Cloud & AI: Helping Contact Centers Deal with COVID-19

As we discussed in previous No Jitter posts, COVID-19 has sent healthcare, local government, and other customer service operations into a tailspin, with physical contact centers shutting down just as they need to deal with a barrage of questions around the disease. In response, contact center providers are scrambling to help these customers spin up home-based operations and deal with unanticipated call volumes. In a recent interview with No Jitter, Omar Tawakol, VP and GM of Cisco Contact Center, shared how Cisco is helping businesses get up and running quickly with its cloud platform, Webex Contact Center; support remote agents; and deflect calls onto AI capabilities to ease the load on live agents. Over the last couple of weeks, Cisco has helped one customer shift 10,000 agents into a work-from-home scenario, and another bring on 1,000 agents to answer COVID-19 questions coming in from around the country, he cited as just two of many examples. All told, Cisco provides contact center technology to over 36,000 customers (on-prem plus cloud) and hosts 3.6 million agents globally, many of are overwhelmed by the global pandemic, Tawakol said.