Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is a three-part episode featuring conversations I had with Vinod Muthukrishnan, the VP & COO for the Webex Customer Experience Business Unit at Cisco, Chang Chang, a Senior Director of Product for Cloud CX Solutions at Cisco and a Cisco Webex customer – Patrick Cornish, a Senior Network Engineer specialising in collaboration Architecture and Engineering at BancFirst, while at WebexOne recently in San Diego. We talk about their highlights from the event, what stood out for them from the slew of announcements and their views about some of the big challenges that organisations are facing in trying to improve their customer service and experience, particularly when it comes to harnessing the potential that new AI-powered innovations offer.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The State of Customer Engagement – Interview with Chris Koehler of Twilio – and is number 558 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Vinod:

• The very unfortunate problem is that within the customer service space the problems are exactly the same as they were 20 years ago, except we have newer and more expensive solutions that we’ve thrown at them which have not actually made the end customer experience better.
• I think the purpose of all this AI and technology and automation is to actually make customer experience more human, more approachable, more relatable, more intuitive, smart, predictive, personalised, etc.
• The philosophy of how we currently look at deflection and containment should be banned.
• Customers don’t want to be contained or deflected.
• Metrics matter, but we should be focusing on the ones that matter to the customer.
• And often metrics and incentives drive behaviour.
• One customer said their average handling time went up after they implemented AI.
• It’s never been easier to build an AI agent, and it’s never been harder to make it work in an enterprise use case.
• We do not want to be the vendor who lobs a ton of AI across the fence and says, okay, make sense of that. We want to be partners. AI is a team sport. And, AI is a marathon.
• We jus created something for the first time in the business called the Solution Consulting Group to help the product managers get close to our earliest adopters of this technology, work with them, understand what works, and then ultimately codify it so we can scale it.
• That resulted in what we call a practical guide to AI deployment in the enterprise, which resulted in a business value consulting framework, wherein we collect all the inputs that matter and the framework throws out all sort of suggested recommendations via a 40 page report (pdf).
• We believe that we have the number one CX SLA on the planet.
• Culture drives SLA.
• Security is not an afterthought in our products because we are a multi-billion dollar security company. Moreover, the reason resilience and uptime are not an afterthought for us because we are a network connectivity company.
• We are the mission critical AI infrastructure for this age.
• Everything that is critical to succeed in customer success, customer experience in AI, we run as a business outside of customer experience.
• We’re excited about building incredibly well thought out products from the ground up for a workforce which is digital and human and AI.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Chang:

• Achieved 200-plus new CX innovations to our CCaaS platform in the last year.
• We really focused on how our AI agent is interacting with end consumers, making sure both the digital and the voice experience was the best in the industry.
• Apart from other agents we announced, we have our agent wellness feature, which actually monitors and proactively suggests a wellness break for an agent.
• We’ve actually done a complete refresh of our UI and UX of our agent and supervisor desktop. Obviously, it looks better with different visuals, but we really looked at the UX to find ways to make the work of an agent very efficient. So spatial grouping and the flow of information were all looked at to really drive that new experience.
• One of the common problems we’ve seen is that brands and organisations want to make sure that they see all interactions between their end consumer and an human agent or an AI agent, and that it’s meeting the performance standards that they’re looking for.
• As a result, our AI quality management feature set is the ability to look at 100 % of all interactions, whether they’re AI agent-based or human agent-based, to ensure that you can drive the right level of quality and performance across all of those interactions, including automated scoring, additional dashboards, insights and evaluation.
• We have an open platform and are completely focused on interoperability, e.g partnerships with Microsoft, Zoom and Salesforce.
• We really are trying to make sure that regardless of wherever you plug in a third-party solution, you can still use all of our features.
• In the whole on-prem to cloud conversation, what we heard from our customers, a lot of them either weren’t ready to move to the cloud or will never move to the cloud for lots of different reasons.
• Regardless of the reason, we want to make sure that we support and invest in our on-prem solutions and also make sure that they don’t miss out on all the great innovation that’s happening.
• So, we’re very intentional on how we were designing and building out our AI features to easily take those that are being deployed and launched on our cloud solutions and being able to easily have them deployed on our on-prem solutions. This is why the recent update of our on-prem product (Release 15, which rolled out earlier this year) had the capabilities to bring in all those good AI capabilities. And so we actually do already have AI agents and AI systems that will be going into early access and trials here soon for our on-prem customers.
• We are, with release 15, going to move to a more ongoing cadence of updates that we are able to roll out very easily to our on-prem customers to make it very easy for our on-prem customers to still get all these features without waiting for up to two years, say, for an update.
• We’re in 190 different countries and so working with some of the biggest brands across the world, then I’m pretty sure that some of those deployments are going to be hybrid i.e. some on-prem, some in the cloud, depending on the local data, security and legislative environment.
• We’re just seeing so much being unlocked now in terms of companies doing more, not reducing the human workforce, actually doing more with AI agents.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Patrick:

