyone like I said, this recording will be shared out, so that email will come from me. But if you think of any questions after this, feel free to reach out directly to one of us or go to the TTEC digital website, and we'll be happy to have a further discussion with you. You guys wanna put a gag order on me. I'm sorry if this is on the recording, but, you know, I've got one more probably for you. And, Ryan, it would probably be for you at this point. TTEC from what are you guys doing from an innovation standpoint as far as AI is concerned? Can you speak a little bit to that too on how you're partnering with us? Because, yeah, I don't I don't know if I'd necessarily heard enough about it. I was multitasking a little bit, but that being said, go for it. So No. There's a couple of things that I would highlight in particular that we haven't talked about, which is, you know, it's not just a technology challenge. When you think about applying AI, One of the things, first off, is companies are coming to us and saying, I don't know where to start. Where will I have the biggest business impact or operational impact as I think to enable AI or other innovations like digital channels, etcetera? And so for many of our customers, we're actually analyzing their existing conversations and helping them identify kind of the low hanging fruit, the the longer term things that can have a big impact but are really complex, and help them kinda stream together what that priority road map should look like for AI enablement. So that's part. The other thing I would say is the actual experience design. So the technology can do a lot of things, but it can also be overwhelming if not designed properly. And so both from a customer experience perspective as well as the agent experience that Jonna was talking about earlier, how do we think about those user experiences and interfaces that we provide to customers and agents, from a design perspective. So we've got experts within TTEC Digital that certainly know the Cisco technology and all of that, but also can approach it from the human side of things and how do we make this most effective in delivering great experience? And so we've been building out and and scaling those capabilities to help complement the tech. Perfect. Okay. That that's all I have. Nicole, to your point, that's that that's my final word. I had I had one question for John. Oh, no. This is this is not open season on, on Ryan and I I'm kidding you guys. Go for it. Go for it. Real quick. I know we have a couple events, hypervile events coming up, in the near future, Jono. I was just wondering how CX and AI were gonna play into those events. Yeah. I think, maybe, you know, this is kind of the parallel to what, Jim, you were you were talking with Ryan about. But for us, I go back to the two words. It's about experience matters. That is the foundational conversation that we want to continue to have. It is the experience of your customers, then the efficiency of your business. It's not purely serial, but that's the way we want to talk about this. And so when we talk about AI, it is driving both experience and efficiency. So, we'll have a nice long laundry list of all the capabilities coming out. But the way we talk about the value we provide to our our business partners, right, you all that are watching this, how do we help make that customer experience as great as possible? I talked about the background noise removal. I I hinted at the AI codec that will reduce the bandwidth requirements, meaning more people can have better conversations and it drives better AI. You're also gonna see us talk about some of the the the virtual agent capabilities we have. Right? A native virtual agent that simplifies life for everyone, that is voice enabled, which our second pillar is really about how do you make human agents and supervisors more efficient and effective. And that's a lot of what Ryan, you and I were talking about, supporting those human agents. Be it through the more traditional agent dancers, supporting wrap ups, you know, driving that type of efficiency, but also the signal back. The real time understanding I I talked about the Jono's hands always move because we have that record. We know that he's very emphatic this way. If I call one day and I'm like this, we can't tell you that Jono's PO'd, but something's different. Right? So those kinds of things where we lean on the real time media to understand is stuff that we'll talk about there as well. And that third bucket was how do we help businesses get more efficient? And so something that we've been building out is our topic analytics. We'll look over all the stuff that's going on in your contact center and tell you, thirty seven percent of your interactions and do you know that's password resets? Password resets can definitely be automated. Right? Then again, freeing up those human agents to to support the the novel, right, the new and more complex. But we've also got these capabilities to generate templates for virtual agents. We're working on that now. Meaning that cycle becomes virtuous. Using our platform will help you know where you're spending your time, and we're even suggesting the virtual agents that could help drive that automation. That's the true driving efficiency cycle. We called it self learning contact center a year ago. We continue to use that because it is. Use the platform, learn, improve. So those are the kinds of things you're gonna hear from us, at at Cisco Live as well. Right? Those investments to help you do better as a business across those three areas. Yeah. And, guys, just to kind of a point, both TTEC and Cisco will be at the events that we have coming up. Those those that Andrew mentioned. Some things like Cisco Live, we have coming up WebexOne. So definitely look into getting into those sessions to find out a little bit more. Andrew, anything to add? I look at Yeah. I guess and if you're gonna be at Webex one, make sure and stop by and see the the TTEC guys. They will be there. Thanks for that plug. Alright. Like I said, if if there are any further questions, feel free to reach out to us us directly or go to TTEC Digital dot com, and we will schedule another follow-up discussion one on one with you. We'd be happy to. Awesome. Thanks, Jonah. Much, Joan. Joint. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, TTEC team.