Why Cisco is turning contact centers into context centers
A customer calling a support line doesn’t think about org charts. They don’t know or care whether they’ve reached the storefront, the billing department or the contact center, since to them it’s all just one continuous relationship with a brand. Most companies can’t deliver on that assumption today because their systems don’t share context across touchpoints, which is why some vendors are pushing to turn the traditional contact center into what they call a context center, a hub that carries a customer’s history with it everywhere they go.
Vinod Muthukrishnan (pictured), vice president and general manager of Webex Customer Experience at Cisco Systems Inc., has spent the past several months building out that vision under a broader banner Cisco calls agentic CX. The industry has overused the word agentic, since a bot that completes a single transaction doesn’t really qualify on its own, Muthukrishnan said.
“An AI agent that can fill a slot or fulfill a transaction is not agentic. Agentic is much more of a framework of tools and products and processes,” Muthukrishnan said. “The big thing around agentic is going away from just voice agents that can answer a question, fulfill a transaction, to orchestrating a journey, to now evolving all the way to be able to orchestrate a relationship.”
