Webex’AI Targets Agent Burnout in Contact Centers

Cisco’s Webex has unveiled innovative AI-powered solutions within its Contact Center platform to address the prevalent issues of stress and burnout among contact center agents. These challenges are particularly pronounced, with agent turnover in contact centers being twice that of any other profession. A study revealed that burnout contributes to 50% of this turnover, costing businesses with 100 agents an average of $4.8 million annually.

Jeetu Patel,

Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco.

“Webex aims to tackle these issues by introducing new capabilities that focus on enhancing agent well-being and productivity while simultaneously elevating customer experiences. Webex’s commitment to fostering a compassionate, inclusive, and progressive business culture by prioritizing agent wellness.”

The AI-powered features in Webex Contact Center include:

1. Burnout Detection: Proactively identifies agent burnout and allows for automated breaks, such as the “Thrive Reset,” and real-time coaching after challenging interactions.

2. Suggested Responses: Utilizes generative AI to automatically propose responses, boosting agent productivity when addressing customer inquiries on digital channels.

3. Conversation Summaries and Wrap-Ups: Provides agents with clear summarizations of self-service interactions and call/chat summaries, automating wrap-up codes and actions and saving an average of five minutes per interaction.

4. Coaching Highlights: Generates a dashboard for supervisors showcasing the highest and lowest customer-rated interactions, offering coaching tips for improvement.

Additionally, Webex introduces “Webex Customer Experience Essentials” to extend the core capabilities of the Contact Center to Webex Calling users. This enables employees outside the contact center to become specialized agents, improving issue resolution speed and customer satisfaction.

To further empower contact center agents and combat burnout, Webex is expanding its partnership with Thrive Global, founded by Arianna Huffington. The collaboration integrates Thrive Reset into the agent workflow, providing 60-second reset videos with breathing exercises, mindfulness, and stress-relief techniques. This integration aims to reduce cortisol levels and enable agents to handle subsequent customer interactions more effectively.

Webex’s real-time AI technology identifies situations leading to burnout, automatically initiating breaks for agents and offering Thrive Reset videos. This strategic collaboration aims to create a more resilient and rejuvenated contact center workforce, ultimately enhancing the overall customer service experience.