 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2020. I'm John Furrier, my coach Dave Vellante here at theCUBE. The big story is it's not about the infrastructure, it's about the applications. Of course Cisco has been connecting businesses with routers and gear throughout the years and their history. We got a great guest here, Omar Tawa Cole, who's the Vice President and General Manager of the Contact Center for Cisco. Omar, thanks to have you on your serial entrepreneur. So your second company now here at Cisco, leading the charge. A lot of action, contact center. Sounds like an old school thing. We all know what contact centers are, but a lot of action going on there. Tell us what's happening. There's a huge amount of energy and focus in the contact center now. First of all, thank you for having me. And really brands are really investing in it. There's over 22% growth in this category. So a lot of attention is on bringing contact center to the cloud, infusing it with AI, and just making it a lot easier to serve customers with very high, almost unbounded kind of expectations out of the brand. So we need to really help them, technically. And it's an impact area too for customers because there's real results. We all know the little, started out of Microsoft, it was the little tool that came up, the little paper clip and windows, and it became chat bots now. We've seen recommendation engines, AI bots have been great. This accelerates the customer experience in purchasing and support. What's the next level look like? What is it, what's the next milestone? What's the next industry point? Well, you know, one of the ones that we're focusing on is this idea of turning your agents into super agents. When you kind of look at automation, there's two ways to go at automation. One is automate the human out, and the other is kind of the opposite. Take the human and make them more accurate, extend the range, allow them to answer questions faster. So that's what we're doing in the contact center. And the way we approach that is we say there's a certain number of tasks that really should, that are simple, that should never hit a human. And so if we can put kind of voice bots and chat bots on the front end and make those really good interactions, you take off the simple stuff. What you're left with is the human interactions are now going to be a little bit more complicated. So now you instead use AI to help listen along with the human and put up suggestions. So for instance, someone's calling in and they're saying, hey, I'm traveling from California to Barcelona and I'm calling T-Mobile or AT&T and saying, you know, extend my data plan for there. The AI will listen and say, hey, we'll look at your data plan. It's already covered. You don't have to pay anything else in Spain. So that's going to make the customer happy. Typically an agent would have to take 17% of the time searching and putting you on hold that the AI can completely cut that off. And so that makes the agent happier or the customer happier. So there's a lot of ground for improving the experience just by applying AI there. There's a big spectrum in contact center experiences ranging from a totally asynchronous email us and we'll get back to you, you hope, to one that is, you know, somewhat painful with a synchronous experience in a phone call. Different people like different approaches. I personally like to solve my problem on the phone. So where do you see Cisco being able to take its customers and the consumers' experiences? What do you see in the next five years that looking like? Yeah, so basically the three areas of attack. First off, Cisco acquired Voicia. They acquired MindMell, they acquired a company. So over a half a billion in acquisitions over the past 18 months precisely to bring AI to collaboration. But we also partnered with Google. We announced the Google CC AI partnership because we wanted best of breed and in proprietary to attack one problem. Get to customer resolution faster in the way that customer wants to interact. So if they want to interact kind of in an automated fashion, make that better. Sometimes that's not going to work. And the last thing I want to hear is agent, agent, agent, right? So we want to do, detect something's not going to work and early on say, transferring you to human. Take all the context of the interaction they had to give it to the human and then suggest to the human, hey, we think you should tell them that that feature's for free. Get to a customer resolution faster. I see this as a five year journey. But that's starting today actually. That's some of that's happening today where you don't have to sit, agent, agent, they go right away. Others who maybe don't use your products or they, you know, you go into that endless loop. So you're starting to see improvements but still a lot of upside, I'm sure you'd agree. Which is good, that's good news for the marketplace. Absolutely, but the next part of there is that the phone call finishes, use AI to wrap it up so they don't spend five minutes trying to type up the wrap up and then coach them. Be able to identify well, what didn't, did they comply so that you can compress the learning because, you know, the agent churn is high. Reduce the agent churn, get them to learn faster, keep them there longer. All these, all these kind of innovations impact the economics of running a contact center. And that's the big one, the economics I want to get into that because the impact is right in the moment but it's also impacting and accelerating the journey of the customer but also providing contextually relevant interactions. You said super agents, the expert, how do you know when to deploy the right talent at the right time, these are the challenges. Can you talk about that impact to the customer journey and where some specific examples are economically impacting? Yeah, so talking about customer journey, we acquired a company called Cloud Cherry in October and have already integrated the product in and it's now WebEx Experience Management and the whole insight that we had there was that a customer's journey doesn't just show up at the contact center. You know, they interact with your brand before, hopefully a lot before they ever get to contact center in the contact center after the contact center. So what we needed to do is have the analytics that ties together kind of essentially listening across 17 different channels. So by the time you come to a customer representative they now know what you've done in other areas. They understand your sentiment in other areas and they can take that into account and say, oh, we see that you've traveled with us before. The other thing that's even more important than that is now you can give to the management team the full understanding of the journey so you can tell them, you know what, these two drivers of your experience, perhaps it's average whole time or perhaps it's the technical expertise of