• We’re excited about all of the releases, and we’re really looking forward to extending some of those capabilities throughout our entire ecosystem.
• Notetaker is really interesting and is going to be particularly useful for our Regional Managers. The nice part about it is that there are other systems and things that can do similar things, but I think what’s really gonna be a game-changer for us is that it’s all integrated. It’s gonna be really huge for how we do day-to-day operations.
• Our journey with Cisco started with an on-premise older version of their contact centre suite.
• However, WebEx Contact Center, as a CCaaS platform, has just so many robust features.
• We had some ups and downs throughout the implementation, but we were able to work through them pretty smoothly.
• As far as our approach, we took a crawl, walk, run approach.
• It’s about finding small use cases in pockets, using the topic analytics, to break down our data in ways we’ve never seen before.
• Are you taking those insights and piping them back into other parts of the business?
• During Patrick’s presentation at WebexOne showed what they had been able to achieve vis-a-vis debit card placement with the use of AI agents. They were able to reduce something that would normally take us around 10 minutes to just under 3 minutes.
• The level of attrition, on average, across the contact centre industry is quite high. Therefore, we are finding the agent wellness feature really useful and our agents and supervisors have been extremely positive abut it.
• Don’t do features just for feature’s sake.
• You don’t have to boil the ocean. You know, it’s kind of like, I used to baseball and actually talked to a customer yesterday. Just look for singles. You can hit singles and singles and singles, and you don’t need that home run. And before you know it, you’ve put enough runs on the board, you probably run it.

About Vinod

Vinod Muthukrishnan is the VP & COO for the Webex Customer Experience Business Unit, overseeing Go To Market, Customer, and Business Operations. In this role he collaborates with Cisco field teams, partners, and customers to deliver innovative solutions. His passion lies in creating products that solve real customer pain points and providing a seamless customer experience. He also values building strong communities, teams, culture, and operating rhythms.

Previously, Vinod spent three years in Enterprise AI at Uniphore, a Cisco Investments Portfolio Company, where he developed a product enabling Citizen Developers to create AI and automation solutions. He managed Uniphore’s customer functions, including Delivery, Technical Support, Customer Success, and AI consulting, helping enterprises align their business goals with AI roadmaps.

Vinod was also VP & COO at the Webex Contact Center Business Unit during a period of significant growth and innovation. During his tenure at the BU, the IMI CPaaS business was acquired, and Webex Contact Center was launched. These two initiatives now serve as the foundations of the Webex Customer Experience Business Unit. Vinod oversaw all GTM functions.

He joined Cisco when his startup, CloudCherry, was acquired in 2019. As Co-Founder and CEO of CloudCherry, he and his team developed a Customer Experience Platform that became Webex Experience Management. They also built the foundations of the Customer Journey Data Service, essential to the Webex Portfolio today.

Coming from a military family, Vinod began his career in the Merchant Marine at 18, becoming a certified First Officer with Maersk Line and sailing to over 60 countries. He later joined the founding team at MarketSimplified, which introduced mobile trading to major brokerages like TD Ameritrade and OptionsExpress.

In his spare time, Vinod mentors founders and serves on the Governing Council of SaaSboomi, a community supporting SaaS and AI business growth. He is also Co-Chair of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) Startup Connect Program, fostering tech collaboration between the US and India.

Vinod resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family and a very vocal Husky. When not dreaming of customer experience, he is often consumed by thoughts on how to score more runs in his local amateur cricket league.

Feel free to connect with Vinod on LinkedIn here.

About Chang

Chang Chang is a Senior Director of Product for Cloud CX Solutions at Cisco. With over 14 years of product leadership experience, Chang has held key roles at Intuit and Mighty Audio (early-stage startup) as well as a management consultant at PwC. Chang holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson.

Feel free to connect with Chang on LinkedIn here.

About Patrick

Patrick Cornish has spent the last eight years at BancFirst, where he designs, researches, and architects customer experience solutions, working directly with executives to bring those innovations to life to curate an experience and customer journey tailored to customers. Before his time at BancFirst, he was a senior regional network engineer for the Defense Logistics Agency, where he held a Top Secret security clearance and managed projects from coast to coast and beyond. He’s also had the pleasure of working with Presidio Solutions and gaining partner level expertise in data center, wireless technologies and telecommunications. On a personal note, he is happily married to his wife, Ashley going on 10 years, and they have three amazing kids. The oldest is 19 and attending the University of Illinois, where she plays softball. They also have a 14-year-old getting ready to start high school and an 8-year-old heading into second grade.

Feel free to connect with Patrick on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Katja Anokhina on Unsplash