What are the new connectors for Webex Contact Center? The new business application connectors for Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zendesk are out-of-the-box connectors that improve customer interactions by embedding the Webex Contact Center experience within the business app for easy access to key customer information—all in one place. This provides agents with a single experience while interacting with customers, eliminating inefficient research and app switching, which can be time consuming and distracting. The connectors are easy to install and configure, and are free of charge, making it fast, simple, and cost-effective to integrate the agent’s experience with the most common CRM and ticketing apps our customers use everyday. In addition, contact center supervisors have unified reporting for business app and contact center interactions. What business problems are we solving for our customers? The contact center is one of the most interconnected applications in the enterprise, with dozens of integrations to multiple systems. A survey by the Aberdeen Group indicates that 60% of contact centers are using 7 or more systems to interact with customers. When these applications aren’t integrated with the contact center, it can create slow, disconnected, and frustrating experiences for agents – trickling down to customers. Improving first contact resolution: When agents don’t have the right information at their fingertips, it takes them longer to find critical customer information, search for historical context, and get answers from experts outside the contact center. This results in not being able to solve the problem for the customer on the first contact. Improving agent productivity and efficiency: According to a survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group, agents spend 17% of their time searching for relevant knowledge to do their job. Agents are inundated with information overload and repetitive mundane tasks, making them inefficient and slowing their ability to deliver timely and accurate information to their customers. Effectively manage and enhance my customers experience: Engaging customers in today’s complex environment can create disconnected, frustrating, and outdated experiences. Looking for relevant customer information and switching between multiple applications while trying to help a customer is one of the biggest challenges agents face today. Slow processes and workflows in the contact center: When the contact center isn’t Integrated with CRM and other business applications, customer records aren’t automatically displayed for the agent, creating cumbersome, repetitive and inefficient processes which slow down workflows and productivity. Application integration complexity: Customers are striving to reduce the complexity associated with managing the contact center and all the other technology supported by their IT staff. Custom application integrations are time-consuming, very costly and highly IT resource intensive. How do these connectors benefit our customers? Agent productivity: Agents have contact center functionality embedded within the business app experience, so they can solve issues proactively. No need to flip between apps. Improves first contact resolution. Supervisor productivity: Unified reporting for business app and contact center interactions makes it easy for supervisors to do their job. No costly API custom mash-up of data required. IT productivity: Pre-built connectors are plug-n-play. Easy to configure and install. Eliminates the cost and complexity of custom integrations. Customer experience: Provide intuitive, personalized answers fast to keep your customers and prospects happy - resulting in improved customer satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value. Connectors come with your license for free. No need to deal with long timeframes, cost and complexity associated with custom integrations. Transforms your customer interactions from transactional to proactive, personalized, and relational experiences. Business advantage: Streamlines business processes and workflows, improves efficiencies, and allows your IT staff to focus on strategic projects rather than time-consuming complex integrations. What is our unique differentiator? The open platform and flexible cloud architecture of our Webex Contact Center solution enables our customers to fully leverage their technology investments, and seamlessly connect their contact center to any of the systems within their business. • The connectors are plug-and-play, meaning that they are pre-built, super easy to set-up and install, which minimizes IT complexity and costs. • Lastly, unlike our competition, the connectors are included with Webex Contact Center at no additional cost. Lot’s of added value without the financial burden. Great, where do get started? Find business app connectors getting started guides here. ... View more

Hello All, Announcing the general availability of the new and improved Context Service gadget for Finesse! The new journey gadget can be deployed in a phased manner starting with one pilot team and expanding to the rest. ^ click to expand ^ New features and capabilities include - Ability to add customer contact intent depicted by the briefcase icon. We call it the Context Service Request. This data will be stored in the cisco.base.request fieldset. Improved timeline view with related interactions (chat, email, voice and other Activities) grouped by customer intents (Requests). This grouping helps agents quickly understand the count and type of interactions that happened towards fulfilling a specific customer intent. Timeline view is also chronologically grouped as Today, Last 7 days, and Older for faster date lookup. Auto saves intent and interaction details entered by agents every 10 seconds. The new UI also shows the last saved date time stamp. Ability to click & drag activities between open requests or to a new request. Orphaned / abandoned interactions can also be moved to the correct request. Ability to move interactions across customers - Agents will be able search for customer info (account number, email, phone number, etc.), identify the right customer and move the activity. Ability to capture persistent interaction notes within activities. Agent name and date time stamp is captured for tracking/audits. Comments window can be expanded/contracted for easy reading. Ability to view more details of a customer, request or activities on mouse hover over the customer or the timeline icons. We have also improved the gadget reliability, error handling and alerting to deliver a better user experience. The new gadget is supported on UCCX/PCCE/UCCE/HCS v11.5 and above. Find out how you can enable the new and improved Context Service gadget today -> https://collaborationhelp.cisco.com/article/en-us/ddvl63. Please leave your feedback and comments below or email them to ask-context-service@cisco.com. Cheers, Sajith ... View more

Hello, We have added a new Context Service use case recipe for end customers and partners to try out. This use case recipe covers Personalized greetings when customer calls Detect Repeat callers Contextual/Dynamic routing of calls based on customer's journey The recipe includes Call flow and configuration video Sample CVP script Step by step instructions to configure the use case Here's the recipe -> https://developer.cisco.com/docs/context-service/#personalized-ivr-experience Have you tried this yet? Do you have any comments or questions regarding this recipe? Do you have suggestions to improve this experience? We are eager to hear. Leave a comment below! Bookmark the What's new in Context Service page to keep yourself informed about new Context Service features and enhancements. Cheers, Sajith Kaimal ... View more

<<Update>>: This promotion is now closed. Congratulations to everyone who won the Free Pass! See you at Cisco Live! See here for more information -> Earn a Free Pass to Cisco Live 2018 at Orlando ... View more

Hello, We are very excited to announce the availability of two new features in Context Service that will make it easier for partners and customers to manage their Hybrid Contact Center deployments - 1. Resources UI tool to view the status of all components (OnPrem/3rd party SDK clusters) connected to Context Service. 2. Field/Fieldsets UI tool to easily View, Create, Update and Delete Fields and Fieldsets How can you access these new tools? Login to Cisco Cloud Collaboration Management portal using your administrator credentials and click on the Services icon. You will see links for these new features in the Hybrid Context card as shown in the figure below. Resources link will take you to the Hybrid Context Resource cluster tool. Read more about this tool here. Clicking on Fields/Fieldsets link will take you to the Manage Field/Fieldset tool. Read more about the fields tool here. Read more about the fieldsets tool here. If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please feel free to leave them below or email to ask-context-service@cisco.com . Bookmark the What's new in Context Service page to keep yourself informed about new Context Service features and enhancements. Cheers, Sajith Kaimal ... View more