Cisco / Broadsoft Connections 2018 Takeaways

Earlier this week, I attended Connections 2018, Broadsoft’s annual user event. After Cisco acquired Broadsoft last year, it continued organizing the event that brings together company partners, service providers, resellers and employees. The event also provided an opportunity for industry analysts like me to interact with the company’s executive leadership team to learn about key product updates and new developments.

Because my research coverage is focused on the contact center and customer experience, my primary interest at the event has been on the company’s contact center product and messaging. This includes the following products: Contact Center Express, Contact Center Enterprise, Hosted Collaboration Services (HCS) and Customer Journey Platform (CJP). The first two are Cisco’s on-premises contact center products, where the former is focused on addressing the needs of small and mid-size firms, and the latter is focused on the enterprise – as its name suggests. HCS is the company’s hosted platform, including contact center capabilities, and CJP is its cloud contact center solution. (Please see Aberdeen’s Cloud Contact Center: Control Your Costs, Empower Your Agents, And Create Happy Customers for an overview of the differences between these deployment models.)

Michael Tessler, Cloud Calling & Broadsoft Business Leader at Cisco, opened the event. During his speech, he noted the trends Cisco has been observing in the market and how they plan to respond. One of the many trends he emphasized is that large and mid-size organizations are currently in ‘hypergrowth’ mode. This was echoed throughout the event by a number of other speakers, highlighting Cisco’s focus on the mid-market in 2019.

To this point, Aberdeen’s research in the contact center space shows that as mid-market organizations grow, their operations become more complex. Yet, they don’t have the same resources that are available to large enterprises. Thus, mid-market firms must find ways to operate like enterprise organizations, but become more savvy in using existing resources to do that. By enabling companies to scale up at times of increased demand and scale down at times of low demand, a cloud-based communications infrastructure enables firms to more strategically manage its financial resources. This comes in addition to having no upfront fixed costs to purchase a product – a necessity with traditional (on-premises) deployment models.

At Connections, Cisco highlighted its Flex plan. Briefly, the Flex plan allows current and potential users to subscribe to a flexible plan where users can get some products (e.g. UC Manager) through an on-premises deployment and others (e.g. Contact Center) through a cloud-based deployment model. The plan also provides different subscription levels enabling companies to subscribe based on the number of active users, named users, enterprise agreements and concurrent agents. As such, companies are provided the benefit of forecasting and managing their communications costs through this model. Overall, Flex was presented as a validation of Cisco’s ‘cloud-first, not cloud-only’ strategy, where the company aims to help its users enjoy the benefits of a cloud-based infrastructure but enable them to manage the transition at their own pace.

Flex was one of the five key pillars presented in relation to Cisco’s customer care / contact center roadmap. The other four pillars were:

Global footprint: This refers to the company’s focus in selling and serving its customer care product globally. At the event, the company noted that its awareness and reputation among CIOs is a key factor in leveraging these relationships to get senior IT buy-in when selling contact center solutions. While this is certainly an advantage for Cisco, my perspective is that the company should also consider adding dedicated messaging that aligns with the priorities of the line-of-business. While IT remains a key influencer in contact center technology purchase decisions, it’s ultimately the line-of-business (customer support) that uses the technology. With the blurring of the lines between support, marketing, and sales technology capabilities, the line-of-business has greater influence in purchasing and renewing customer engagement technologies, including contact center platforms.

Full-stack: this refers to the company’s unified platform bringing communications, collaboration, and contact center capabilities together. Cisco notes that one of its strengths in the contact center space is that it not only provides contact centers with the applications they need to help customers, but also helps customer care employees communicate with internal subject-matter experts by using the same platform with the same user interface. The company notes that this helps minimize the need to train agents to learn how to utilize multiple applications, and enhances agent productivity by making it easier to collaborate on resolving issues. The discussion of such a unified platform versus integrated platforms providing native integration to partner capabilities has been a common discussion topic in the contact center space over the past several months. While both approaches have their unique benefits, it’s ultimately the users of these platforms who will decide on what best meets their needs. As such, it’s important for solution providers to continue focusing on enriching their own capabilities or partner network to ensure their users can access the right tools needed to succeed in the rapidly evolving marketplace.

Data-drive intelligence: This refers to incorporating machine learning, artificial intelligence, task automation and robotic process automation capabilities within customer care activities. Cisco highlighted this as a key pillar of its current and future focus. During the dedicated Analyst track at the event, company executives highlighted the need for organizations to have a rich view into customer journey data in order to enable machine learning tools to derive reliable insights. As such, it highlighted the ease of integration between its tools, such as the CJP and other enterprise systems, e.g. knowledge management and order management (more on that in the next section). It was assuring to hear that Cisco executives are not presenting AI capabilities as a way for organizations to eliminate their agent workforce. While some contact center vendors note that companies can fully automate all their activities through AI, the reality is that current AI capabilities are not sophisticated enough to handle complex customer issues through software such as virtual assistants. Cisco highlighted that AI and related capabilities such as machine learning and automation will enable contact centers to augment employee activities by automating tasks such as forecasting traffic volume across various channels, handling simple issues such as password reset or account balance checks through virtual assistants, and optimizing routing activities to help connect the right customer with the right agent. As such, the company’s focus aligns with the priorities of CX executives who are more pragmatic in utilizing AI to achieve rapid gains.

Complete & open deployment: At the event, various company executives noted that the company understands that businesses use multiple technology tools. They noted that while the company would prefer its users to fully migrate to the Cisco product ecosystem, it also focuses on ensuring that those that use different solutions (e.g. Microsoft Teams) can still use other Cisco products (e.g. Contact Center) through an open architecture enabling ease of integration with different tools.

Connections 2018 also featured many other insights and discussions in addition to the five pillars covered in this article. These takeaways provide an overview of the discussions related to the contact center leaders. Tell us about your perspective on these takeaways, and how they align with your priorities in 2019 and beyond.