Cisco Contact Center Strategy To Be Reshaped With CloudCherry Acquisition

Cisco Systems has been on a mission this year to refocus its contact center business.

Under Amy Chang, Cisco's senior vice president of collaboration, the company on Monday announced its plan to buy CloudCherry, a privately held Customer Experience Management (CEM) company. The deal will improve Cisco's contact center tools by injecting more predictive analytics and customer journey mapping capabilities into its portfolio.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Salt Lake City, Utah-based CloudCherry -- which has raised $16 million in funding, according to Crunchbase -- is a Cisco Investments portfolio company.

[Related: 'No More Islands' Across Cisco Collaboration Portfolio, Tech Giant Says]

Cisco has been pushing more AI and machine-learning into its collaboration portfolio, and now it's the contact center's turn, said Vasili Triant, vice president and general manager of Cisco Contact Center Solutions.

"With CloudCherry, we’re augmenting our contact center portfolio with advanced analytics, rich customer journey mapping and sophisticated survey capabilities that all our customers can use – whether they’re using Webex Contact Center in the cloud, or our hosted and on-premises solutions," Triant said in a blog post on the deal.

CloudCherry’s open API platform simplifies how customer data is ingested from systems of records, transactional data, and other data sources in real-time, which helps contact center agents close the feedback loop with customers and improve end user satisfaction, Cisco said.

"Predictive analytics help agents make journey modifications in real-time, such as up and cross-selling and enabling discounting or couponing to meet customer needs during the interaction, to improve first contact resolution and customer happiness," Triant added.

The CloudCherry team will join Cisco’s Contact Center Solutions business led by Triant after the acquisition closes, according to San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco.

Cisco has been selling collaboration and contact center solutions for years through its channel partners. The tech giant today has more than 3 million agents across 30,000-plus enterprises, Cisco said.

The two companies expect the deal to close during the first quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2020 and is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

Also in the collaboration department, Cisco in August announced its intent to acquire Voicea, a deal that Cisco said will boost its flagship Webex platform with meeting transcription, voice search, and data privacy features.