Cisco Customers Find Flexibility in Contact Center Architecture, Backed by AI Innovation
With 38.4% of companies using on-premises contact center platforms—including nearly half of the world’s largest companies—the need for continued innovation is crucial. Cisco’s customers have validated its ability to deliver features and functionality on a platform many said would be replaced by now.
Cisco not only won a Metrigy MetriStar Award for On-Premises Contact Center platforms; it scored higher than any other provider. The program is based on a global study of 1,397 companies whose IT, CX, or business leaders rated vendors on several CX technologies. The MetriStar comprises customer sentiment ratings, along with business metric improvements.
The MetriStar Results
For on-premises contact center customer sentiment, MetriStar Top Providers earned at-or above-average ratings in eight metrics. When we averaged all metrics, Cisco earned the highest overall score for on-premises contact center platforms with a 7.92 score on a 1- to 10-scale (average score was 7.81). Cisco also scored above average in every metric measured. Cisco’s highest scores were in security capabilities (8.22), customer service (8.22), and platform reliability (8.18). It also received the highest or among the highest scores in AI capabilities, analytics capabilities, technical features, and value.
In the past three years, Cisco won a Customer Sentiment MetriStar award for on-premises contact center platforms; this is the first year it won both Customer Sentiment and Business Success awards, moving it into the “Top Provider” category.
The Business Success portion of the MetriStar program asks companies how the use of their respective vendors drives business success. Cisco’s customers saw above-average business success for all areas measured: customer satisfaction (5.8 on a 1-to-7 scale), first-contact resolution (65.6%), low agent turnover (24.8%), and the designation of their contact center as a value center (73.4%).
Cisco beat all other vendors rated, including Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Avaya, Enghouse Interactive, Genesys, Mitel, NEC, NiCE, and Zendesk (which also won a Top Provider award, but did not score as highly as Cisco).
On-Premises Innovation
Though much of the attention in the media and at events is focused on Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) platforms, on-premises platforms are still utilized by the majority of companies, according to Metrigy’s MetriCast research study, which shows 34.0% of companies using CCaaS globally. Unlike the swift shift to UCaaS, companies haven’t been as quick to move to CCaaS, with the highest adoption in Europe (40.1%), followed by Asia-Pacific (38.3%), and North America (37.5%).
The top reasons companies keep their contact center on-premises are security (58.7%), reliability (56.6%), cost benefits (53.2%), and control of technology customization (43.4%). That said, they still want to innovate without being forced to move to cloud platforms.
While competitors downplay or sunset their on-premises platforms, Cisco enthusiastically offers on-prem along with a variety of additional communications, including CCaaS, Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS), and Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS).
Most importantly, Cisco’s AI products operate across all platforms, so on-premises customers can leverage AI capabilities without moving their entire contact center to the cloud. They can use AI in a hybrid architecture, as well, as they consider a transition to full cloud. Cisco’s high score in integration capabilities underscores the importance of choice and flexibility among its customers.
Specifically, Cisco’s Release 15 allows on-premises customers to use Webex AI Agent and AI Assistant capabilities across both voice and digital channels. What’s more, companies can integrate third-party virtual agents into their Contact Center Enterprise platform. Underlying all AI capabilities is companies’ data; Cisco enables companies to keep their data within their own infrastructure, giving them full control over decisions such as where it’s stored and how it’s accessed.
Consider that 63.0% of CX leaders from companies still on-premises say they will have move to the cloud someday. In the Cisco ecosystem, they can change architecture at their own pace—and they don’t need to be using CCaaS in order to use AI; Cisco provides cloud-based AI capabilities from all their platforms.
Cisco continues to invest in both cloud and on-premises platform, while enabling AI agents and advanced capabilities to operate on either platform. Based on Cisco’s ratings and business success metric improvements, its customers recognize that Cisco’s on-premises investment isn’t an afterthought but a strategic investment.