the person on the phone really drive NPS. So if you invest in that a little you're going to get a much higher NPS. The alternative is what I call the highest paid executive in the room making intuitive decisions which they think are awesome which typically are not so awesome but if they actually had the data it would be a lot more powerful. So having that legacy, having that corpus to tap into. Talk about developer, we're in the DevsNet zone. A lot of companies have been trying to build their own homegrown integrations maybe because of a database issue or other stuff. How do you guys look at your customers when they say I want to build on top of it? It's a really good question. We were at a customer innovation board where all of our customers were together telling us what we wanted and we were telling them about the new set of AI capabilities that are coming out next quarter and almost unanimously when we asked them would you prefer us to first rule out a UI that hasn't embedded in it and then afterwards give you some APIs or would you prefer just to get the API first and they unanimously said just give us API first. Really? We might not even use your interface for that and I was like okay I'm not going to take it personally. How about it, check. Good requirements to get out of that right straight away from the customer. All right, do you see any industries as really leading the charge? I mean I think about retail and maybe I was going to Amazon War Room and you think about Amazon, they basically say here's a finite set of choices. Pick one and you may be lucky, you may not. Okay, boom, end of story. But you've got a relationship with that retailer. Do you see any particular industries, airlines or others really leaning into this and predicting doing well? Yeah, we've seen quite a few where people are really kind of lean forward. So finance and insurance because they have a very high volume of interactions that they have with customers so getting this right really impacts the NPS and all their economics. Certainly you've seen in retail some innovative examples. We've seen some airlines looking at trying to kind of make the journey a little bit smoother. Surprisingly I've seen a bunch in healthcare trying to make the patient experience better. Yeah, I can't say they're necessarily at the cutting edge but they're really putting a lot of investment, seeing what's happening with other brand experiences saying hey we should really revolutionize the patient experience too. So this is pretty across the board. Well the upside is enormous. I mean you build a relationship through a contact center. I mean that's loyalty for life if they're really good at it. Yeah, and that's why I like the approach that says don't try to automate humans out of that. We want to speak to humans and for many, many, many years to come the human experience in helping is just going to be awesome so instead of just focusing and getting rid of them make them more effective. I want to get your thoughts on your vision around the industry because if you think about contact center I think telephony old days the industry used to be voice over IP came from the PBX's and the unified communication space integrated in and then in comes the cloud. So what is the real game changer because that kind of just seemed like the telephony market trying to be cool with the internet and it just felt kind of clunky to me and then also over the past few years almost a complete resurgence of robust features, new things, what's your vision, why is this, do you agree with that and what's happening? I agree, I think the biggest thing that's happening is the expectation on feature velocity. Where before the cloud all these big enterprises were calculating okay I have to upgrade a certain version and it's going to cost me a certain amount of money and time and I have to coordinate with other kind of partners that I'm involved with whereas when you come to the cloud you just can move a lot faster because you leave it up to a company like Cisco to take care of rolling out features in the middle of the night and you not even have to worry about it you don't have to pay for it and you enjoy the features. So I think that's really going to change the game in a significant way. The other thing that's changing because you mentioned voice is if you think about your kids they're growing up and there was just two years ago a child first uttered Alexa before they uttered the parents name. So that is a generation. It's a full coming full circle of voices in a whole new way. Voice is coming back in a new way and we're going to enable a different type of interaction because of that. Yeah, of course we're talking here on the cube and it's being converted into metadata as you know, text transcription, machine learning is fed by text, text and voice working together is a new dynamic. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, you have to be completely linked. So now it's not just a blob of audio. I have all the metadata, I have it transcribed. You have NLP to give you an understanding of the intent of what's happening there. It's searchable, it's linkable. Yeah, this is going to be a new world here. And of course as you know, that's what we did at Voisia. So I'm very excited about that. Well, I want to tee that up. Congratulations on your acquisition. If someone looks at Cisco and you're fresh to the scene here you've been out an entrepreneur. I'd be like, oh Cisco really held all these acquisitions and it's going to be hard for them to be competitive. How do you answer that if someone says that to you and you see them on the street or a competitor might say that if someone says that to Cisco, you've thought acquisitions, you guys have done it and you were sold to them. You mentioned the other ones. All those acquisitions coming together. What's the response to that? You know, you're about to talk to Sri and Amy and what they did is they came to me and they said, I want you to focus on integrated value. So within three months, we both integrated deeply into meetings and the contact center and we're working on one with calling. So the mentality here is two things. Keep the talent, number one. Number two, deeply integrate. So it doesn't become a theory about we acquired this company. You really need to show value to the customer base and that mentality has been very good for us. And people get energized about that because when you're acquired, you now have this ability to affect hundreds of millions of users on the Webex platform. The faster you integrate to do that, everybody benefits. Speed is a new competitive advantage. Yes. Omar, thanks for coming on. I know you have a tight schedule. We're going to bring you back in the studio in Palo Alto. Thank you for having me. You can keep a dive on your business. Thanks for coming in. Thank you, sir. Keep coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you. Sorry, I got up too soon.