Podcast ¦ Punk CX: The terms deflection and containment should be banned – Interviews from Cisco’s WebexOne

Key Take Aways

1. Customer experience remains an ongoing challenge, with many issues persisting unchanged for decades despite technological advances.
2. AI’s potential is often overpromised; successful use hinges on enhancing the human, personalised, and intuitive aspects of customer interactions.
3. Metrics such as call deflection or containment should be reconsidered; they are meaningful only when aligned with overall customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
4. Systemic, incremental improvements, rather than large-scale deployments, tend to generate more consistent organisational ROI and morale.
5. Organisational culture, particularly around service standards and responsiveness, is a critical driver of SLA achievement and customer satisfaction.
6. AI deployment should follow a structured, validated approach involving a practical framework for enterprise implementation, including assessment, planning, and scaling.
7. Supporting hybrid on-premise and cloud solutions is vital, recognising that many organisations retain on-prem systems due to control, geopolitical, or security concerns.
8. Data security, privacy by design, and responsible AI practices are core principles embedded into product development, particularly in regulated sectors like financial services.
9. Open platform interoperability allows organisations to integrate third-party solutions, enriching their ecosystem without vendor lock-in.
10. Holistic integration of UC and contact centre platforms enhances customer journey visibility and enables greater operational collaboration.
11. AI’s evolving role extends beyond automation to improve agent wellbeing, reduce burnout, and support precise, real-time decision-making.
12. Organisational success with AI involves ‘doing the right things’ for customer outcomes and building organisational social capital through small, consistent wins.

Key Statistics

• Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) SLA boasts a target uptime of five-nines (99.999%), with a gold SLA option of 100% uptime.
• A Gartner report noted an 18-point increase in customer recommendation scores, rising from 97% to over 97%.
• Pre-sale and post-sale experience scores are both averaging 4.7 out of 5, indicating consistent customer perceptions.
• The attrition rate within contact centres is often around 50%, with burnout and operational complexity as key contributing factors.

Key Discussion Points

• The persistent nature of customer service problems and the risk of investing in newer technologies without addressing root issues.
• The importance of focusing on outcomes that make interactions more human, intuitive, and predictive, rather than simply automating for automation’s sake.
• The need to view metrics systemically, connecting operational KPIs with customer sentiment and business objectives.
• Strategies for incremental AI deployment centred on testing, validating, and scaling use cases to continually generate value.
• Emphasising long-term partnerships and the commitment to a trust-based, customer-centric culture.
• The significance of security and privacy by design as foundational principles in deploying AI-enabled solutions.
• The practical approach to on-premise AI deployment, accommodating organisations with data control requirements, and ensuring continuous updates.
• Enhancing collaboration through unified platforms, integrating UC and contact centre systems for comprehensive customer journey visibility.
• The emerging emphasis on agent wellness, leveraging AI to monitor sentiment and proactively support my health.
• Lessons learned from real-world customer deployments, such as automating 24/7 support and reducing handling times significantly.
• The importance of prioritising specific, high-impact use cases (“singles”) over feature-heavy, unfocused projects.
• The evolving role of AI in customer-facing applications, including multimodal, conversational interfaces that support complex problem resolution.

Podcast Description

This podcast offers a comprehensive exploration of customer experience innovations within the contact centre landscape, focusing particularly on the strategic integration of AI, security, and operational excellence. Featuring senior executives from Cisco and real-world customer insights—primarily in financial services—it provides valuable perspectives on deploying technology at scale, building resilient and customer-centric cultures, and leveraging data-driven insights. Designed for senior managers aiming to harness emerging solutions for sustained competitive advantage, it emphasises pragmatic approaches, long-term partnerships, and organisational transformation in customer engagement.