Cisco Is a Vendor of Merit in Customer Experience Management

We are happy to share some insights about Cisco drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Cisco and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

Cisco provides a mix of contact center, business communications and collaboration tools, largely under its Webex brand. Its CX offering CX Cloud, is a combination of Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) and Communications-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) elements that it ties together but frames largely as an IT-focused solution. Cisco was categorized as a Vendor of Merit and ranked 18th overall in this Value Index evaluation, performing best in Reliability, where it placed eighth.

CX Cloud includes some capabilities of a customer experience management (CXM or CEM) suite, including interaction handling, case management, asset management and some journey management functions. The primary use-case for the solution is to manage internal IT resources that are invoked in the process of managing customer relationships rather than managing the relationships themselves. Webex Connect features communications channel management, business logic and flow orchestration, ample integration support and artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) for automating conversations.

Cisco’s Capability ranking could be improved by making its analytics more useful to different CX teams, especially marketing and sales. It could also make the functionality related to customer journey management more accessible and useful for line-of-business users rather than primarily IT teams.

This assessment was based on Cisco’s CXM products available in October of 2022.

Cisco, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.